From Rebecca Murray,
Your Guide to Hollywood Movies.
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Irwin Winkler's Home of the Brave is the first feature film to focus on what happens to America's brave men and women after they've finished up their tours of duty in Iraq. Samuel L Jackson (Snakes on a Plane) stars as Dr Will Marsh, a heroic medic who has an extremely difficult time adjusting to life back home as a husband and father.

Samuel L Jackson on His Character and the Appeal of Home of the Brave: “It was kind of dealing with the repercussions of what happens to people when they come home and they have nothing really in place to help them get back in society. My character in particular, being a professional guy, it's very interesting that they used different stratus of people to explore what happens to people when they come home. Not being able to talk to anyone about what he saw, what he did, what happened. Not actually being able to verbalize his failure. Dealing with a kid that had his own ideas about what was going on, has a definite opinion about it that's not an informed opinion apparently. But like most kids, thinking they're right and thinking you're wrong, and you're just the enemy and you don't understand. We have that.

I think it's time to sort of put a face on what's going on and the reality of it all. A lot of people see it, but most of us don't because we don't have kids who are there. We don't have friends whose kids are there, so we don't live the life and death struggle that they have every day of wondering if their kid's okay, if they're coming back home. Or the ones that don't come home, understanding the pain of losing a child, a friend, a lover.

These people, when they do come home, if they get home, [are] being denied a lot of different things that they didn't actually know. They joined up to be kind of weekend warriors at some point. All of a sudden they were going somewhere for a couple of weeks or a couple of months and before you knew it, they'd been there for two years, a year and a half. They come home and the job they were supposed to have when they came home is gone because they couldn't hold it that long. The person that loved them when they left has fallen in love with someone else and moved on, or the children that were being born when you left home don't know you, don't understand who you are and why you're in the house.

You can't talk to your friends about what you did or whatever happened. But the big difference being, unlike Vietnam, they're not treated like baby rapers and murderers when they come back home. But people still don't understand. People ask you strange questions like, ‘What was it like? Did you kill anybody? Did you see anybody get killed?’ You don't really want to talk about that, but you need to. It's time we sort of put a face on it, and it's unusual to actually do something like this while it's still going on. So hopefully it will encourage people to reach out to these kids in a different way.”

On Playing Such a Vulnerable Character: “First you have to find out, figure out what kind of person he was before he left, in terms of his stability, the success that he had as a doctor. Why he would make a choice like that, to go into service and go in the field and do that not just once but twice? What drives him? Why not succeeding in the field is so tormenting to him. Is it because the guys are so young or is it because he didn't have the tools to do his job or whatever? Because when you read about field hospitals now, the field hospitals they have are better than some hospitals that we have here in the States. Guys are able to microsurgery right on the spot. They drop them into a field op and they're taken care of.

There are a lot of doctors that have gone beyond what you saw in this particular film. They moved their medical operations into the cities where the soldiers are operating so they can get to them quicker, rather than have them helicoptered out and transported everywhere. But to figure out why a man with all these things going for him, a wonderful family, a loving family because he and his wife are still very passionate towards each other… I'm not sure how successful he is in his passion but he loves her, she loves him. But she knows he's been damaged in a way. Just like he says, ‘Do you really want to know?’ And she's kind of like, ‘Well, no.’ Because you don't want to know what that person has done or what that person has seen. You want to know the smells of that hospital? You want to know how many legs I had to cut off in an hour? Do you really want to know those things?

And then when somebody says they want to know and then they change their mind, you have no place to vent. You have no place to let that stuff go. You don't have any contemporaries. There aren't a lot of other army doctors who are coming back that you can talk to. They're not there in that little town and the doctors that you do know, you can't talk to about it because they don't even understand why you left. They thought you were crazy for leaving in the first place. So it was just interesting to be able to explore the kind of dynamics that a man like that has with friends, families and contemporaries, for me.”

Page 2: Jackson on Researching the Subject Matter, Selling a War Film, and the Snakes on a Plane Hype