Posted by Mr. Beaks

By the time Sam Mendes went to Hollywood, he had already racked up multiple Olivier and Tony Awards for his brilliant stage direction of classic (e.g. Twelfth Night, Othello and Uncle Vanya) and modern plays (Company, The Real Thing, and Take Me Out) alike.  Even though he was in his thirties, he was regarded as a wunderkind because, over the course of five years, he had amassed a series of successes that suggested the artistic reincarnation of Elia Kazan was upon us. 

Kazan was two years older than Mendes was when he made his first feature, the very modest A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which earned two Academy Award nominations, one being a Best Supporting Actor win for James Dunn.  It was an auspicious beginning.  Mendes, on the other hand, seemed in 1999 to have galvanized the art form with the audacious, semi-scandalous American Beauty, which took down numerous Oscars including a Best Director trophy for the ambitious rookie.  It was too much.

This is not to say that Mendes didn’t deserve the many honors bestowed upon him, but merely to note that no one makes that big a splash in this town without eventually frustrating expectations, which he did with his second feature, the beautifully crafted but lukewarmly received Road to Perdition.  Two years later, the fawning had given way to carping, and the glow quickly faded.

Six years after American Beauty, Mendes has returned with his third feature, Jarhead, an adaptation of Anthony Swofford’s bestselling Gulf War memoir told from the rowdy, slightly psychotic vantage point of a marine sniper.  This time span is worth noting because it took Kazan six years to get from Brooklyn to his first masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire (which he had earlier directed on stage with much of the same cast save for Vivien Leigh, who unseated Jessica Tandy as Blanche DuBois).  How does Mendes measure up?  You’ll have to see the film to judge for yourself.  In the meantime, here’s the much admired, now forty year-old director discussing the difficulty of tackling a war film with very little war, working for the first time without cinematographer Conrad Hall, and the likelihood of returning to theater.  The following is transcribed from a press conference held several weeks ago at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons.

One thing that separates this from any other war movie is that it’s actually about a lack of action, or a lack of combat.  Did you find that a challenge going into it, or was that something that excited you about the project, that this is, you know, more mundane?

(Big laugh from Mendes)  I find that one of the things that attracted me was the whole idea of you train a huge group of men to go to war, and then what happens when you take away the war?  What happens in that period of waiting – which is really the center of the film – they turned in on themselves, on each other.  They create their own wars, whether it be a scorpion fight or a game of football with gas masks on, all of those crazy things that go on.  It was the details of the story, and Tony’s book, that grabbed me because they seemed so unusual.  None of that world had ever been available to me before.  All the war movies and war literature I read were about combat, and here is a story about what happens when there is no combat, but you’re trained to kill.  That was my way in.  If anything, the original script had more waiting.  I shot more scenes that I took out in the middle of the film [with the troops using the sniper’s scope to watch MTV, as well as learning of their forthcoming marching orders from troop positions displayed on CNN].  I had some pretty cool stuff, but at the end of the day you can only make an audience wait so long, and then something has to happen.  But even when it does happen, it doesn’t happen in the expected way.  These guys were observers of huge events, but they never were actual participants on some level.  And that’s what fascinated me about this:  it was all these things that made me want to do the film in the first place, rather than things I thought were problems.

Some woman babbles on about waging the battles of the mind until she arrives at the question:  Do you think, as an outsider, you can more easily tell a story that Americans find difficult to address?  (Even though the book was written by an American, and there have already been two films off the top of my head – Courage Under Fire and Three Kings – that have taken the Gulf War head on.)

I wouldn’t know that.  There are some master American storytellers who have [addressed war] better than I have.  Sometimes it’s a help, and sometimes it’s a hindrance.  It’s a help in the sense that you can remain objective about things for a little longer if you’re an outsider.  But it’s a hindrance sometimes because you don’t speak the same language.  You’re dependent on your actors, and also, in this case, my military advisers.  I surrounded myself with people who knew what they were talking about, so that nobody noticed that I didn’t know what I was talking about.  (Laughs)  I don’t have the experience of being a marine or being in combat, and I felt very much that it was my duty to all the people who fought in Desert Storm to get it right.  How many times is this conflict going to be put on film?  This is probably it.  So, I felt I really needed to surround myself with people who fought it.  A lot of the military advisers who did the movie are military advisers on lots of Hollywood movies – they did The Last Samurai, Windtalkers or whatever.  But all these guys, for the first time, were becoming military advisers on a movie about a war in which they had actually fought, so they literally could say, “No, no, this tent is the wrong way around”.  I used them a lot.

