Actors Anonymous (29 page)

I positioned Miles with the camera in our usual spying spot in the corner. I told him that once we started not to turn it off and to record everything, no matter what. I put on the lab coat and turned up the collar. In the pocket I felt the rubber knife.

“Okay, you ready?” I whispered to Miles.

“Ready,” he whispered and I reached over and pressed record on the camera.

I started walking toward Casey like I was creeping. Then when I got close I stood over her and started cackling, first softly, and then really loudly. Casey looked back at me. She was sitting in a little chair so she had to look up to see my face. I was holding the knife high above her.

Through the cackling I could hear her say, “What the fuck are you doing?” Then her eyes looked scared. Before I could bring the knife down to pretend to kill her for the film, I saw Christopher out of the corner of my eye running toward me with the guitar in his hand. I was ready for that Swiss faggot. I smiled a murderous smile.

Miles recorded it all.

TRADITION 8

We should remain forever artists, but we can employ technical workers.

Back to Bataan

I
WAS IN A FILM
about the Bataan Death March. The real death march happened soon after the day of infamy, December 7, 1941. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, they also attacked American bases in the Philippines, which had been stationed there since the Spanish–American War. These bases had been low-priority outposts and were not prepared for such an attack. It was the “country club” base, and most of the equipment and weapons had not been updated since WWI. The US army was not prepared for immediate response to the attacks, especially after suffering such a blow to its fleet in Pearl Harbor. So, soon after the Japanese attack on the Philippine bases, 75,000 US and Filipino troops, under the command of General King, surrendered. This was the largest US surrender in history.

The Japanese had been expecting only a third of the number of POWs and were unprepared to accommodate the actual number. In addition, the Samurai code of Bushido determined that surrender
was a dishonor, and therefore prisoners were below contempt. The Japanese forced their staggering number of prisoners on a sixty-mile death march to various prison camps in the region. There was little water or food, many prisoners were infected with malaria, and if anyone faltered they were bayoneted or shot.

Three years later, when the United States was able to focus its military energies on the Pacific, there were only about three hundred US soldiers still alive. They had been so mistreated and subjected to such deprivations that they resembled Holocaust victims. If these soldiers were rescued, they would do nothing to contribute to the war effort, but their rescue was deemed a sentimental mission and necessary to make up for the lack of US support earlier in the war. The assignment was handed to an inactive unit of army rangers led by Colonel Mucci. The mission, planned by Captain Robert Prince, was ultimately a success that saved all the POWs, and resulted in only one US casualty.

In 2003 I acted in a movie about the death march and the rescue mission called
The Great Raid
. It was produced by Miramax and directed by John Dahl. Benjamin Bratt played Colonel Mucci, and I played Captain Prince. We filmed for five months near Brisbane, Australia, because terrorist activities had made the Philippines too dangerous to use as a location. I stayed in a garish apartment on the beach in a city called Surfer’s Paradise. Whenever I mention this city to any Australians, I get a lot of eye-rolling and disclaimers about how the quality of that cheap casino/tourist city does not reflect the rest of Australia. But it was fine. I stayed inside most of the time that I wasn’t shooting. I had hundreds of books to read, and I didn’t dare venture into the undiluted, ozone-less sun.

Since Oliver Stone made
Platoon
in 1986, it has become a trend for
war movies to put the actors portraying soldiers through an abbreviated boot camp. This boot camp crucible has been all but codified since
Saving Private Ryan,
where the depiction of the D-Day beach landings set a new standard for filmic immersion in a historic war zone. The man who was responsible for training the actors for
Platoon
and
Private Ryan,
Captain Dale Dye, was the military advisor on our film. Our boot camp was almost two weeks long in the wilds of Australia, the longest actor boot camp he had ever conducted. And also the largest. In addition to the principal actors (who are usually the only people in actor boot camp), we had sixty background players who, unlike most background performers, would be with us for the entire shoot. They would portray the rest of the ranger battalion.

As I was the captain in the film, I was regarded as a captain during boot camp. I gave orders and I planned the missions (with Captain Dye’s help) against the other camp full of Japanese actors who were going to portray our enemies in the film. We all had real M-1 rifles and BARs and sub-machine guns. Only the bullets were blanks. Dale Dye had us run reconnaissance missions on the surrounding farmhouses in the area. These were real farms. I don’t know what they would have thought if they saw young men in army greens with guns, sneaking around their property at night. But they didn’t see us; they were just watching TV.

One night at 2 a.m., we all lay in the dirt under bushes and waited to ambush the Japanese actor/soldiers. It was all set up. Captain Dye had told the advisor for the Japanese actors to send them toward our camp at a certain time. We lay in the dirt for two hours. Finally we heard them. The poor Japanese actors thought they were going to be sneaking into our camp, but as they crept by at the appointed time, we got ’em! We fired hundreds of blanks at them before they fled, defeated. We won the war game, even though it had been set up.

Then one of our guys was bitten on the neck by a spider. The spider bite was real. Australia has some of the most poisonous spiders and snakes in the world. He was sent to the hospital.

