Actor Gerard Butler will be in Melvindale July 8-28 to shoot scenes from the new Lionsgate film “Machine Gun Preacher” before moving to South Africa to film the remainder.
The film is based on the true story of Sam Childers, a missionary in southern Sudan who really is referred to as the “Machine Gun Preacher.”
Childers is a former gang biker and drug dealer from Pennsylvania who became a member of the Assembly of God church and later visited Sudan.
While in Africa, he witnessed the work of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a militant group in northern Uganda and southern Sudan that captured children and forced them to be child soldiers and sex slaves.
“I seen the body of a small child that stepped on a land mine,” he said in the television news interview embedded below. “I remember I stood over that body and I said, ‘God, I’ll do whatever I can to help these kids.'”