But in terms of being an outsider, I’ve never been an insider in this culture.  It’s unintentional that I’ve ended up doing a trilogy of American films.  Genre movies – one of them is a suburban comedy, a gangster movie, and a war movie now.  Next time, I think I’ll take on a more global subject, or something less specifically American. 

This movie was shot during the time of the current war.  How conscious were you of that conflict, and how are you by whatever political parallels and analogies that will be drawn between the earlier conflict and the war that is currently being fought?

I was completely aware of it all the time when we were shooting it.  I would step out of my hotel room, and there would be a copy of USA Today or whatever, and there were photographs on the cover pretty much once a week, which looked exactly like scenes we were shooting in the movie.  It was impossible to ignore it, and, of course, I was fully aware of it at the time.  I’m not concerned at all about people drawing parallels, because to me it’s all a part of the same debate. I think… what you’re seeing is an upsurge in movies that are engaged in the current political climate, from The Constant Gardener to Good Night, And Good Luck to movies that haven’t come out yet like Syriana or Munich.  You’ve got a load of movies this year that really engage in political discussion on some level.  That’s not to say that this is a specifically political film, but I feel what’s important is that there’s a debate and people’s understanding of what’s going on in the Middle East is increased on some level.  These are human beings out there, and this is a way of trying to tell a story about a group of men, all of whom are very individual exactly the same way as the millions, or hundreds of thousands that are out there right now.  It doesn’t bother me.  All that I hope is that understanding is increased.  The mistake would be to say there is a message [in Jarhead], or that the movie’s good for you on some level.  A movie is only good for you if it entertains you, moves you or grips you.  It’s not good for you because it has a message to deliver.  If I felt I had the answer, I’d be writing it in a newspaper somewhere.

This is a layered film.  It’s non-judgmental.  It shows every aspect of the life of being a marine, and whenever it shows a specific point of view, for example Swoff’s – like when he’s sitting there in those burning oil fields, and it’s his vision of hell – it counterpoints that by having Jamie Foxx’s character sit down and say, “Who else gets to see shit like this?”, and reasoning why he wants to be there rather than anywhere else.  To me, it tries to balance out every view point of war.  It’s a dangerous game to play, because at the end of the day you have to come down on one side or another as an individual, but that’s up to the audience rather than me.

Roger Deakins did some outstanding work in this film.

I agree.

Can you tell us a little about your collaboration with him?

You know, I threw out everything that I used on American Beauty and Road to Perdition.  I didn’t storyboard.  I didn’t work in the same composed way.  The images weren’t painterly.  I didn’t enter every scene knowing how I was going to shoot it.  I worked for a long time in pre-production designing the environments, and being as accurate as possible, and talking with Roger about the color palette and how grainy it would be.  I wanted to make the film in a more organic way, because I was afraid that, with Road to Perdition, I was so concerned with style that sometimes I wasn’t allowing the actors the freedom to express themselves properly.  I thought I had a choice.  I could make movies in two different ways:  I can either take the style I used on American Beauty and Road to Perdition and impose it on every piece of material that I have, and that would be my style.  And then I have to find material to suit the style, and there are many directors who have done that and done it brilliantly – for example, Stanley Kubrick.  Or I could be a director who adjusts his style according to the needs of the material, and I deliberately, therefore, chose a piece of material in Jarhead that didn’t allow me to do anything that I’d done before.

So, here I was working with a new cinematographer, a wonderful cinematographer, hand-held camera – I won’t go into too many technical details, but we bleach processed, so a lot of it is very blown and very desaturated.  I wanted to get the sense that, as [the characters] were longer and longer in the desert, that they became more and more divorced from reality, so the desert is shot progressively more and more stylized.  So, the very last time you see the empty desert before the oil fire is the scene where they meet the Bedouin – with the camels and that kind of stuff – at which point it’s so blown and so overexposed you can’t even see the horizon line; it’s like you’re in a science fiction movie.  They’re so divorced from reality, they don’t know who anyone is, who they’re supposed to be fighting, where they are, who they are – everything has fallen away. 

