Have you held special screenings of "The Great Raid" for the survivors?
“We’ve tried. Because many of these men are getting up in age, we’ve tried to stage as many screenings for them as possible. In fact, we showed it in New Mexico earlier this year. I think we had about 19 survivors. And then we showed it in Cincinnati at their 60th reunion of the Defenders of Bataan and I think we had about maybe 25 survivors. We showed it in California right after we finished to about another, a group of about 18. And so we’ve tried to make it as available as possible to groups that want to see the movie.
There was a POW that saw it in Kansas a couple of weeks ago and before the screening he came up to me and said, ‘Are you involved in this movie? I heard you’re the producer.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m the director of the movie,’ and he said, ‘I was in Cabanatuan and this movie had better be good.’ I said, ‘I understand.’
For me it seems like kind of an obligation to tell the story correctly. After the movie he stood up and he said, ‘You know, this is extremely hard for me to watch because I was abused by the Japanese for years. But on a scale of one to ten, I’d give this movie a nine.’”
That’s pretty strong praise.
“These guys are going to be very hard on it. I think they’ve seen too many movies where it’s been sort of sugar-coated. The other thing I think that’s really interesting is that there was an effort after the war to kind of like put it behind them and sort of move beyond it. They did not conduct the same kind of trials. Like in Germany, they conducted the Nuremberg trials and found all the war criminals and they prosecuted them and they hung them. That just didn’t happen in Japan because I think the United States realized there was a unique opportunity to create a democracy in Japan – in Asia. So here you had this country that was completely destroyed and was ready to kind of start rebuilding their country, and the government just felt like this is a great opportunity.”
What went into your decision to tell this story from three different points of view?
“It’s such a big story and you can’t really tell the story without telling the story about the Philippines. You can’t really tell the story without talking about the Philippines and the Filipino underground, all the many Filipinos and the Filipino guerillas. This was their country. The war was being fought on their home land. I really just felt that it was important to bring in the underground. That Margaret Utinsky character that Connie Nielsen plays is based on a real woman.
…There’s a captain in the movie, Captain Joson, and it’s actually the real Captain Joson’s grandson who plays that part - he was an actor. And that’s how much a part of it this story and the war in the Philippines is to the Filipino people. And unfortunately, their story hasn’t been told as much as it should.
You know, it’s a rescue mission set in World War II and inspired by amazing people that did amazing things. At one point I was thinking about the Margaret Utinsky character and then I read a book that she wrote about her life. And it’s just so inspiring, I just felt like there’s just got to be a way that we can incorporate this into the story. What life was like for the POWs in the camp… The character that Joseph Fiennes plays is a fictitious character, but trying to sort of bring the story of the POWs out. What we decided to focus on there is like what the dilemma must have been for the leadership of the camp. Trying to keep the men there and his primary goal was to try to keep his men alive. How do we survive this nightmarish experience?
If you really look at war, you understand that the most complicated and difficult time in a war is when one army is leaving and the other one’s arriving. That’s when civilians, people that are stuck in the middle, are most likely to be killed. And so we kind of play up that dilemma of the camp commander in an extremely difficult situation, made even more difficult by the fact that the Japanese actually left the camp and left them there. They said, ‘If you stay in the camp, you’ll be ok. If you leave the camp, you’ll be shot as an enemy combatant.’ So these guys had to make this decision. ‘I guess we’d better stay here and hope for the best.’”
Page 3: John Dahl on Putting His Actors Through Boot Camp
