(Continued from Page 3) "When I suggested to Miramax that we make that part Filipino, they said, ‘Well who could we get?’ They said, ‘You know, you should see Benjamin.’ I saw ‘Pinero’ and I met with Benjamin and I kind of felt like, you know, I’ve always liked Ben. I thought he was terrific and said, ‘We’re changing the script and maybe Ben could play the part of Mucci.’
It’s interesting – Colonel Mucci – his name is spelled M-U-C-C-I and probably people pronounce his name ‘Muchee,’ but at that time in the United States being an Italian-American wasn’t very flattering. This guy was a West Point graduate and I think he did not like – this is all I can figure out – he didn’t want to be really sort of perceived [a certain way] I guess. He insisted on this unique pronunciation of his name. Everyone called him ‘Musee’ not ‘Muchee,’ because ‘Muchee’ just didn’t have… ‘Colonel Muchee just didn’t have the same ring of authority.
Anyway, so I said to Ben, ‘Would you be interested in playing the colonel?’ He said, ‘Well, I don’t know. It’s like, well, he’s an Italian-American, yeah, but I don’t know if I can play that part.’ So I went back and I found a picture of Colonel Mucci and Mucci always had this mustache, and then I found this press photograph of Ben where he had a mustache and I put the two together and it’s like [Benjamin] looked amazingly like him. I made a Xerox of this, the picture of Mucci and the picture of Ben, and sent it to him. I said, ‘Don’t you think there’s a chance you could play this part?’
We were thrilled we got him. The original script, that character was involved in all the action and shooting his way across the Philippines with all the other guys. So he sort of signed on to do the movie and then ultimately his character sort of evolved and changed quite a bit, and he was more than happy to go along with that.”
And casting James Franco?
“James Franco… The one thing about Captain Prince from my understanding and my research is that the real Robert Prince was a like a lot of people. He was in ROTC and he had gone to Stanford and he was probably not the most sort of gung-ho [soldier]. He was a little bit more of a soft-spoken guy. We tried to dramatize this in the story. There was probably a captain that was probably a little bit more of a gung-ho type of Ranger that you would think of, but I think there was something unique about Prince. He was sort of this methodical, pretty precise kind of quiet guy, which you don’t really imagine as a Ranger captain. We were trying to kind of draw that out of the character and so when I met James, I just felt like he had this great sort of quiet intensity he could bring to that part.
It’s also interesting too, because people think - and maybe I’m guilty of this - but when you think of World War II, you think of these guys, look at old World War II movies, they seem so old. All the characters do. And I remember this movie called ‘A Bridge Too Far’ and Robert Redford was in it. He played the part of this [major]. Robert Redford he had probably been doing films and then one of his films had done really so all of a sudden there was kind of a lot of attention put on Robert Redford in that movie. I remember some of the criticism at the time was that he was too young to play that part. Well the reality is, I mean you think about it, guys in the military aren’t very old. My dad joined the service when he was 18 and he was out of the service when he was 21. My dad said that the old guy in his company was the sergeant who was 26.
You don’t think about it. And then if you think about the guys that are in Iraq right now, they’re like 19, 20, maybe 21, you know? So Captain Prince on the actual raid was, I think, 25 - about the same age as James. The oldest guy on the raid was Colonel Mucci who was 33. So you know, we have a tendency to like not think about how young these guys are.”
