Big & Loud: On the Set of Digital Playground's 'Machine Gunner'

LOS ANGELES—Let nobody say that the porn megaproduction is dead. Arriving on location for Machine Gunner, the new blow-’em-up military extravaganza from Digital Playground, it’s abundantly clear that this is no typical micro-scale adult shoot—quite to the contrary, it is literally a sprawling operation, with scads of cast and crew members getting shuttled up and down a steep hillside atop which sits a lavish Spanish-style estate where the movie’s climactic firefight is set. And when we say “firefight,” we are not talking any feigned playacting with toy guns that’ll have their bursts of ammo added in post—no, these bad boys are the real deal, loaded with live rounds (of blanks, natch), and they are not quiet. When we’re about to witness our first actual take of machine guns blasting (“Stand by everyone, guns are hot!” director Ricky Greenwood bellows into a megaphone), we’re handed a pair of noise-cancelling headphones to don. We wonder bemusedly how necessary they really are, but then Greenwood calls action ... and full-on cacophony erupts. The explosion of gunfire is so earthshattering, it feels as though a barrage of, well, military-grade fireworks are going off right in front of us. From left: Damon Dice, Kayley Gunner & Nicole Doshi   For Greenwood—who has grown into a powerhouse director like few others over the past several years, taking home the now-retired AVN Award for Director of the Year in 2022 and following that up this year with the preeminent Grand Reel trophy—Machine Gunner is a high-stakes project for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that it’s his first for DP, and a gauntlet-drop for the brand, in a sense, signaling the dawn of a newly revitalized effort to resurrect the kind of lavish blockbuster-tier pictures for which it was known in years past. On a much more personal level, meanwhile, the movie also represents a posthumous tribute for Greenwood to his close friend and mentor Robby D., who passed away in the fall of 2021 due to what a number of those close to him reported was a severe bout with COVID-19. “Every time I was having dinner with Robby or talking with Robby, he was always telling me his favorite Digital Playground movie that he made was Code of Honor,” Greenwood tells us after all the day’s booms and bangs have subsided, referring to the AVN Hall of Famer’s 2013 action epic that racked up nine AVN Award nominations including Best Drama and Best Director – Feature. “So when I talked to Digital Playground, I said I will be interested to do a movie, but I will wish I can do Code of Honor 2,” he continued. “And they didn’t want to do necessarily a sequel to Code of Honor, but they were willing to do another military movie, so we did an homage to Code of Honor.” On top of carrying the immense weight of everything above, this endeavor also happens to be the largest Greenwood has ever undertaken, he attests. “Each movie has its own challenge,” he says. “Like other movies I did in the past had their own different type of stunts or different challenging props, prosthetic makeup, or other things. But this one is a totally different scale. “It’s just like, we’re firing blanks, we’re having stunts, we’re faking explosions, we have people running attached to a car,” he spouts off. “It’s just crazy.” And while it may be overwhelming, to say the least, Greenwood asserts, “The fact that Digital Playground agreed to all those things ... I was very happy to see that, and I think you can tell that Digital Playground really, really [is trying] to bring back, I call it the ‘old school’ Digital Playground.” On the specific challenges of orchestrating all that gunplay, he reveals, “It’s not my first experience with guns, but it’s my first experience with that much guns. I used to do some short film action movies when I was living in Montreal, so I had some—like, one gun firing or a shotgun or something like that—but I never had like ... at some point during one of the scenes, we have like six guns firing at the same time. So it’s a lot of firepower, it’s a lot of noise, it’s impressive.” He’s sure to note, though, that “we have someone who professionally does all the staging and explains to us what to do and makes sure that everybody is safe and is doing it safely, but it’s still impressive. And I never fired a gun in my life. So I didn’t even know it was that noisy.” From left: Damon Dice, Nicole Doshi, Isiah Maxwell, Kira Noir & Kayley Gunner For all of its pyrotechnics and elaborate set accoutrements—including big army rovers trundling about—Machine Gunner is not meant to be anything more than a giant popcorn ball of over-the-top fun, Greenwood contends. With a script by the razor-witted Shawn Alff, it aims to capture the campy spirit of absurdly gratuitous action classics like Commando and the Rambo films. “I’m a huge fan of action ’80s movies,” Greenwood says. “I would say Code of Honor was like very ’90s action, and this one is really ’80s action—all the kills are super brutal, everybody looks like they get shot with a huge machine gun and stuff, and the girls are shooting with two guns and stuff like that.” He goes on to expound, “’80s movies have one-liners, the characters are funny, they’re not really taking themselves seriously. So it has that. We have a lot of serious parts at night, and stunts and action sequence[s], but we don’t take the movie seriously. It’s not a really military, like, we didn’t have them do an intense training of how they hold the gun and they walk in the woods and, like, clearing a room and stuff like that, we just have them shooting guns and that’s it. It’s fun. It’s fun in all the aspects of it. “We just want to give the viewers something that, you know like when you watch a movie and you say, ‘Oh I wish she would shoot with two guns’—well now you don’t have to wish, we have her shooting with two guns.” Episode 1 of Machine Gunner debuted June 12 on DigitalPlayground.com, and there are three more episodes slated to roll out at two-week intervals through July 24. Photos by Natasha Inamorata (Top photo: Kira Noir)