|
|
Features
|
|
Telling A Soldier's Story
The last time Mel Gibson and writer/director Randall Wallace worked together they wound up with the Academy Award-winning film Braveheart. In this interview they discuss their latest effort, We Were Soldiers, which depicts a bloody battle at the start of the Vietnam War.
Friday, March 1, 2002
By J. Sperling Reich
|
|
On November 14, 1965, with the United States preparing for a war few ever managed to understand, Lt . Col. Hal Moore led the First Battalion of the Seventh Calvary into the Ia Drang Valley in Northern Vietnam. Known as The Valley of Death, Moore and his 400 young troops touched down at Landing Zone X-Ray and, as he promised them, took the first step onto the field of battle himself. For the Calvary, riding to war in helicopters was a new concept advocated by Moore. Yet nothing could have equipped the military veteran or his troops for the reality they faced at that moment.
Surrounded by 2,000 Vietnamese soldiers, Moore and his men engaged in one of the bloodiest battles in U.S. history in what turned out to be the first major military encounter between America and North Vietnam. In the end, the firefight lasted three days, cost the U.S. the lives of more than two hundred of Moore’s men and over 1,000 Vietnamese troops were killed. Moore would go on to retire from the military as a Lieutenant General and along with a war correspondent for United Press International, Joseph L. Galloway, would write a book about what he and his soldiers went through at the LZ X-Ray in the Ia Drang Valley; We Were Soldiers Once. . . And Young.
In the mid-1990s, just a few years before his screenplay for Braveheart was made into an Academy Award-winning motion picture, Randall Wallace fell in love with the book. He immediately contacted Moore and Galloway, convincing them to let him adapt their work into a film that would capture the spirit and essence of, not only the men who fought in Vietnam at that particular battle, but, like the book, also include the plight of their families and wives. The resulting film, We Were Soldiers, weighs in with a running time of more than two hours, beginning in the United States and ultimately cross-cutting between Moore’s soldiers on the battlefield and their families back home.
To play the charismatic Hal Moore, Wallace turned to Mel Gibson, the actor turned director who helmed Braveheart. Picking up the book, Gibson quickly saw what it was that attracted Wallace to the story. “It deals with ordinary men and women in extraordinary situations,” he says. “Combat, brutal combat. I had no experience in that. But I’m fascinated by it simply for that reason, which is man’s nature in that situation. Just an ordinary guy, a baker, a butcher and two sides of his nature come out. It’s phenomenal to me that this occurs, and I hope I could behave similarly under such circumstances.”
A religious man himself, Gibson appreciated the spirituality displayed by Moore both with his family and during battle. “On one hand you see the basest of his nature which is the animal side of it,” Gibson points out. “And right next to it there’s the divine side of his nature which is higher, because flesh and blood only gets you so far in really harrowing situations like that. You have to go to another place, and that’s a place of the spirit. They say there’s no atheist in foxholes.”
“Hal Moore is, in a way, the perfect warrior because he is a man of great spirit and faith in something greater than himself,” Gibson adds. “He understands that this is a finite life, and that it could be more finite for him than for others in an instant. He’s prepared for the other side when he considers the other side, and he believes in it. That’s where his courage comes from. He’s also very compassionate as a human being to all his men, even the enemy. He’s gracious, and, at the same time, he is the worst bad-ass you’ve ever met in your life. It’s this combo of things that just make him like this perfect battlefield commander.”
Gibson speaks from knowing Moore first hand, having met him while preparing for We Were Soldiers. When asked about the Lieutenant General, the actor speaks in awe of Moore. “When you meet him, the positive energy coming off this guy in every aspect of his life is tremendous,” he exclaims. “I mean, there’s no way he was going to lose. He was very generous to let me in on all these aspects of his life, but even then he wasn’t grandstanding or talking about himself too much. I had to go around and ask other people who were close to him. I had to talk to his wife. I had to talk to the soldiers under his command.”
