they had to learn how to march. We had planned to do all that and the battle scenes that first weekend. If it hadn’t been for that monsoon, I don’t know what we would have done. So we shot the farm/Fort Africa scenes first, which allowed us to get the cast ready for the battle scenes.
NM: Wasn’t the fire of the battle scene pretty significant?
NM: Yeah, the fire was a huge part of the battle. We used Prairie State Park as the location, which resembled the original site of the battle, which now is primarily private farm land. Prairie State Park is the only place in the state that still has native prairie grasses, and they routinely have to burn it to keep it under control. The State had fire personnel on hand as well. After all that rain the first weekend, you couldn’t light a match out there. Even with the week’s delay, we still couldn’t get the flames that the State and I would have liked, 20 foot tall flames. But we did get some fire, fortunately. I only had one day, with all 15 of the Bushwhackers and all 15 to 18 Union soldiers. Second day I had all the soldiers and kept 3 Bushwhackers. But only one early November day with everyone, which isn’t much light. But we were able to get some beautiful sunsets.
NM: You were able to shoot the whole thing over two weekends?
BH: Everything but the scenes with old George and the slave exposition. And actually it was three shoot days, not four. I only used one or two takes to get what I needed. Some of the Bushwhackers had done 20 to 30 movies, and one of them told me that in some of those films they would have taken all day, maybe two days, to accomplish what I did in twenty minutes. I would have loved to have that kind of time. It was about the most stressful thing I’d ever done.
NM: What a great training ground, to find what you can accomplish with severe limitations.
BH: I’m really, really grateful for the people who put a huge amount of energy and passion into the project. It took all of us to pull it off, and it’s all about the subject matter.
NM: Tell us a little about George Washington, the man and main subject of the film.
BH: George was given as a wedding present at about two or three years old. He grew up as a slave on a hemp farm in northwest Missouri, and it wasn’t until he was about fifteen that he realized he was a slave, not simply a farm hand. Kansas was a free state, doing what it could to undermine Missouri’s economy, and was encouraging slaves to run away to Kansas. By then, George was being locked up, shackled by his owner, Jesse Williams. When he was about 22 years old, George ran in the middle of the night. He said in later years that if he hadn’t