“I wrote it with my writing partner. He quit his job - he’s got three kids. He had a very well-paying job as an Emmy Award-winning TV writer. He’s a novelist and he was like, ‘This needs to be made.’ I love this guy, Mark Richard, but he’s Texan and he’s religious. He’s a church-going guy. He’s got three kids, he’s got a wife, he’s conservative, he’s just like the best, you know what I mean? He calls me up and says, ‘Are you really serious?’ because we’ve been trying to write on weekends. I’m like, ‘Of course I’m serious.’ He said, ‘I’m thinking of quitting my job.’ I’m like, ‘Don’t quit your job. I can live under the radar but you’ve got three kids. That’s crazy. I can’t guarantee that we can sell it and make it.’ He calls me the next day, he’s like, ‘I quit my job. We need to write quickly.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ He moves in, his wife was a dream, let me live with him, and we wrote the script.”
“So two things: number one, we had a written script and we wrote it about this generation. It was going to be a young story that moved. It was going to be a young man’s journey - that already set it apart. It was going to be totally from the soldier’s point of view. We were going to use rock ‘n roll. We were going to use them shooting up presents. We were going to use them drinking in Texas, because Mark is from Texas. We were going to capture a kind of energy that we hadn’t seen before.”
“The other thing was because I had gone all around the country videotaping with my research partner, Reid, who’s great, we’d gone to the middle of America, we had all of these stories and we cut them together. We took all those soldiers’ videos that I talk about. My brother brought back soldiers’ videos - videos that soldiers shot and edited to rock music - and I was like, ‘This is an anthropological find. We are inside the point of view of the soldier. This is how the movie needs to feel. It needs to be born out of this energy and out of this honesty.’ In some ways, it’s going to be like World War II and Vietnam because it’s a war, but at the same time, it’s going to be nothing like it. We’re seeing it firsthand.”
“We took those videos and we cut them up. We made a DVD and we had a finished screenplay, and one weekend on a Friday we sent it to the studios, we sent it to the financiers, we sent it to the producers and we said, ‘You have the weekend. That’s it. You call and you tell us who wants it. If you buy it, you make it. And if you buy it and you don’t make it, you pay $5 million. I don’t want the $5 million; I want you to make the movie.’ That’s because, look, the studios by necessity are bureaucracies and they’re businesses. And of course they’re going to buy a lot of scripts, and of course they’re then going to debate whether they really want to make the movie. The studio is the most invested when you greenlight the movie, when you’re in production. That’s where they always say, ‘Get them to spend money.’ A screenplay - I don’t want to get into numbers, it costs something - the movie costs thirty times that, right? When they’re greenlighting the movie, spending the money, is when they’re on the hook. So we said, ‘You buy it, you make it. We’re selling it as a greenlit movie.’ Four studios wanted to buy it as a greenlit movie, four financiers wanted to buy it as a greenlit movie, a number of producers, and that was how we moved forward.”
What did you base your decision on?
“It was very complicated. They all came in at a similar budget. I have long term relationships with studio heads and I had just got Scott Rudin as a producer, who is very smart and has a number of relationships. You just say, ‘Look, this is the kind of movie I want to make,’ and you basically go with the person who it feels like you want to make the same movie. You don’t want to end up in the marriage and be like, ‘We want different lives.’ Basically, you want to marry somebody who essentially has the same values that you have. So when people say it was amazing you got a studio to make it, the wonderful thing is by the time they came to the table, they knew what they were making. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, it’s a giraffe. Can we make it a deer?’ It’s a giraffe that’s going to be a giraffe. I mean, you can change how many toes it has, but this is what it is.”
“I think that this movie, I have to say that this is a fresh start for a new year. I think that this is young; I think it’s got a great young cast. They’re amazing. We cast it authentically. We cast it the right age. It’s from the soldier’s point of view. Soldiers worked on this movie from beginning to end. I think the music is different than you’ve ever seen before. So I just don’t think it has anything to do… I think it is a totally different situation and I think we need to run with the fact that it’s a really, I say it with humility, but it’s a good story. I think it’s satisfying emotionally, because that’s what people tell me. They come up to me afterwards and they’re like, ‘I was a little hesitant,’ some of them are like, ‘I didn’t know what it was going to be. Thank you for telling an emotional story.’”