Roger is also the most incredible operator.  Anyone who’s made a movie will tell you that if you’re [going] handheld you’re in the hands of the operator, and the way they are able to read the actors’ performances.   And Roger is incredibly sensitive to the actors’ performances; he started in documentary.  And although he’s made all those Coen Brothers movies and [The Shawshank Redemption] – fantastic films that are very composed – this was a chance to get back to his roots get out there in the field with a camera on his shoulder and respond to things.  There were many times where I just threw him into the middle of a scene without telling him what was going to happen – the party scene, for example.  I just put him in the party and said, “Alright, go!”  They did their stuff, and he had to pick up what he could pick up.  It was very exciting.  It wasn’t a dry exercise; it was really organic.  Things were happening all the time.  It was very fluid.

Since we’re on the subject of how this was your first film working without [cinematographer] Conrad Hall, could you talk a little bit about his impact on your process, and what it was like working without him?

I missed him hugely as a friend.  The main thing with Conrad is that he was a wonderful human being; he was an artist in the sense that you couldn’t not be affected by him.   He was a person that I loved – he was loved by everyone that worked with him – so I missed him sitting next to me.  But what it allowed me to do is to go away from [the style of my previous films].  Conrad was a very meticulous lighting cameraman, and Roger was less concerned with that, and I wanted him to be less concerned with that, so it loosened up the work process a great deal.  It was also one of the reasons why I chose to work in such a different way, because I didn’t have Conrad, and I didn’t want to try and repeat what I’d done with him before.  I wanted to do something totally different.  But he’s one of the greatest cinematographers in the history of movies, and you can’t be unaware of that.  But I thought it was very nice that… last night I went to check the prints at Deluxe.  I arrived, and he said, “You’re going to that new building in the corner.”  And I said, “That wasn’t there two years ago.”  I got there, and it’s called the Conrad L. Hall Theater.  And I just thought, “That’s a good sign”.  He’s up there somewhere looking down, saying, “Come on.  Finish the movie.  You’re done now.”  But I miss him, of course.

Was there no role for R. Lee Ermey?

(Laughing)  It’s funny you should mention that.  I got this package two days before I started shooting, and out of it was this card:  “Best of luck!  Semper Fi!  R. Lee Ermey.”  I opened it up, and there was an R. Lee Ermey doll.  You press it, and it’ll say, “If you do that, marine, I will rip off your head and shit down your neck!”  So, all during shooting I was using that doll.

You didn’t want to use someone that iconic?

Well, he’s not a young lad anymore.  And that’s the most famous performance in the history of military performances.  Him, maybe Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now and a handful of others – no, I didn’t use anyone that iconic.

If you had to make a choice next month between film and theater, which would it have to be?

Well, I’m very glad I don’t have to make a choice, but if I did, I would choose film.  I feel like I’ve directed play and play after play for fifteen or twenty years, and, for me, as you can see with this film, I’m still experimenting in movies.  I still feel like I have lots to learn.  I’m just a beginner.  And I feel like I have more that I want to try out in film, but I have not had the opportunity to do it.  But if you’re asking me which one I feel most at home in, I feel most at home in theatre.  And the thing I miss the most when I’m not doing it is being in a rehearsal room of a play with a bunch of great actors.  I guess that’s called having my cake and eating it.

Is there a play on the horizon?

There’s nothing at the moment.  I literally just finished with [Jarhead]; I’m just reeling from it.  I need some sleep, and, then, maybe I’ll make up my mind.

While we’re discussing theater, have you ever given any thought to opening up any of the great productions you’ve done in the past, like The Real Thing?

I have.  I’ve always avoided doing plays on film because I always feel that’s what they are.  They’re not movies.  Movies should be treated totally separately, and things that make a good play are not the things that make a good movie.  Occasionally, you get something that is very unusual, like A Streetcar Named Desire, which is basically a recording of the stage production, but it’s so good it doesn’t matter.  But unless you have the chance to capture a great iconic performance, like [Brando’s Stanley Kowalski], then I’m not sure there’s any point.  You’ve got to believe that the movie is going to be better than the play, and a good play is exactly that; it’s a play, not a film.  But I’ve given a lot of thought to it.