One night at midnight, Dale Dye took the whole company on a stealth raid on the Japanese camp. We took the wrong route and went by a cattle farm. I was at the front of the long column of actor/soldiers with Captain Dye and Benjamin Bratt. We were halted by a grunting man in the dark. He was about a hundred feet in front of us. It was hard to determine what he was saying, but the grunts had a thick Australian accent. Captain Dye whispered that I should hold the company back, and then approached the thickset, grunting man in the dark. The light from his farmhouse was orange in the haze. Then we saw that the farmer was holding a shotgun.
His
gun was real and, I’m sure, loaded. Then I could make out some words, something along the lines of “Get the fuck out of here.”

But Captain Dye was already trotting back to us, head ducked, in case there was any shotgun spray following him.

“Move Captain Prince, move!” whispered Dye. He always called me by my character name. In fact, we were not even allowed to mention that we were making a movie. We
were
in boot camp. I quickly gave the order to turn the company around and retreat. All seventy of us turned and ran. I had never seen Dale Dye scared, except for that time, his gooseneck stretched in panic, running from a potential firefight that he had entered with fake bullets.

When the boot camp was over, we had a little ceremony. I looked each actor/soldier in the eye and congratulated him. It was funny looking eye to eye with these guys. We had accomplished something, we were definitely better at pretending to be soldiers, and the movie
would benefit from our training, but for whom were we pretending at this ceremony? We were still just actors, not trained killers. There was one guy, I’ll call him Chucky, who had asymmetrical eyes—we all do, just take a photo of one half of your face, and then duplicate it, and flip it, and put it together, and you’ll see a very different person. But Chucky’s asymmetry was pronounced. One eye was at least an inch below the other. I really noticed this when staring into them at the ceremony.

Chucky was just an extra, but he was a hard worker. He was a local. He didn’t say much, but during the boot camp and the shooting he proved himself to be someone that could be depended on to fill in for whatever was needed. He rode a motorcycle, and one evening after shooting, about two months into the shoot, he crashed and killed himself. We were shooting out in some cane fields, and there were many kangaroos in the area. Apparently one jumped out in front of Chucky, and Chucky, being a skilled motorcyclist, swerved around it. Right into an oncoming car.

I had already left the set by the time Chucky had his accident, but some of the other actors were still there. The car was on the side of the road; Chucky’s motorcycle was on its side, next to his body, and his head, still in the helmet, was on the other side of the road.

We had a memorial for Chucky. Before the funeral, Captain Dye met with the company—he still considered us a company—and called us all by our character names. He told us that he wanted us to wear our military costumes to the funeral. Captain Dye was used to ritual, and he knew how to put large numbers of young men through tough group experiences, to make them cohere as a unit. Our group was bonded by the mission of the film, so wearing the uniforms wasn’t as
crazy an idea as it sounds. But nobody did it. Everyone wore his real-world clothes.

At the funeral, Chucky’s friends and family said nice things about him. They said the movie had been very important to him. He had been very into athletics and extreme sports such as skydiving and rock climbing, but the movie had opened up the idea of more possibilities. He had wanted to go to Hollywood.

In the final film, I don’t think you can even see Chucky. He is just another guy in green in the background. It is hard to make out individuals other than the main actors. In the film we go on the raid, massacre a bunch of evil Japanese guys, and save the POWs. The film took about a year and a half to edit, for no good reason that I could discern. Finally, in 2005, there was a big premiere in Washington, D.C. Harvey Weinstein, the original president of Miramax, was a friend of Hillary Clinton. She and John McCain both came to the premier and sat together. Weinstein introduced them as the future presidential candidates. I spoke to Hillary—she and Bill are big film aficionados, always renting DVDs out in Connecticut. McCain didn’t say much to me; he looked catatonic.

When it was released in theaters the next week, the movie was a bomb. It was the last Miramax release before Disney kicked the Weinstein brothers out of their own company. So there was no money put into the advertising. It’s not a bad movie. Looks nice, at least. And I read a lot of books in Australia. It’s not the worst movie I ever did, but I wish I could forget most of it.

TRADITION 9

We should remain unorganized, but we may create production companies in order to serve greater projects.

Power of the Image

P
OWER OF THE IMAGE
. Power of information. Power of flow. The power of the image can create flow; it can attract and bring attention to whatever it wants. This is why celebrities are a big part of presidential elections. This is why celebrities get paid millions of dollars for their books. This is why companies want celebrities to endorse hair products.

Camera people, sound people, production designers: Get them to make your work look good. Sometimes the difference between a movie star and a soap opera actor is the lighting.

Of course there is the script, and the way it’s edited, and the subject matter. But if you shot
The Godfather,
shot for shot, on a soap opera soundstage, with soap actors, don’t you think it would seem silly?

Or, let’s say you shoot it on all the original sets they used with all the same actors they used, even Brando, but they lit it like a soap opera—it would change everything. The acting would suddenly look bad.

When I direct, I am often more interested in the technical sides of things. It’s hard for me to allow much time for lighting because I often find the payoff to be incommensurate with the time spent. But I like to think about framing and camera movement as much as I do the acting. The camera movement combined with the editing is the grammar of film.