Jarhead

Hello, my name is Sam Mendes, and you have made the fateful decision

to press the Director's Commentary button on your DVD

and now I'm going to bore you stupid with observations about this movie

over the next hour and 53 minutes.

A story.

We had various ways of starting this movie

and I think maybe in some of the deleted scenes you're going to see this.

We had a scene, upfront of the movie, featuring Sam Rockwell,

that fine actor, playing a kind of composite figure

of Swoff's uncle and a recruiter.

I felt we needed something to introduce a comic tone at the beginning of the film

and something that was telling us

that Swoff's father and uncle had fought in Vietnam.

But, at the end of the day, it felt like it was from a different movie.

It felt like the beginning of almost a Coen brothers movie

and I think you'll feel that when you see it in the deleted scenes.

And on the last day of principal photography

I did a voiceover session with Jake Gyllenhaal

and we recorded sections from the book that weren't in the script.

And one of those was this quote about the Marine and his rifle,

and that became the beginning of the film.

Then we jump right into boot camp here, which you see with Scott MacDonald.

And this piece of dialog that you're watching right now

is entirely an improvisation.

We did about 20, 25 set-ups on the first day. This was the first day of the shoot.

And we had an hour left at the end of the day

and I said, "Let's go back to that shot and just improvise."

And because we had rehearsed for four weeks

and Scott MacDonald had channeled the drill instructor,

he was able to just go off like this.

We had a drill instructor on set.

And we had a lot of Marine advisers on this movie.

He was very good at preparing Scott

to play a series of mind-fuck games in which there is no correct answer,

which seems to me the great art of the drill instructor.

And that's how this dialog arrived.

It was shortly after meeting Drill Instructor Fitch

that I realized that joining the Marine Corps

might have been a bad decision.

The book, by Tony Swofford, features boot camp very briefly.

There are lots of sections in the book which is very impressionistic

which we dropped from the screenplay.

And we decided very early on to go to this boot camp.

And, of course for me, it was very difficult to get out of my mind

the memories of PU“ Meta Jacket,

which is Kubrick's masterpiece about boot camp, at least in part.

And whatever you do to this white room with the yellow lines,

it's very difficult to get that out of your mind.

But we went for something a little bit more hand-held, a little looser,

and, at the end of the day, boot camp is boot camp

and there's nothing you can do to change the way it looks.

Kubrick didn't invent it, it was invented by the Marines.

And when you go in there to those barracks it looks exactly the same.

One of the reasons why we took out that section

with Sam Rockwell at the beginning is boot camp turned out to be quite funny,

in and of itself, which it wasn't necessarily in the script.

And then we jump with Swoff

into the bus on the way to the barracks at Camp Pendleton,

in 1989.

This is the only time we use a caption that has a specific date on it.

A bed was a rack. A wall was a bulkhead.

I felt very much like I wanted to be very accurate with the period.

But at the same time, I didn't want to keep reminding people that it was in the past

because there are many things that are

direct parallels with the present day,

and that doesn't mean just about the war,

but about the way in which Marines are trained

and the places in which they are trained.

This, as is the case with many scenes in the movie,

was a much longer scene when he steps off the bus.

We originally had Jamie Foxx's first appearance in this scene

with his face painted with green paint, looking rather scary,

and it was the first moment they had eye-to-eye contact.

But, in the end, it became part of a sequence

that was a very swift introduction of Swoff into the world of the Marines.

And just another feature of the speed at which

people are supposed to acclimatize to it

and the, frankly, disinterest they have in the notion of the individual

within this incredible and selfless institution.

You know, there's a reason why everyone looks the same

has the same haircut, and there are very few insignias on uniforms.

And that is because in the psychology of the Marine Corps

everyone is sewing something bigger than themselves.

And this is Swoff arriving in the barracks

which is a scene very vividly described in the book

in which they pretend to brand him

and humiliate him on his first day.

And there was something very deliberate about the way I shot this.

I wanted them collected at the end of the barracks

doing something that was slightly mysterious and quite bizarre,

like a bunch of animals.

And Swoff walking into this very particular and very charged atmosphere.

And then to introduce Troy, Peter Sarsgaard's character.

The character who is going to be his friend and his mentor

throughout the movie, in this very offhand way.

Almost thrown away.

And introduce him as really quite an unpleasant and violent figure,

who, in this case, binds his hands with duct tape,

and, in fact, begins the fight straight out of the gate.

Kind of seems to give the order for it to happen.

