Samuel L Moore Reflects on Life on the Set of “Freedomland:” “Actually, we had a great time on this film. I tend to see movie sets as a fun kind of playground. All of the stuff that I need to know and do I had prepared myself to do. Interestingly enough, Julianne [Moore] is almost like a mirror image of me. When we got through with the rehearsal process and we were ready to go and shoot, when we got to set Julianne and I could stand there and talk about baseball and basketball and her kids - and at the time she was real caught up in 'American Idol.' She was watching it all the time and so she would talk about it all the time. [Director] Joe Roth would call action and she would just go into these really emotional scenes and then it was like cut and, 'I really hope you get to see it tonight. It's going to be so great.' So she would go in and out of it so easy and so we had such a great time.”
Next Up for Jackson: “Home of the Brave:” Jackson will be starring in “Home of the Brave” for director Irwin Winkler. The Iraq war drama tells the story of three soldiers who struggle to adjust to life back at home after their tours of duty in Iraq have ended. Jackson will play a doctor who has trouble resuming his normal activities and finds his life unraveling.
Jackson readily admits it’s a difficult – and very timely – subject. “It's timely and there are times… I've been flying a lot recently and so I run into a lot of kids who are either on R&R or on their way to Iraq or whatever. I had an interesting conversation with this one girl I remember because her name was so odd. Her name was DejaDru. I said, 'Well your parents had a very sort of interesting sense of humor.' She was a 19 year-old girl who's an information specialist. I asked what that meant and she told me that she goes to people's houses in Iraq and talks to them about what we're doing and what we're trying to do. I said, 'Well, you speak Arabic then?' She said, ‘No. I have an interpreter that tells them what I'm saying.' 'And you really trust that person to tell them what you're saying and telling you what they're saying?' She said, 'Well, I have to.'
Then you meet other guys that have been wounded or guys that are going back again and so the interaction with these people causes me to have a lot of interest. All of these kids are kids who know who I am and are fans, but they are kids. I have yet to meet one that is over 23, and it's not because we have a draft like we did when I was that age, but these are kids who joined the National Guard or whatever so that they could go to college and be weekend warriors or whatever. But now they're like full-time warriors, and the war and them killing people and seeing people die around them is having a very profound affect on them and how they come back home.
Sometimes they are gone so long that they come back and their jobs are gone, jobs that they're supposed to be able to get back. Or their girlfriends or wives are estranged – all kinds of stuff is going on. We don't address that in a very real kind of way and hopefully this film will make people aware of it more so than people who have kids that are going through it, because there are a lot of us that are untouched by it except that we know someone who has someone who knows someone over there. But most of the time we're unaffected.”
