AS FAR as day jobs go, hanging out with renown film stars and training them must rank pretty high.

For Paul Biddiss, that is his reality.

The 51-year-old has recently been lending his military expertise on set for the hotly anticipated World War One film, 1917.

Mr Biddiss, who lives outside Chipping Norton, is a senior military technical adviser and has lived in Oxfordshire since 2002.

His latest venture had a budget of $100m and is being widely tipped to receive Golden Globes.

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Mr Biddiss described it as the ‘biggest movie’ he has worked on, with some of the filming coincidentally done in the Stadhampton area.

He said: “I was asked to come in by the director Sam Mendes to help train the film’s leads George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman.

“They both took to it really well and were practising all the time.

“I advised the director and cast how to be a soldier and helped guide the script to make it as realistic as possible.

“There were also 800 extras that needed training and I trained them how to make the pictures look as realistic as possible.

“It starts with historical lessons, safe weapon handling and the tactics of the era.”

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1917 is set for release in UK cinemas on January 10 next year and is littered with stars such as Benedict Cumberbatch, Colin Firth and Andrew Scott.

Mr Biddiss added: “I give ideas and train actors on the firing range so they know which way to hold the weapon.

“I work a lot on what lots of people wouldn’t notice but what servicemen like myself would, to make the whole thing more authentic.

“Sixty per cent of my job is research and the remaining forty per cent is my own experience in the army.”

Mr Biddiss spent 24 years in the Parachute Regiment, before leaving the army in December 2012.

Following stints working in security and as a private investigator, Mr Biddiss found work on 2014 film, The Monuments Men.

He explained: “They needed someone ex-army to advise them on bits so I lent my help and it’s gone from there really.”

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Since then, Mr Biddiss has cut it with some of the biggest stars of film and TV, working on the likes of Fury, War & Peace and the most recent Bourne movie, Jason Bourne.

This year alone, he has worked on six different films and television programmes and has recently finished filming with Dame Helen Mirren for the HBO series Catherine the Great.

Asked what it’s like working with such internationally famous stars, Mr Biddiss said: “They’re just normal people, they like it when you just treat them normally.

“I don’t get starstruck, I’m not really a film buff, I don’t even watch some of the stuff I’ve been involved in.”

Although he refrains from getting starstruck, Mr Biddiss admitted there is one particular actor he would love to work with and said: “If I got a chance to work with Arnold Schwarzenegger, that would be great.”