Peter Sarsgaard on the buzz surrounding “Jarhead:” “People keep asking me if it’s an anti-war movie, and I’m like, name one good pro-war movie. I want to see that.” How about “The Green Berets?” Sarsgaard says, “I watched that recently and John Wayne takes a M-16 and smacks it against a tree and breaks it in half. So ‘The Green Berets’ is about that level of reality. Because if you ever held an M-16, you know the tree is going to break before the M-16 does. And he’s just like, ‘Damn.’
Our movie, in contrast, is instead of deciding whether or not this war or that war is wrong or ok, it’s more like, ‘Alright, here’s a job that is the hardest job on the planet. You’ve got to learn to kill people in a way that is with discipline and is professional and not personal.’ And that is the nature of being a warrior. There’s no other way to do it.
You can argue whether or not there should ever be a war, but certainly most people would say World War II was justified. This is a job that people do. And it has the hardest training, period. Everybody knows about boot camp. The reason they do that is both to prepare you in your body and your mind. And then when you get there, you’re ready to do this thing. That’s why they talk the way they talk, because you don’t want to be like, ‘So, I’m going to go over there and pop that guy in the a**, and I’ll be back in a minute.’ You go, ‘Yes, sir. I’m going to do the thing.’ It’s a mission. You do it professionally and you do it exactly, and you shoot ‘em through the head.
But what happens when you get over there and you’re not fighting? You’re sitting there in the desert and you gotta clean the shitter and then you gotta clean the Humvee and you’ve been there for a couple of months and you’re missing your girlfriend and stuff, and you’ve gone through this training where you’re ready to kill and you’re not killing and you might have to kill tomorrow or they might drop chemical [weapons]. What happens to your mind? And so it’s really a movie that, I think, honors Marines by showing how difficult it is to be a Marine. So I think that that’s kind of the genius part of the movie.
Usually people when they go to make movies like this, it’s partisan. To me, that’s not a partisan thing. That’s like if those guys are going over there, you can get behind the idea that they gotta do it well, and you can understand when they start f***ing up, I think, in this movie.”
Peter Sarsgaard on training for “Jarhead:” “Boot camp was not that long, but I’d say actually doing the movie was the hard part. We shot what’s called French Hours, which means we didn’t stop for lunch. We shot hand-held, so you just go on to the next scene and they start filming it. There’s no go-back-to-your-trailer time. And you start to just feel…not that you’re life is on the line – that’s the part that’s different – but you feel what the 60 lb. backpack feels like.
You’ve got the flack jacket on, you’ve got your chemical stuff on, you know – Mach 3. And it’s got charcoal in it. And then you’ve got your stuff on underneath that. You’ve got a 15 lb. rifle and it’s 90 degrees out because we’re in Mexico. And you’re standing there and you start to figure out ways to lie down, just in between takes while they reload. We looked like turtles. We would get down like this and put our helmet like that, and there’s all these pictures of us going like this. And then they go, ‘Alright, we’re going again,’ and you stand back up.
Just carrying this s**t, not even with live bullets, just carrying the s**t and standing there is not easy. So that, on top of the discipline and all the other stuff, you start to really have a lot of respect for what these guys do, even if they do f**k up. You start to understand why they f**k up, because it’s a task that I’m sure is not humanly possible to do perfectly.”
