A lot of vets like 'Good Morning Vietnam' - I get great letters from guys.
There's no such thing as an anti-war film.
'The Red' delivers intense action, leavened by a genuinely sympathetic portrait of soldiers caught up in battles they never chose.
Rambo isn't violent. I see Rambo as a philanthropist.
I grew up with Apocalypse Now and Badlands, so I had a real awe thing going.
Hollywood continues to present the U.S. Army as being the good guys, always defeating the aliens or foreigners.
Given the knee-jerk patriotism of recent war movies, it's discouraging to see 'Windtalkers' evade pertinent facts that could have recast the doubled-edged issues of racism and loyalty and made them relevant to contemporary times.
When you make a war movie, the other side has to be the enemy. You're making a war movie from the point of view of a soldier fighting it.
You've gotta be careful. People don't want to be reminded of Vietnam and Korea. We lost thousands of fine young men and didn't win either of those wars. Nobody wants to hear about them. 'Apocalypse Now' and 'The Deerhunter' weren't box-office hits.There was too much violence and blood and gore.
The most powerful Vietnam movie, to me, was 'The Deer Hunter,' which was more about what happened to the folks who went and about their relationships.
On 'Black Hawk Down,' I was employing 1,000 Muslims. 'Kingdom of Heaven,' same deal except bigger, probably 1,500 Muslims.
After Sept. 11, there was a reticence and worrying about films that touched on war, and even more on terrorism.
A military childhood in the 1950s was very much informed by WWII. My brothers and I often heard stories from our dad - and from other kids - about things that had happened to their dads. We constantly played war games and, nearly every Saturday, saw a different WWII movie at the post theater.
When I went to the cinema as a boy, when I saw a war film, I thought the general was the star, and that Cary Grant was an extra. I had no idea about the structure of film, but I loved going to the cinema.
I suppose I prefer kind of epic dramas like, oh, I don't know... 'Lawrence Of Arabia' or 'Apocalypse Now'; those are the movies that I have a tendency to be most fond of.
My favorite traditional Christmas movie that I like to watch is All Quiet on the Western Front. It's just not December without that movie in my house.
Sitting in America, we never get to know the other side in any kind of believable way. We have so many movies about Iraq, Afghanistan, and this and that, but there is never a character from that side.
By my count, of the more than 600 English-language World War II movies made since 1940, only four have even acknowledged the humanity of the soldiers of Nippon. There may be a few I've missed, but not many.
The Japanese couldn't have been all bad during World War II. Look at all the movies Hollywood was able to make on account of them. The Indians weren't the only bad guys. Thanks to the Japanese and Geronimo, John Wayne became a millionaire.
Here's an easy way to see if a war movie is being truthful: If you see an explosion on a faraway hillside and the sound of the explosion and the detonation of the bomb happen at the same time - if they're putting the sound and the vision together in the same moment - they're going toward our cultural understanding of war, not the reality of war.
There's a difference between 'political films' and 'films about Iraq.'
I grew up as a child living 'Red Dawn.' I was leaping out of spider holes, mowing down Russkies at the age of eight.
My first soldier role was in 'Flags of Our Fathers.' Casting director Jay Binder saw that movie and was looking for soldiers for 'Journey's End,' which led to 'Generation Kill.'
I made 'Saving Private Ryan' for my father. He's the one who filled my head with war stories when I was growing up.
I did grow up in a military family but lacked the perspective to grasp the cognitive dissonance carried by most people who serve in the armed forces or the circumstances that push lots of folks into the military. I don't blame G.I. Joe or Rambo for that atmosphere, but they certainly reflected the final stage of a two generation cultural myth.
