Interviewing the men who’ve gone AWOL because of being stop-lossed…that must have been difficult for them to talk about their situations.
“It was. Okay, so there’s a couple things. One is, I interviewed guys who were AWOL in America. There was a wonderful article in Harper’s late 2004 I believe, it’s called AWOL in America. She says there’s 9,000 AWOL in America - I think at this point maybe it’s 11 or 12,000 - and she was telling all these profiles. That was very early on, and that was very interesting to me. Democracy Now! had a show, probably this is maybe the beginning of 2005, where she had three AWOL soldiers on the program. They were AWOL. One was public with his identity, one or two were anonymous, and they told their story. Then I found some who were actually AWOL in America, I just didn’t use their identities. Then the other people that I found, which was amazing to me, people who had crossed over the border to Canada. They’re very public. Jeremy Hinzman, Brandon Hughey, Joshua Key - there’s a number of them. There’s a whole delegation. Michelle Robidoux runs a foundation that helps take care of them over the border.”
Are they hoping to come home?
“If there was amnesty and if it was lifted, they would of course come home. These are not draft dodgers. These are people who signed up voluntarily to serve their country, fought, experienced battle, many of them were decorated, and didn’t want to be forced back. They would love to be living in their country. This is the biggest heartbreak of their lives that they’re not here. But, obviously, they’re doing it. A lot of them have kids and they’re like, ‘You know, I have to be there for my kids,’ so they take their family over to Canada. Canada can’t be seen to be an easy place for soldiers to go or every soldier would go, so there’s some kind of pressure being exerted on Canada. Canada is refusing them any sort of citizenship so they’re illegal aliens there. So here they are with their kids; they didn’t leave America to still be illegal aliens. They were very open in talking to me because most of them are actually very public. They’re on the internet. You can just look them up, so that’s very easy.”
How do they survive?
“That’s the problem. If you’re not a citizen, you’re like illegal labor. It’s really a disaster for them.”
Are there many women who’ve gone AWOL and are in the same situations as these men?
“I don’t know. I would imagine there are less women in the armed forces and women are not technically in combat… So since it’s about unit integrity, I think stop-loss is across the board. I don’t know.”
What does your brother think of the film?
“I don’t want to speak for him, but he went to the last screening as we locked picture. I said, ‘What do you think?’ He’s just like, ‘I love it.’ And I was like, ‘Well, what do you think about this and this and this, the things that I changed?’ He said, ‘I knew you were going to ask me that! I knew you were going to make me think about it!’ He brought somebody who had been in combat with him and he was just like, ‘Thank you.’ And over and over, that happened last night at the screening.”
That must make you feel good about the work you’ve put in.
“Because I do it for them. I go to them - and I did this with the Brandon Teena story. It’s like I ask them, ‘You tell me your point of view so I can make it from your point of view. I have no agenda rather than to make it honest.’ Last night I had not only the Wounded Warriors were there and they said, ‘Thank you. This is accurate,’ now these are guys who are devastated and wounded and they want to go back to battle. I had a guy who had done three tours who wanted to do a fourth, Mike - give a shout out to Mike - and he said, ‘Thank you, thank you for getting it right.’ So, yeah, that means everything to me. It not only means everything to me like, ‘Oh, thank you for giving me the story and I got it right.’ It’s, ‘Thank you for giving me your story so I can put it out there,’ because I want America to see what America is going through.”
“I think that this is not just a soldier’s story, this is our story. Stop-loss happened to 81,000 soldiers. That means it happened to all the people who are in those soldiers’ lives. All the wives, all the girlfriends, all the daughters, all the sons, all the fathers who are waiting for their soldiers to come home – they’re being stop-lossed, right? And America’s being stop-lossed. We have a huge amount of resources that we’ve spent in Iraq. We’ve spent our soldiers and our children; we’ve spent our money. We’re heavily invested. How do we get out without destroying what we’ve tried to do? Without destroying ourselves? So I feel like stop-loss…the movie’s not about stop-loss but how stop-loss intersects for all Americans right now.”
How did you get a studio to back a movie like this because war movies aren’t doing well at the box office. This isn’t a war movie, but people might assume that from seeing the soldiers in the film’s trailer.
“That’s a really good question. I had a studio give me movie - another movie fully cast: Annette Bening, Rachel Wood, Hugh Jackman, Ben Kingsley - ready to go. They’re like, ‘We want to make it for 30 million,’ and I’m like, ‘Great.’ And they’re like, ‘But we only want to spend 20.’ So I’m like, ‘Okay…’ ‘So cut 10 million dollars out of the budget.’ I was like, ‘Okay.’ They said, ‘We’re only willing to pay 20, but we want to see the $30 million version. We don’t even want to see the version we would pay for.’ So I was like, ‘Okay, I see where this can go.’ So I was like, ‘You know what? I’m going to pick up my video camera and I’m going to do it the way I did it before.’”
“I went out and interviewed people and I paid for it. I flew all over the country and then I paid to write the script. Because I don’t need to interact with somebody, not that I don’t respect executives, but I don’t need to interact with executives to tell the story of these young boys who are at war and my brother and all this stuff, because I’m on the ground floor interviewing them. You know what I mean? America needs to hear the story as it is. So I was like, ‘I’ll just write it.’”
