Is it true you put your actors through a special boot camp?
“Right. There’s kind of an amazing guy, Captain Dale Dye, who is a retired Marine captain. He’s fabulous. This guy’s almost single-handedly changed the way Hollywood makes our war films. He managed to convince Oliver Stone to hire him to do ‘Platoon,’ which was his first film. He said, ‘I’ve never liked the way movies, the way they portray soldiers, and so I want to take them and put them through boot camp.’ And maybe because Oliver Stone was a veteran, he said, ‘You know what? That’s a great idea.’
They took all these guys that did ‘Platoon’ and ran them through boot camp. They take them out of their luxurious hotels, put them in the jungle, make them eat K-rations, learn how to fire weapons, to act like you’re in the military, and it’s an amazing process. You take these well-intended actors and you turn them into soldiers. It’s the best sort of like boot camp for them in terms of giving them enough information to play the characters.
Dale’s whole mission is to try to get them to sort of respect the men that they’re playing. Respect the institution of the military. Respect the training and what these men have gone through. It’s fabulous rehearsal, if you will. It works so well with the Americans. We had a Japanese technical advisor – we did the same thing with the Japanese. In fact, the Japanese and the Americans were training simultaneously in different camps and they would stage war games with each other. It was pretty intense.
It was so successful that I asked Dale if he would do the same thing for the POWs.He took our core group of actors and our core group of extras and he basically ran them through boot camp. They were all dressed in wardrobe and he took them out two miles away from the camp and he had the Japanese military show up and arrest them, basically. Take them into custody. And he had them take their shoes off and tie the laces and put them around their neck so they had to walk two miles barefoot to this camp. They spent two days in this POW camp eating crappy food and I think at one point, actually Dale gets so into he actually had the Japanese guards beat him just to give the POWs the sense of what it must have been like.
And to the credit of all the Australians that participated in the movie – the POW extras were just amazing because we gave them this stack of papers assuming it would all end up in the trash, just to kind of give them the history of who they were and what this experience is like. They not only read it but they really just got into it. They did a great job and realized that they were kind of an intricate part of the movie and portraying these amazing people.
A unique thing about making the movie in Australia is that there are so many people that were affected by World War II in Australia because it was their country that was next. You know, Darwin was bombed a couple of times. There were ships that were bombed in Sydney harbor. The war in the Philippines was very real to the Australians.”
James Franco and Benjamin Bratt don’t seem like obvious choices for the lead roles in this type of movie. Why did you cast those two?
“Well it was interesting because Miramax had just done this film with Benjamin called ‘Piñero.’ I thought that he was fantastic in the movie; I thought he did great. And Miramax wanted me to meet him, and at that point I was trying to convince them with this more realistic interpretation of the story.
In the original script the Captain Pajota character, the Filipino guerrilla, was going to be cast and played by an American and so this American would be inspiring the Filipinos to defend the bridge for the camp. And there were Americans that rather than become captured and spend their time in a POW camp, went into the jungle and organized resistance fighters. Robert Lapham was one of those. So there were Americans that did that, but the character that was originally written in the script was more sort of like Colonel Kurtz from ‘Apocalypse Now,’ this sort of outside loner that had gone off into the Filipino countryside. There literally weren’t people like that. They were all in touch with the military. They worked with other people. Many of the Filipino guerrillas had served in the U.S. Army so there was complete understanding of the military."
Page 4: John Dahl on Casting James Franco
