Real life super heroes.
The big movie opening this week is “Act of Valor,” the story of a Navy SEAL team starring actual Navy SEALs. I don’t know if there’s ever been anything quite like this in Hollywood before. There have been a few war heroes who starred in movies (Audie Murphy, Harold Russell) , but that was when they were out of the service; these SEALs were on active duty when the movie was being made, and were heavily involved in putting together the story and details.
The movie was directed by the Bandito Brothers, aka Scott Waugh and Mike “Mouse” McCoy. ComingSoon has an extensive interview with them where they give some background on how they got the movie made and what it was like to work with this unique group of actors. Here are a few quotes to get you started:
CS: How did you go about casting the SEALS? Were they people who were available for the time you needed? How did it work?
Scott Waugh: You know, they’re active duty, so they are either coming on workouts for deployments or coming back from deployments, and we were originally talking to all the operators. The ones that are in the film were really ones we just gravitated towards, just because they were very confident men, they had multiple deployments and they were very secure within themselves of who they were. We just felt once we had the idea to just use the real guys, at least these eight guys we met are awesome, let’s see if we can get them to be in the movie. When we approached them, all eight turned us down. They said, “No, we’re not actors, we’re not Hollywood guys. We’re Navy SEALs, we have a job to do.”
McCoy:Then eventually they realized that the film was going to be crafted with their own vision in mind and it was going to be authentic and true to the brotherhood, and they were going to have a hand in it. It was really important to know not only everything that you see actually happened to a SEAL in the movie, an act of valor that’s happened, but all the operational planning was done by the SEALs as well, so every big action scene was architected by the SEALS as it would really go down, so it’s a legit look at their world.
CS: Did you have to then go back and work on the script around what you filmed to tie everything together?
Waugh: Sometimes we would, yeah.
McCoy: Yeah, we would just present a story point or a context that we would want to connect with and they would go ahead and write the op, and then on the day, every day, we’d rewrite dialogue with them as it would be for that particular scene. They’d be like, “No, dude, we wouldn’t say that right now,” or “We wouldn’t say anything right now.”
Waugh:Yeah what we did is once we wrote the screenplay, there was really a skeleton plotpoint that we knew would be a great story arc through the film, but how we got from Point A to Z, we would really craft with the SEALs. We said, “Hey, plotwise, we need to get to here. How you want to get to there is… how would you get to that boat that’s floating in the middle of the South Pacific?” “Okay, we would do this, this and this.” “Wow, can we be a part of that? Can we film that?” “Yes.” “Awesome, let’s go do that.”
Read the rest here at ComingSoon. It will be interesting to see the box office for this one.
