Anthony Swofford on Altering Characters from the Book to the Screen: "The character that’s really most an amalgamation is Jamie [Foxx's] character and everyone else is a real person. But that was a really smart choice because there were like three different sergeants in my Marine Corps career who were like Jamie’s character. And so for storytelling, for continuity, they combined that character. I think they made a really rich character out of these three different guys."
Anthony Swofford on Turning Over His Story to Screenwriter William Broyles Jr: "It was easy because I really trusted Bill... [Producers] Doug [Wick] and Lucy [Fisher] and then Bill. He knew the book really well. He knew the book sort of shockingly well when we spoke, and I knew that he cared about the story. He cared about the guys that I’d written about and he cared about how he was going to treat it.
It was time for me to let the story go, too. I’d written the book in a really, really intense year. If it was going to move to film, I was ready to let someone else do that work."
But turning his work over to Hollywood was a risk. Great books don't always translate into good movies. Swofford said, "I was either worried or foolish, I’m not sure (laughing). I was a first-timer and again I really trusted everyone who was involved."
Anthony Swofford on Jake Gyllenhaal Playing Him in the Movie: "I think it was really smart. When Sam [Mendes] told me that he’d made that decision, it made a lot of sense because there’s something… I’d always admired Jake’s acting and there’s something in his screen persona that I thought would really translate into this role."
William Broyles Jr on Adapting "Jarhead:" "I hope we stayed true to the heart of the book. Tony’s book is so good that there’s no way you could actually film it. You had to find a movie within it. That was the key thing was to try to be true to his experience. And at the same time, it was great to be able to draw on my own experience in Vietnam and my son’s experience - who’s in Iraq now - because there’s a sort of universal truth to Tony’s book that applies not just to his war, but to any war. That was what attracted me was a chance to say something really honest about what it’s like to go off and fight for your country."
Broyles said he was given free rein to make changes to Swofford's story in order to effectively adapt the book into a script. Broyles said, "Obviously the Swoff character is the key. But everything else, all the other characters are pretty much combinations of characters in Tony’s book or partly based on that and some of the people I knew and people I’ve met through my son. So really I brought in a lot of different things, but the heart of it is absolutely Tony’s book. Without that there’d be no movie."
William Broyles Jr on Keeping "Jarhead" Author Anthony Swofford Involved in the Project: "I kept Tony involved the whole way and we met with him a lot. He read every draft of the script. I really wanted him to be happy with what we did. At the same time I was saying, ‘Look, it’s going to be different from your book. It’s going to be a movie.’
He was immensely useful and a real cheerleader, and very understanding about what had to be done in terms of compressing things in his book and combining characters and things like that. It’s been the best experience I’ve had in the business."
William Broyles Jr on How This Very American Film Will Play Internationally: "...What I hope is that there’s something so universal about the experience of going to war. I think as long as a film is really true, then it’s going to appeal to people who are interested in what it’s like to be a human being, particularly under these kinds of circumstances because almost every country has people that go to war. It is a lasting constant in human history so we hope we made a small little contribution to that."
Brian Geraghty, Jocko Sims, Anthony Swofford, and William Broyles Jr Interview Video from the World Premiere of "Jarhead" - Play the Video
