JARHEAD
An Interview With Director Sam Mendes

The first Gulf War affected a lot of people in America. It’s been about 15 years since Desert Storm, but it was five years ago Anthony Swofford, a retired US Marine, decided to write a book about his experiences during his time serving the country.

That book was called Jarhead, a slang term for a Marine; Universal turned it into a movie, directed by Sam Mendes and starring Jake Gyllenhaal.

The film and book chronicle Anthony’s time before, during and after the war. A lot of the movie focuses on the down time that the soldiers faced. For Sam, that’s one thing that attracted him to doing this film:

Sam Mendes: “You train a huge group of men to go to war, then what happens when you take away the war, what happens during that period of time which is really at the center of the movie. They turned in on themselves, and each other; they create their own wars whether it be a scorpion fight or a game of football with the gas masks on and all the crazy things that go on. But it was the details in the story and in Anthony Swofford's book that really grabbed me because they seemed so unusual, none of that world had been available to me before. All the war literature that I had read had been about combat, and here was a story about there being no combat even though you're trained to kill. So that was my way in really. If anything the original script had more waiting; I shot more scenes that I took out of the middle of the film with stuff going on and just hi-jinx and craziness and people spying into the major's quarters using the scope of their sniper rifle, watching MTV through the scope of their rifle, I had some pretty cool scenes. 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 were never actual participants on some level. So that's what fascinated me about it and it was all those things that made me want to do it in the first place rather than things that I thought were problems.”

Being from England, Sam wasn’t as familiar with the on-goings of the war. So it was a bit unusual he would be chosen to direct the film – he didn’t think so:

Sam Mendes: “I think sometimes it's a help and sometimes it's a hindrance. It's a help in that you can remain objective about things for a little bit longer if you're an outsider, but it's a hindrance because you don't speak the same language, so you're dependent on your actors, and also in this case my military advisors. I surrounded myself with people who knew what they were talking about so that no one noticed that I didn't know what I was talking about (laughter) because I don't have first hand experience at being a Marine or being in combat; 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 going to be put on film? This is probably going to be it, there aren't going to probably be many other movies about Desert Shield, Desert Storm. So I felt that I really needed to surround myself with people who had fought in it, but a lot of the military advisors who did the movie were also military advisors on Hollywood movies, so they've either worked on The Last Samurai or they did Windtalkers or whatever, but for the first time these guys were all advisors on a war in which they had actually fought. They literally could say ‘No, no, the tent is the wrong way around; there is one too many beds on this side of the tent,’ so I used them a lot.”

Jarhead was shot simultaneously with the current war going on right now, so Sam said he had to be extra sensitive on how he handled some of the plots:

Sam Mendes: “I was completely aware of it the whole time we were shooting it of course because I'd step outside of my hotel room and there would be a copy of the 'USA Today' and there were photographs on the cover, pretty much one a week at least, that looked exactly like scenes that we were shooting in the movie. So it was impossible to ignore it and I'm fully aware, of course, of it and I was fully aware of at the time. This is a layered film I hope, it's non-judgmental, it shows every aspect of the life of being a Marine and whenever it shows a point of view. For example, Swoff is standing in those burning oil fields and it's his vision of hell; it counterpoints that by having Jamie Foxx's character standing there going ‘Who else gets to see sh*t like this,’ and reasoning why he wants to be there rather than anywhere else. So for 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 to me.”

Jake Gyllenhaal really puts on an amazing performance portraying Tony Swofford, and that doesn’t take anything away from Jamie Foxx or Peter Sarsgaard’s acting either. But it was something about Jake that stood out:

Sam Mendes: Jake was a pleasure to work with, and people keep telling me, but he's telling people a story about me. And it's like ‘Oh, wow, that's interesting.’ You find out a lot of things on days like this because people talk to you about what's being said about the film. Apparently, I made Jake wait four months to hear from me about whether or not he got the part; it seemed to fly by, and I probably did make him wait, but it wasn't deliberate and I wasn't being cruel. I think that one of the things I was worried about with Jake is that we all know him and he's soft and a puppy and doughy eyed and sensitive and floppy haired and this was a tough young Marine who was, yes, he was innocent and needed to be accessible, but he also needed to be angry, frustrated, difficult, dark and doubting and all sorts of other things, and I'd never seen him do that before. So I needed to see everyone else that was available to me. I think that it's my duty as a director to see that whole generation of young actors and see who's out there. He called me and said ‘I will literally do anything that I need to do to play this part, I want it to so much.’ I know that it sounds crazy, and I'm probably launching a whole series of midnight phone calls to me when an actor wants to play a role, but it does make a huge difference to a director to know that an actor is willing to go the distance and to know that they want this part more than anything in the world and that they're willing to push themselves to the limit. So then what happen 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 because that's all it does to people; it's 150 degrees, you're away from a tree, a car, 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 a ring, a book, your personal affects, nothing, no lanterns. All you have is your mental and spiritual being, and it really finds and sorts the men from the boys, and he pushed himself to the limit and to the point where I think that he forgot that he was acting a lot of times. I think that there are times there when he loses self-consciousness. I mean, just simple things like he dances pretty much naked in that party scene. I mean, you ask most actors to do that and they'll be like ‘No way, I'm not going to do that.’ 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. He only has to do that once or twice and there it is. He lost it, and on that day he actually turns to the other guy and says ‘Well, shot me then!’ He puts the barrel in his mouth and knocked his front tooth out because he was so completely out of control. He went off camera and there was blood coming out of his mouth, and I was on the verge of saying cut, but he walked straight back on again and carried on because he just wanted to see what would happen. Without wanting to encourage lunatics you can see that on camera, there's a real energy and so what happened was that something in Jake changed in the course of the film and I think that we captured it on film a little bit. If you ever watch the movie again knowing where he has to get to again watch his face at the beginning of the film, he looks eleven years old and we shot it almost in sequence and he really went from being a boy to being a man; it happened during the shooting of the movie. So a lot of it surprised me and I was really pleased with what he came up with.”

This film really takes the war-genre films to a whole new level. It’s extremely compelling to watch, and you might even laugh a few times, too! Jarhead is rated ‘R’ for pervasive language, some violent images and strong sexual content. It should be on your must-see list when it hits theaters this Friday, November 4th.