Colorado- With a sheriff’s deputy pointing a rifle at him as he got ready to perform his next scene, Chris Borden knew he wasn’t in the land of make-believe anymore.

“It took a little while for me to realize I could’ve died for my art,” the 25-year-old said, recalling how deputies handcuffed crew members of Different Kinds, a low-budget movie in which Borden plays “a guy who is kind of on the emotional edge,” he said.

It was about 4:30 p.m. Saturday, in an isolated area in a park near Carter Lake, when Larimer County sheriff’s deputies responded to a call of a hostage situation, not knowing that what was playing out was a movie.

In the scene the crew was filming Saturday, Borden pistol-whips a man trying to rescue a woman Borden had kidnapped.

Before director Eileen Agosta could yell “action” to do another take, Borden said a crew member asked, “Is that a cop in the woods?”

Deputies responded to the park after a ranger called, said Larimer County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Eloise Campanella.

Agosta, 24, said the deputies told them they were there because they had heard someone had been taken hostage.

That’s when Borden said he and his fellow cast members discovered they were surrounded by guns, and Borden was the deputies’ prime suspect.

“Yep,” Borden said. “They had me in the line of fire.”

Agosta and Borden said the deputies handcuffed the seven crew members – “Even the person who was supposedly the hostage,” Borden said – despite their efforts to explain they were just shooting a movie.

“And they then singled me out because, by their own admission, they’d been watching us,” Borden said.

Which is why he doesn’t understand how deputies didn’t notice the filming equipment and that the cast was on friendly terms, as evidenced by how Borden helped the man he hit with a pistol to stand after the scene.

“They told me I looked like I didn’t care if I got shot because I had a criminal demeanor,” Borden said.

Borden said deputies told him the only reason they didn’t shoot him was because they saw a cameraman.

“That was the only thing that prevented them from blowing me away,” he said.

In hindsight, Agosta said she understands why deputies reacted the way they did. After all, the gun and the wounds on actors – obviously fake to her – looked real to deputies, she said.

“I guess I didn’t realize how bad it looked,” she said.

When deputies took the handcuffs off cast members, Borden said they took their film and the $20 fake gun he used in the scene, and ticketed him for disorderly conduct. Agosta was cited for accessory to disorderly conduct, Borden said.

They’re set to appear in court on Aug. 28.

“We’re considering having the whole cast show up to say, ‘Hey, we were filming a movie,’ ” Borden said.