Sky Bandits

Sky Bandits (1986)

There's a new kind of adventure in the air.

A pair of old west cowboys become fighter pilots in World War I.

Date of release
1986-10-31
TMDB
5.8 / 10 (6)
Runtime
1h 45m
Genres
Adventure
Director
Zoran Perisic

Casting

Interesting facts

Sky Bandits, also known as Gunbus, is a 1986 British adventure film about two outlaws from the Wild West, drafted to the battlefields of WWI, who enlist in the fledgling Royal Flying Corps flying early warplanes called gunbuses.

Production

The film was directed by Zoran Perisic, a Yugoslavian who moved to the UK when he was 15. He moved into special effects and did the flying work on Superman (1978). He was known in the industry as "the man who made Superman fly".

Perisic learned how to speak English by watching films at a cinema in Huddersfield and later said "I suppose you could say the Western scene in Gunbus is kind of a Western hommage to Huddersfield".

The film claimed to be the biggest wholly independent movie made in Britain in 1985, with a reported budget of £13 million. The film took eight years and three million dollars to get into production. It was produced by American Rick Herland, whose previous film Steppenwolf took seven years to go into production.

Perisic came on board the project in 1982 to work on its effects. Brian G. Hutton was meant to direct. However a few weeks before filming was to start Hutton pulled out. Herland said, "He [Hutton] wasn't prepared to bet with us unless the money was on the table. And since we didn't have the money from the City Institutions to make the movie until a week before filming you can see there was a problem.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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