Though We Were Soldiers is not the first film to be made about the Vietnam War, Wallace believes he approaches the subject differently. “Screenplays say a lot about the guy who writes it, and films say a lot about the guy who directed it,” the filmmaker muses. “But so many of the films that have come out of this war have said more about people who made the film than they’ve said about the war itself. But in this story, the responsibility was to be true to the soldiers, and to be true to myself.”
That We Were Soldiers might be compared to Vietnam War movies that have come before it is understandable, however it may also be compared to two films that have nothing to do with the subject. “I think there’s obviously going to be some kind of similar thread to Braveheart because of Randall Wallace’s involvement in both,” says Gibson of the film in which he starred as a commoner in 13th Century Scotland when the country battled to overthrow the English. Several sequences in We Were Soldiers are reminiscent of that movie’s graphic scenes depicting sword fighting and hand to hand combat.
Another, more recent film that is sure to be fresh in audiences’ minds is Black Hawk Down, which also tells the story of a single military altercation, much like We Were Soldiers. “That was a very well made film. The combat stuff, to watch it is amazing, but it was somehow uninvolving,” Gibson comments on the movie, which details the true events that occurred in 1994 during a botched military operation in Somalia. “I’m not putting it down, but it didn’t have a story for me, it didn’t involve me, and I think that’s the responsibility of film. It’s just a very different film.”
Black Hawk Down was released at the end of last year and has gone on to be a financial and critical success, having garnered 4 Academy Award nominations, including one for its director, Ridley Scott. Indeed, due to its serious subject matter and well-crafted execution, it seems surprising that We Were Soldiers was not also released last year for Oscar consideration.
“There were certainly a lot of discussions about it,” Wallace admits when asked about the release date. “There were all these discussions about should we come out before Black Hawk Down and all of those things. I was comfortable with the idea of waiting till now to show the film. For one thing, I wanted to get it just right. I wanted time to do some things with it that I wanted to do – to work on the music. To finish everything just right and to say we didn’t make this movie as a movie business event. We made it as a labor of love. We didn’t make it to go win Oscars, we made it to try to say to these people, ‘Thank-you.’ So to come out not asking for Oscars feels really right to me.”
And Wallace doesn’t believe that his film should be limited solely to the Vietnam War, but rather that its story should resonate with everyone who has ever been affected by war. “I think that what grabbed me about this story was that there was truth in it that went far beyond any given political situation,” he states. “It was not even so much about the Vietnam War as it was about soldiers. And there is not a single character in this film who is villainous. War is the villain of this film. And while war itself is a tragedy, out of that tragedy, as from other tragedies, there are always individuals who rise up to affirm something timeless and noble. It is one of the greatest opportunities as a storyteller to show people something that they have not seen in a situation they thought they understood. My sense was not to make sense of the political aspect of Vietnam, but to recognize the truth that in arguing about the politics, we have ignored something so much more powerful, which is what those families went through and the human cost of that war on both sides.”
Gibson agrees that audiences will not be so quick to brush off We Were Soldiers as just another Vietnam War film. In trying to emphasize his point of view, he quotes Galloway’s writing. “He said Hollywood got it wrong every time, sharpening their twisted political knives on the bones of our dead brothers,” Gibson says passionately. “It stings these guys because what they could see was a very cynical perspective on that conflict. No conflict’s a good conflict, even a just one. War is a horrible thing, and no sane person would ever be a fan of it, even the people that went. But, this film I think differs from those others that have been made on this subject in that it doesn’t view it as cynically and certainly, I think, may be truer from their perspective. They were really thirsty to be portrayed in a way that wasn’t denigrating. They weren’t all drug-takin’ baby-killin’, lieutenant-fraggin’ wackos. They were ordinary men and women who suffered, who sacrificed, some the ultimate sacrifice, others just limbs, but every one of them still has wounds on their heart, and they were never acknowledged for their sacrifice. They were doing what they thought was right, and the finger of blame belongs much higher up.”
|
|
|
|
|
 Email
|
 Print
|
|
|
|
|
|