Writer/director Peirce said she had her eye on Gordon-Levitt from the start and wasn’t about to let him say no to the part. “I had to have Joe. He’s one of the best actors of his generation,” stated Peirce.
Gordon-Levitt didn’t have much in common with his character, but that didn’t stop him from wanting to be involved in Peirce’s film. “Tommy's just about as different a character to my own personal stuff as I maybe have ever played,” explained Gordon-Levitt. “I was brought up by peace activists. I was blessed with a family that loved and supported me. Tommy, I think, was not so fortunate.”
“This isn't in the movie, but this is something I spoke about with Kim [Peirce] a lot. That speaks to her strength as a director that she took the time to figure out with me who this guy's dad is, who's this guy's mom, what was his life like before he enlisted, what does that mean, why does he enlist? What are those demons that he left at home that he's trying to cover up and that he has successfully covered up finding a new family of sorts in the military and Texas? How do those demons come back to get him when he returns home and does no longer get to be an outstanding soldier in Iraq, because you can't be a soldier when you're back home? There's not people trying to kill you. You don't have a rifle, etc. Those things are all, I think, implicitly in the movie because I was thinking about them all day long, but they're not explicitly addressed. That's Kim for you, that kind of thorough, in-depth analysis of a character's psychology and personality is what she's all about, what she's so good at.”
Writer/director Peirce, the filmmaker behind the critically acclaimed 1999 film Boys Don't Cry, did an incredible amount of research prior to writing the screenplay. Peirce interviewed dozens of soldiers, even ones who went AWOL directly because of the stop-loss policy. This allowed her to base her characters on real people, although Sgt Brandon King and his buddies are all fictional. “We were hanging out with soldiers before shooting the movie, while shooting the movie,” said Gordon-Levitt about his access to the real men and women who serve in the US military. “Not only did I base my character on that, I couldn't have possibly done this movie without being able to soak up who they were and take all that I admired about them and try to put it into what I was doing.”
Like the bonds formed in the military, the actors of Stop-Loss have remained a close-knit group. “It's funny. Normally, the standard drill is you get really close with people when you work on a movie and then you probably don't see them again, or hardly. It's even rare to keep one friend from a movie. I swear to God, I'm good friends with Rob [Brown], with Vic [Rasuk], with [link url=http://movies.about.com/od/tatumchanning/]Channing [Tatum]], with [link url=http://movies.about.com/od/phillipperyan/]Ryan [Phillippe]], with Abbie [Cornish], with Mamie [Gummer]. I've seen all of them recently and they're all friends of mine. That's extremely, extremely rare, and I think it just speaks to the fact that Kim cast a cool bunch of people. We all had an experience that was so intense and so positive together that we're still friends.”
Prior to the start of filming, Peirce put her actors through training that resembled what military personnel go through. Attention was paid to handling and firing guns, and Gordon-Levitt admits he did okay with that bit of training. “Not as good as Chann; I'm better than Vic,” said Gordon-Levitt. “Some people took dates [to the firing range], right? It was like a date for some people. Texas. It's a bizarre love/hate relationship I have with guns. Mostly, they're machines designed to kill people and the more you have them around you, the more likely you are to get shot. But I gotta admit, it's an exhilarating thing to shoot a gun. It just is.”
Gordon-Levitt also did his own research before taking on the role of Tommy. “I went to a recruitment office. Guy was really cool, really smart, but if he could have gotten me to sign it immediately, he would have. He wouldn't have said, ‘You know, you maybe want to read that whole thing.’"
After the completion of Stop-Loss, Gordon-Levitt joined his co-star Channing Tatum for what’s sure to be an action-heavy big-budget blockbuster, G.I. Joe. Gordon-Levitt’s quick to point out that while both films involve soldiers, neither movie is a ‘war movie’. “I wouldn't call Stop-Loss a war movie so much as a soldier movie because it's about guys coming home. It's not a movie about any political specific message or not trying to convince you. It's not really making any grand statements about the war because, and I think the reason for that is of all the soldiers that I got to know, and I got to know and got close to quite a few guys, they didn't have any simplistic unilateral opinions about ‘the war’ in general. I think when you're actually over there, it changes. When you're getting shot at, all that matters to you is you want to get your buddies home safe and you want to get yourself home safe, and that's it. Stop-Loss is a story about these human beings. It's not about ‘the war’. But G.I. Joe is just a fun day at the thrill park. That's all it is, and it's so much fun. It really is.”
And while Stop-Loss attempted to capture military life as realistically as possible, that’s definitely not the case with G.I. Joe. “It's not aimed at that, no. There's no boot camp, there's nothing military. It has nothing to do with reality in any way. They're shooting lasers.”
