I've always been a movie fan,
particularly military movies.
I think I'd seen every one ever made.
But in Vietnam,
I saw absolutely the best of human nature and absolutely the worst of human nature.
And I thought, what's really missing in Hollywood is an insight, a psychological,
emotional understanding of who we are as professional military people.
And so once I retired from active service,
I decided: You know what, I'm going to go out to Hollywood.
But I had no idea how movies were made.
And I was meeting a lot of resistance.
A friend of mine who had been in Vietnam with me,
he was working for a director by the name of Tobe Hooper.
He said, "Look, Tobe has got a problem with this story that he's doing.
It's called "Invaders From Mars."
In this version, the Marines swoop in and kill the Martians.
We'll tell Tobe that you're going to bring in the Marines
and stage the action, and he won't have to worry about it."
And I said, "I can go down to Long Beach and there's a whole unit of Reserve Marines,
and maybe I can talk them into coming up, and we'll just use them
as the attacking force and they'll know what to do."
So I walked out of there with a job.
I began to develop the theory of training actors,
and I was creating this entity which we called Warriors Inc.
It is full-immersion, experiential-based training.
I believe sincerely and firmly that the basic warrior spirit
is essentially the same.
A soldier will act the same way if he's part of a 256-man
Macedonian phalanx as he will if he's a guy carrying an M-4 in Fallujah.
The mentality, the heart, the emotions are the same.
I found that if I kept that in mind and meticulously did my research,
then I would be ready to train any outfit,
any period, any service, and it's proved to be true.
I had learned at this point to read Daily Variety
and all of the trade publications, and I was paging through one day in 1985
and I saw this little notice that a relatively unknown writer-director
by the name of Oliver Stone
was going to do a movie
based on his own experiences as a combat infantryman in Vietnam.
And I said, "Oh, damn, there it is.
If I can find this guy, I might just be able to sell this new advanced program."
I was able to get a few minutes and I went through my best
two-minute pitch, and he said, "Yeah, yeah, there's something to that."
He said, "OK, I'm going to give you three weeks in the Philippines,
and when they come down out of your training, they damn well better be you and me
when we were 19 years old." And I said, "I got it. I got my mission."
He gave me
a wonderful bunch of actors — Charlie Sheen, Forest Whitaker, Johnny Depp,
Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe — and I made them
live the life that we lived as young combat infantrymen in Vietnam.
I pulled no punches.
They would sleep maybe two hours a night if they didn't piss me off that day,
maybe two meals a day — once again, unless they pissed me off, and then they only got one.
And we had arranged with Oliver
that last day of training would be the first day of filming
because I don't want to give them a night in a hotel and lose it.
And I knew we had something special here
because the performances were just gut-wrenching.
They understood what the script was telling them to do,
not just because they memorized the words: They understood the emotions involved in this.
I've asked everybody what picture is going to win,
and everybody says "Platoon."
I hope so.
I hope you're right.
We brought that little $5 million film home and promptly
blew everything else off the stage, and we won four Academy Awards.
And after that, all of those people who told me I was nuts for trying to do
this sort of thing, suddenly the phone was ringing off the wall.
I'm all right.
I'm all right. Am I all right?
Yeah.
I worked with Dale on "Band of Brothers," where he was the technical military adviser.
He also played Colonel Sink.
You are hereby transferred out of my regiment.
The boot camp was a very important part of the success of "Band of Brothers."
If you're going to play the part right, you need to know what it feels like.
There was a lot of learning to deal with stress, learning to deal with chaos,
a lot of mind games,
a lot of just hands-on practice with weapons training, how you take care
of your gear so that it carries on your body in a certain way,
squad-based tactics — it's got to become second nature.
And then that allows you to have a whole layer where now
you can think about whatever else you need to think about in the scene.
And your body knows what it's doing and is doing it, and you see the difference.
Wander the woods like Hansel and Gretel calling his name.
He's bound to hear us sooner or later. Ryan!
Also, getting to work with a guy like Spielberg,
who's an absolutely brilliant filmmaker, on something like "Saving Private Ryan"
is a very special thing. And I developed a real friendship with Tom
Hanks at that point.
Dale Dye spoke to us — in a driving rain, by the way —
and we were standing out, you know,
in this little clearing and rain is coming down and we're all wet.
And he's talking to us about the reason that we're there, about
not just, not just accurately portraying these, these men who did this,
but honorably portraying them and what they went through.
And from that moment on, we knew exactly why we were there.
Warriors Inc. at this point includes me as the commanding officer,
my friend Lt. Mike Stokey, the executive officer, and Julia
as the chief financial and chief planning officer.
Julia and I met on "Starship Troopers."
I was cast as a performer in "Starship Troopers,"
and that was the first time that he brought women to his boot camp.
And I was fascinated by what he was putting together.
So it was really neat,
because we started our relationship with professional respect
and then moved into best friends and then fell in love.
Warriors Inc. has done more than 50 productions in film and television.
One of the things that we
really want to do is to educate civilians on what this means.
That allows them to understand the veterans in their lives better
and gives veterans a better shot at being understood.
The potential audience has grown exponentially for military films.
The presumption was the audience doesn't give a damn.
The audience does give a damn.
You underestimate the audience.
And if you do that, you do it at your peril.
It doesn't mean you have to do a documentary.
It simply means that when you're in the process of telling a story,
get the details right.
I think that's just a matter of respect.
If you're going to have the audacity to tell a story about war,
you want to be able at the end of it
to look to the veterans and you want them to feel seen.
We owe that to our brothers and sisters.
It's vital because if we don't adhere to that accuracy,
then their story either gets shabbily told, only partially told, or never told.
And that's a disservice
I will not allow.