Stargate SG-1: “The Warrior”
Fans who were watching the SG-1 team’s off-world attire noticed a big change early on in the show’s fourth season: gone were the MP-5s (first introduced in the feature film) and in was the FN P90 – a powerful and highly precise submachine gun. For Stargate’s on-set armorer Rob Fournier, it was the right weapon for these teams.
Producers were initially resistant to changing the SG teams’ standard weapon, in part because the show had already invested heavily in a range of weapons and rubber dummies. Undeterred, Fournier brought a sample to a production meeting to kick off Season Four. “I explained to them everything about the P90,” he said — “its stopping power, its range, its mobility, its compactness. And it’s user-friendly. … We have 10 of them ready to go.”
Fournier talked with “Dial the Gate” about the change — how he convinced the show’s producers to make the switch, and then training the cast to use the weapon. For filming on a sound stage and on location in the greater Vancouver area, the P90 proved the better choice because its ease of use, compactness, and user-friendliness (including cartridges that eject downward). For the characters going off-world it also made a lot of sense to use a weapon effective at long range.
Watch this first clip from the conversation:
“[The actors] loved it … because it always [holstered] in front of them, it wasn’t long, it didn’t have sharp edges — they fell in love with it from Day 1,” he said. Richard Dean Anderson also quickly developed the habit of resting his hands on his weapon. The actors also appreciated the fact that the P90 ejects its shells downward, making the weapons safer to work with (even when firing blanks).
“But before we even got to that I had to train the cast again, because now there is a new weapon system.” Fournier requested to be locked up on the secured Gate Room set with the cast to put them through the paces of training. “We did a lot of firing in that Gate Room,” he said, “… and they loved it. They all unloaded their magazines, and they pulled the magazines out — because I trained the actors on everything. They were self-sufficient.”
Fournier returned to “Dial the Gate” to share about some of SG-1’s biggest challenges involving the use of firearms on the set. That included the team’s tense, run-and-gun fight with the Replicators in the Season Five opener, “Enemies.”
“With the P90s, there is still a lot of concussive effect on it,” he said. “And they’re firing P90s all over the place with these 50-round magazines.” And as the episode’s director Martin Wood explained how the Replicators were swarming the corridor in pursuit of the team, the cast asked, “Where do we shoot?” “And Martin just said, ‘Shoot everywhere!’”
In this second clip Fournier remembers the sheer concussive force of firing so many blanks in the enclosed space of the sound stage. He also talks about the similarly confined quarters of the Russian submarine in Season Four’s “Small Victories,” and the so-called “stupid gun” that Christopher Judge (“Teal’c”) used in that episode.
“You’re in a closed space right in the set, the sound is coming right at us, all the concussive effect — all the shockwaves are just coming right at us,” with Fournier said left the cameraman feeling woozy despite multiple layers of ear, face, and body shielding. “I was used to it, being ex-military. I’ve done this a million times. … I think we ended up doing four or five takes. Then we had to go in for coverage, and we had to [film] the reverse of it.”
Visit “Dial the Gate” on YouTube to find both of these interviews with Rob Fournier. And subscribe to GateWorld’s YouTube channel while you’re there for more Stargate content every week!