Can you tell us what it was like working with Jake, and if there was anything that surprised you about his performance?

Oh, lots of surprises about his performance.  Jake was a pleasure to work with him.  Apparently, I made Jake wait four months to find out whether he got the part or not.  I probably did, but I wasn’t being deliberate or cruel because one of the things I was worried about with Jake is that… he’s soft and puppyish and doe-eyed and sensitive and floppy-haired, and all those things.  And [Swoff is] a tough, young marine, who – yes, he was innocent – needed to be angry, frustrated, difficult, dark, doubting, and all sorts of other things.  And I had never seen him do that before.  So, I needed to see everyone else that was available; it was my duty as a director to see that whole generation of young actors, and see who’s out there.  But he called me and said, “I will literally do anything that I need to do to play this part.  I want it so much.”  I know it sounds crazy, and I’m probably launching a whole series of midnight phone calls to me when an actor wants to play a roll, but it does make a huge difference to a director to know that an actor is willing to go the distance, and that they want this part more than anything in the world, and that they’re willing to push themselves to the limit.

So what happened was… he pushed himself to the limit.  He really did.  And he tipped over the limit a couple of times, too.  There was a kind of group insanity that descended on everyone in the desert.  That’s what it does to people.  It’s 150 degrees; you’re away from a train or car or anything; you can’t hear anything because the wind is blowing; you don’t have your clothes, your car, your friends, your girlfriend, your hair – nothing.  You don’t have your ring, your personal effects or books.  All you have is your mental and spiritual being, and it really separates the men from the boys.  And [Jake] really pushed himself to the limit to the point where I think he forgot he was acting a lot of times.  I think there were times when he loses self-consciousness.  He dances naked in that party scene.  You ask most actors to do that, and they’d be like, “No way!  I’m not going to do that!”  He was in the scene.  I didn’t know what he was doing half the time.  He just went with it.  He went with it when he had to threaten Fergus with the gun; he lost his mind.  And it’s on camera.  That’s the wonderful thing about movies.  And on that day, when he turned the barrel on his mouth, he knocked his front tooth out because he was so completely out of control.  He went off camera with blood coming out of his mouth – I was on the verge of saying cut – and he walked straight back on again and carried on.  He just wanted to see what would happen. 

Without wanting to encourage lunatics… (laughter), you can feel it on camera.  There’s a raw energy.  What happened was that something in Jake changed during the course of the film, and I think we captured it a little bit.  If you ever watch the film again, knowing where he’s got to get to, watch his face at the beginning of the film.  He looks eleven years-old.  We shot it almost in sequence, and he really went from being a boy to being a man.  A lot of it surprised me, and I was really thrilled with what he came up with. 

[Jarhead’s producers] Doug and Lucy Wick were saying that people will bring their own set of values to this film, whether they see it as an antiwar film or glorification.  What I thought was interesting was that Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter – two antiwar films – were cited in your movie, with the troops getting off on the violence.  Do you think in Gulf War III that people might be interpreting Jarhead in different ways?

I do.  I think in every antiwar film – and those are two great antiwar films – there are elements that young men will cling to that excite them, and there’s nothing you can do about that.  In the same way that there is nothing you can do about people who will want to recruit and go to war, because, on some level, for certain young men, it is a need.  So, to pretend that there is a perfect antiwar film in which there is nothing about it that any young man will want to replicate or endeavor to impersonate is just a lie – of course, they will.  They’ll be like, “Hey, what about that scene with the football game!”  And you know what?  I’ll be flattered by that.  In a way, this is also a great hymn to the resilience and bravery of the marines in the face of nothingness.  That’s the irony of this thing.  There’s no such thing as the perfect antiwar film, because the very things that bleeding heart liberals like you or I might take to be antiwar, someone else might take to be pro-war.  That’s the point [Swofford] makes in his book, and that’s one of the fascinating paradoxes of this movie and all movies about war.  And I think you’ve just got to accept it.

You can draw your own conclusions starting this Friday, November 4^th, when Jarhead opens nationwide.  I’ll be back later in the week with more interviews from the junket.