Hey, boys! Fresh fucking meat!

- What kind of meat? - We don't want you!

I wanted to establish that sense of status

and that sense of slight distance,

that he was the person who started it but wasn't in the middle of it.

Because I felt that, that was going to be important later on

to give him that status.

You know, these guys were pretty amazing. These are stunt guys.

And I can honestly say, that in this scene, Jake got the shit beaten out of him

over and over again. He was pretty bruised for the next two weeks.

Cuts on his head and, you know, bruises on his arms and legs,

and, you know, I was worried he... We cracked a rib at one point.

But Jake was very concerned throughout to push himself to the limit.

And he was willing to go there

and I think without that, the performance wouldn't be half as good as I feel it is.

Oh, fuck.

This was a scene I re-shot

three days after! shot it, which is rare.

And it's rare to re-shoot something so fast

but it was a much longer scene and I felt,

when I watched it back in dailies, that Troy talked far too much in the scene

and that lost his mystery.

And was also trying too hard to be Swoff's friend.

Little fuck-fuck trick we play on the new guys.

Nice.

You want a brand, you gotta earn it.

I wanted their friendship to be unexpected and for it to creep up on us.

And I wanted him to remain a mysterious and distant character.

I originally had three scenes here,

all showing how little Swoff suddenly wanted to be in the Marine Corps

and how big a mistake he felt he'd made.

And it all came down to this one scene with the nurse, in the end.

...that stomach flu, Swofford?

I can't seem to shake it.

That's all right. Not everyone's cut out for the Marines.

But for me, there was nowhere else. That was the truth.

After all, I was made in a war.

And then we cut into these flashbacks which are all shot on Super 16,

just to give it the feel of a home movie, of a series of recollections.

Quite stylized, obviously, but I wanted this kind of...

This incredibly swift travelogue through his past life.

And I wanted to get the feeling of it as a memory, without being that specific.

And that's why we shot it on Super 16, like a home movie.

It was originally intended for earlier in the film.

But in the end, Walter Murch, the editor, and I!

decided it would be better off going in the toilet, kind of as a reverie

out of which he is woken up in a second by Staff Sergeant Sykes,

Jamie Foxx's character, who is his future.

And everything that will happen from now on

comes from this one conversation.

And from now on his life will change

and he will have a focus, which is STA,

and that's the Surveillance and Target Acquisition.

Which is this elite sniper platoon that Jamie Foxx's character heads up.

What the fuck? You're sick?

And inside that flashback, you'll find a lot of information about Swoff's life

that goes by very, very quickly

but that beds down, I hope, quite quickly, too,

about the fact, that frankly, there was nowhere else for him to go.

He didn't feel at home when he was at home.

You can see the dog tags around his father's neck at breakfast,

you see the girlfriend he's leaving behind, you see that he's given her

his most treasured possession, which is his USMC T-shirt.

And all of those things are buried very quickly

as well as the fact that he's reading Camus

and that he wants to go to college, or was thinking about going to college.

A fact that's picked up here

when Sykes, Jamie's character, picks up that copy of The Stranger

and treats it as if it's some strange Sanskrit text

that only the chosen few can understand.

Something that again, as was the case often in this movie,

was an improvisation.

And something that, you know, came to us because we had rehearsed a lot,

and the actors were very confident with each other,

very certain of what the structure of the scene was.

So, like good jazz musicians, they could improvise over the top

of what was a very simple, but certain rhythm.

A little, for small holiday concerts and festivals.

Good. You ain't gotta be Chuck Mangione.

All I need is a bugler.

Somebody to play taps, reveille, battle march...

Jake's lines about a few "holiday concerts and festivals," that's an improvisation.

Jamie throwing the book in the bin,

astonishingly, at the end, is an improvisation.

Can I get my book?

There's 60 of you. I only need eight.

Here's a scene that we took from the book

and we adapted and enlarged.

In the book the Staff Sergeant doesn't make him play the bugle with his mouth,

but says he could do, if he wanted,

and he hasn't done it to avoid him being humiliated.

But, Bill Broyles, the wonderful screenwriter,

who is himself 3 Vietnam vet and an ex-Marine,

and I just thought it was too good an opportunity for a great scene

to force him to play reveille with his mouth.

Okay, Swofford, play reveille.

I don't have a bugle, Staff Sergeant.

- You don't have a what? - I don't have a bugle.

Oh, no. No, no. Damn, damn.

You better play with your mouth.