Director Sam Mendes on what drew him to Jarhead:
“It’s the idea that you train a huge group of men to go to war, and then what happens when you take away the war, what happens during that period of time? They turned in on themselves and each other. They create their own wars, whether it be a scorpion fight or a game of football with the gas masks on, and all the crazy things that go on. But it was the details in the story and in Anthony Swofford’s book that really grabbed me, because they seemed so unusual. All the war literature that I had read had been about combat, and here was a story about there being no combat–even though you’re trained to kill. These guys were observers of huge events, but they were never actual participants on some level. So that’s what fascinated me about it and it was all those things that made me want to do it in the first place rather than things that I thought were problems.”
Jake Gyllenhaal on awaiting combat that may never come:
“I think a soldier’s mind is as great of an enemy as the enemy in the field, bombs or bullets. When you use these techniques and you teach them, and then the soldiers are not allowed to express that, their mind is confused by that. And the boredom sets in, when you realize we’ve been here for a 122 days and we’ve been sitting in the same tent and I’ve done a little bit too much masturbating. I think that it’s more about the soldier’s mind. Sergeant Major [James] Dever, our military advisor, would say ‘Smooth is best, smooth is best.’ He would say it all the time, because you always rush. We’d be putting together our rifles, cleaning them and putting them back together, and cleaning them and putting them back together, and I would always be like ‘I have to really get fast.’ And he came up to me and put his hand on my shoulder and said ‘Smooth is best, smooth is best.’ It’s not about letting your mind get caught up in all of it. As soon as you’re clear, then you’ll get it right, when you’re not over-thinking it. But when you’re given the time to think, I think it probably can be just as dangerous of an enemy.”
Jamie Foxx on his character’s simple survival skills:
“Staff Sergeant Siek was trying to explain to them simplicity. He was making it simple for them: ‘This is what you do. If you don’t do this you will get killed.’ A lot of times, since we’re in Hollywood, we drink cappuccinos and we go to brunch and we think a lot. A lot of these guys are from places where they don’t think a whole lot. My friends when they come up from Texas, they go, ‘Man, why is there all this talking? Y’all debating everything. Why don’t you guys be quiet?’ So that’s what was in this movie. Being in the military is a simple life, and it just happens that war breaks out and that complicates it a little bit, but it’s a simple way of thinking that Staff Sergeant Siek was trying to get across.”
Peter Sarsgaard on the intangible casualties of war:
“What’s interesting about the movie is that these guys get all pumped up to kill, and then they go and just sit there. You don’t ever think that’s a casualty of war, too. You think casualty is watching your friend get shot—it certainly is. Or shooting someone else–it certainly is. But this movie says ‘All right, let’s assume you didn’t see any combat. It will still change your life forever and in some ways you might not be too happy about.’ It opened my eyes to that.”
Sam Mendes on finding the right leading man:
“One of the things that I was worried about with Jake is that we all know him, and he’s soft and a puppy and doey-eyed and sensitive and floppy-haired. And this was a tough young Marine who was, yes, innocent and needed to be accessible, but he also needed to be angry, frustrated, difficult, dark and doubting and all sorts of other things, and I’d never seen him do that before. He called me and said, ‘I will literally do anything that I need to do to play this part. I want it to so much.’ I know that it sounds crazy–and I’m probably launching a whole series of midnight phone calls to me when an actor wants to play a role–but it does make a huge difference to a director to know that an actor is willing to go the distance and to know that they want this part more than anything in the world and that they’re willing to push themselves to the limit.”
Jake Gyllenhaal on growing up as an actor on the film:
“I think Sam ushered me into not pretending to be something that I wasn’t, or putting on something that I thought I should be. It was just purely like, ‘Oh, you’re doing that? That’s fine, but I see maybe there’s more there.’ Many, many scenes he would say to me ‘How do you want to do this scene? We could shoot your coverage first, or we could shoot something else, we could do their coverage first, we’d come back, whatever–how are you feeling, what are you actually feeling?’ Not ‘I’m gonna force him into my agenda.’ And in doing that, it just forced me to see me for who I was. I wasn’t putting on anything for him or anyone else. That made me grow up immediately. And on top of all that, there was the physical stuff, of just pushing my body to a limit where it had never been pushed before.”
Sam Mendes:
“He pushed himself to the limit. And he tipped over the limit a couple of times, too. There was a kind of group insanity that descended on everyone in the desert because that’s all it does to people. He pushed himself to the limit and to the point where I think that he forgot that he was acting a lot of times. I think that there are times there when he loses self-consciousness. I wasn’t even aware he was doing it half of the time. He just went with it. When he had to threaten Fergus with the gun, he lost his mind and it’s on camera. He lost it, and on that day he actually turns to the other guy and says, ‘Well, shoot me then!’ He puts the barrel in his mouth and knocked his front tooth out, because he was so completely out of control. He went off-camera and there was blood coming out of his mouth, and I was on the verge of saying cut, but he walked straight back on again and carried on, because he just wanted to see what would happen. Without wanting to encourage lunatics, you can see that on camera, there’s a real energy. And so what happened was that something in Jake changed in the course of the film, and I think that we captured it on film a little bit. Watch his face at the beginning of the film: he looks 11 years old. And we shot the film almost in sequence, and he really went from being a boy to being a man, and it happened during the shooting of the movie.”
