On Monday, Newsweek magazine ran an interview with the movie's director, David O Russell, in which he stated that a corpse had been used.

The scene in question shows in graphic detail how a bullet penetrates a body.

Action stations: Wahlberg, Clooney and Ice Cube

However, it now appears that the director of Spanking the Monkey and Flirting With Disaster was only joking in the interview.

"No cadaver was used," says Warner Bros spokesman Mark Reyna.

He told the New York Daily News: "A prosthetic was used with special effects for the bullet. No corpse was used."

And Russell now admits: "I was fooling around when I said it. I was fooling around in the sense like, 'How do you think I did it?'

"The intention (of the shot) was to make it look like a bullet going through a corpse. It would be unethical to use a corpse like that. To achieve the effect, we had to build a prosthesis."

The Gulf War era film, which also stars Mark Wahlberg and Ice Cube, is about four soldiers who set off at the end of the Gulf War to find a cache of gold Iraq looted from Kuwait.