Fiennes gets some lip as war film feeds hunger for juicy role

At the end of The Great Raid, the latest film from British-born actor Joseph Fiennes, almost every shot of him appears to be taken from the side or the back.

Fiennes says there was a reason for the camera angles: during the Australian shoot of the movie, he cut his lip open while surfing on the Gold Coast.

'I was pulling fibreglass out of my mouth for a month afterwards,' he says. 'It was my first time in Australia and I was beguiled by surfing. I had the most spectacular accident, basically ripping my lip off. It was a huge wave on a stormy day and I got wiped out.'

The surfing accident was just one in a series of memorable events surrounding the filming of The Great Raid - a movie set in the Philippines during the second world war, when more than 500 American prisoners were liberated by a group of elite Rangers and Alamo Scouts, who took the initiative when the US government had all but turned its back on them.

'The whole exercise gave us an insight into the horrors those men went through,' says Fiennes. 'They died of torture and malaria - the death rates in those camps was high. Just that psychology, confronting that day-to-day knowledge, must have been hugely damaging.'

Fiennes joined a cast that includes Benjamin Bratt, James Franco and Connie Nielsen. He plays Major Gibson, a figurehead to the hundreds of sick and starving men in the Cabanatuan PoW camp, and who himself was stricken with malaria. To prepare for the role, he and other cast members endured a rigid diet regimen, which he says he was able to get through by thinking of the men he and his group were playing. That, he says, and a few laughs.