The Lucky Ones is a roadtrip movie and although it's about soldiers returning from the Iraq war, it embraces a lighter tone than other recent war movies. Being a part of a roadtrip film was an interesting experience for Robbins who said he had great conversations all over the country during The Lucky Ones.
"Particularly in regard to the situations we're in domestically and overseas," said Robbins. "The insight of average Americans is a lot more progressive than you would think. I think we've been led into this false belief that there's this yahoo redneck out there in any kind of majority. It's just not true. It's not been my experience. I've met some progressive rednecks that I liked very much. Even the ones that might disagree have a level of maturity in them and an idea of what it is to be an American to honor someone's difference of opinion instead of trying to marginalize them or demonize them. I was very inspired by that trip in particular."
Robbins believes the film reflects a true cross section of American. "For the most part, most everyone is well intentioned in their response to these three soldiers," explained Robbins. "A couple are insensitive, but that's reflective of the experience that the veterans I've talked to have been through. Certainly, we haven't been asked as a country to think about this much, to really deal with the hundreds of thousands of people that have been through that experience or what we can do to help beyond just putting a magnet on our car. I think there's so much more that we can do and one of the ways to begin that process is to open our hearts to what they've actually been through. That's part of what was so attractive to me about this script is it had such a level of compassion and humanity about the experience of coming home after having served."
Robbins doesn't shy away from expressing his opinions, however his personal stance on hotbed issues doesn't come into play when he's tackling a character. He actually prefers to play a character that's vastly different from himself.
"I played a guy that was in the special police in South Africa a few years ago in Catch a Fire," recalled Robbins. "There's probably no character I've played that's been farther from me. I like that. It's a challenge. You have to find the humanity in those guys as well. There's no demons; there's complex human beings with complex moralities. Bad writing is where everything is in black and white, the good are the good and the evil are evil. That's bad. That's not the way is like. That's not what it's like in real life."
Playing characters with differing points of view from his own helps him gain an understanding and insight into how others think. "It's a matter of embracing it as well. In that particular instance, it's the fight against communism. When we hear that over here, when I heard that over here at the time, that was an abstract. When you go on the ground there and you talk to them specifically about why that was necessary, you come to understand it better from their point of view. That still doesn't justify torture. I got inside the head of the guy a little bit more," said Robbins.
Robbins believes films are an important medium for opening discussions. "They always have and that's why they're an important part of what we do. Think about To Kill a Mockingbird. That movie had a profound affect on the civil rights movement. The dramatists we know and remember now, Ibsen, Chekhov, Williams all were writing things that were taboo at the time. At the same time, the popular theater was producing fluff. Those probably had better box office at the time, but they aren't remembered later."
"There's different paths still that people take. Some are in the business of commercial entertainment and there's nothing wrong with that. It's certainly the engine that drives our industry. But there are some of us that don't want to do those kinds of movies and will want to have an opportunity to do movies like The Lucky Ones and are constantly struggling to get the same attention on our films that the big blockbusters have. It's always a struggle. It doesn't get any easier, but I feel like it's the point. It's the point of what we do," said Robbins.
