James Duff was some eight takes into the scene when he was shot at for the first time.
Wearing black ski masks and armed with airsoft guns, Duff and another actor were filming at a bar in Crawfordsville, Ind., for a low-budget film called “10 to Fire,” a local production of mostly volunteers about a dystopic future where everyone is armed.
But unbeknown to the actors on set, a worried citizen had called 911 to report an armed robbery in progress at the Backstep Brewing Company, a bar just blocks away from Crawfordsville’s police station.
Duff was walking backward out of the bar with the airsoft gun in hand when the police officers arrived, in a confrontation captured in a tense video by a police body camera.
“Drop the gun!” one of the officers yelled, drawing his weapon and firing off a shot when Duff did not instantly comply. The shot missed Duff’s head by about two inches, he said. The police officer continued to yell at Duff to drop the gun and get on the ground.
“We’re doing a movie,” Duff told him.
“Excuse me?” The officer replied, continuing to point his gun at Duff and urging the other actors to stay inside the bar.
The story of the on-set mishap Sept. 26 has ricocheted out of this town of 16,000 northwest of Indianapolis and around the world, after the body camera footage from the officer who discharged his weapon was released this week.
No one was injured in the shooting, but Duff, a 48-year-old concrete and construction worker acting in his second movie, says he hasn’t felt the same since. He remembers the bullet whizzing by his head, “a big breeze.”
“They didn’t even give me a chance,” Duff said in a phone interview Wednesday, more than a week after the shooting.
Duff said he can’t get the episode out of his mind when he is awake and has been having nightmares where he replays it in his sleep. “I woke up Thursday morning screaming my head off,” he said. “I think about it all of the time.”
The police said Duff failed to release the weapon immediately — video shows him attempting to take off the mask before he drops the gun. Duff said he had just been trying to determine what was going on. He said he was handcuffed for about 10 minutes, and interviewed by detectives at the police station.
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