Jake Gyllenhaal:
“I had told Sam before we started ‘I’ll throw up in the sand for you, I’m gonna do anything I can for you,’ but I never thought I would chip off my tooth for him… I remember I looked down, and I saw that my tooth had like come off, I had it in like my hand, and I thought first, ‘Oh, I could stop this scene, or I could keep going–and I should probably keep going.’ And Sam told me before we did the take ‘Think about boot camp in this take,’ and so for some reason, somewhere, I just started hitting [Brian Geraghty]. I just got so angry that he had chipped my tooth. And I just started hitting him, and we didn’t talk for like a month actually after that. Yeah, we didn’t talk for a while, Brian and I. And after that scene, Sam said we need to make a scene where he apologizes to him, where he says he’s sorry, because we didn’t see that.”
Peter Sarsgaard on his own over-the-edge experience:
“I was trying to get fit quickly so I wasn’t drinking. I got fit enough, and when were in Mexico there was a lot of stress. I decided one night to start drinking again. I had a couple of margaritas. Jake started drinking beer at that point. I had some margaritas– maybe only two or three. We were staying at this not very nice hotel that had a fountain in the middle of the courtyard and it looked like it could be a pool, but it wasn’t actually a swimming pool. He said I finished my margarita and put it down. He was in mid-conservation with me and I just walked over to the edge of the pool and–with all my clothes on–walked into the pool and went under water for a little bit and then came up and walked into my room totally wet. He said he was in the middle of talking to me. So that actually happened. I realized I sort of blocked it out.”
[PAGEBREAK]Jamie Foxx on winning the Best Actor Oscar while acting a supporting role in Jarhead:
“At the time I didn’t really know what ‘Ray’ was going to do. No one knew what it was going to do, and it was like, ‘We’ve got to get cracking. We’ve got to get moving.’ We had to get our hustle, and this is a great hustle. It’s meat on the bone. It’s not contrived. It doesn’t look like I went to go and get all the money after the Oscars and do something like ‘Booty Call 2’ or something like that. I don’t want it to look like ‘Okay. I’m Johnny Carson now.’ I’ve always enjoyed being Ed McMahon. Ed McMahon has always had the coolest spot, and what I mean by that is: Will Smith is Johnny Carson, Tom Cruise is Johnny Carson. I’m over here laughing [like Ed], and it’s been great. Winning the Oscar is kind of like Ed McMahon when he got ‘Star Search.’”
Sam Mendes on the film’s potent use of Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks”:
“We wanted something that was now to sell the movie that felt contemporary. It’s just great music. There’s no two ways about it. To find a bit of music that’s that gripping–It’s unbelievable. It’s like he could have written it for us even though he didn’t. Weirdly when we were in preproduction I said to Jamie, ‘Who should I be listening to?’ He said, ‘Oh, this is my friend Kanye West’ and he bought me the album.”
Peter Sarsgaard on working with Jake, who’s his girlfriend Maggie‘s brother:
“You know it was the greatest thing that ever happened to us. I always tell this story: my aunt once had my uncle landscape her property and they didn’t speak for a year after that. I told Jake that before we started. I said ‘You know, if we’re not careful this could be very bad.’ We went through so many difficult times and then so many good ones. It’s like somehow when you have a hard time together, you’re suddenly so much closer. So one of the most valuable that came out of this movie was that Jake and I got a lot closer.”
Jake Gyllenhaal on the perks of his experience on the film:
“Just being around a lot of people who I really respect and look up to, people like Jamie Foxx and Peter Sarsgaard, who are, in my opinion, really admirable men. And also our military advisors who are, to me, people have seen some really incredible and awful things, and are still kind, caring, really cool people.”
Sam Mendes on getting the details right:
“I felt very much that it was my duty to all the people who fought in Desert Storm to get it right. How many times is this going to be put on film? This is probably going to be it. There aren’t going to probably be many other movies about Desert Shield, Desert Storm. So I felt that I really needed to surround myself with people who had fought in it, a lot of the military advisors–for the first time these guys were all advisors on a war in which they had actually fought.”
Jamie Foxx on appreciating the soldiers’ point of view:
“When you go back to my hometown and you have that soldier’s uniform on you are heralded. You did it: You went and did something for your country. I know that sounds weird, but people still say, ‘God bless America’ in parts of this country. For [the Marines who fought in the Gulf War] that is their Superbowl, that is their Oscar, that is their Stanley Cup–when you come back and said ‘I went out there and I protected you.’ You have to get in there and sit with them and see how it really is.”
Sam Mendes on the movie’s message–or lack thereof:
“All that I hope is that understanding has increased. I think that a mistake would be to say that there’s a message, or that the movie is good for you on some level. A movie is only good for you if it entertains you, if it moves you, if it grips you. It’s not good for you because it has a message to deliver, and if I felt that I had the answer I’d be writing it in a newspaper somewhere. This is a layered film, I hope. It’s non-judgmental. It shows every aspect of the life of being a Marine. And whenever it shows a point of view–for example, when Swoff is standing those burning oil fields and it’s his vision of hell, it counterpoints that by having Jamie Foxx’s character standing there going, ‘Who else gets to see s**t like this?’–reasoning why he wants to be there rather than anywhere else. So for me, it tries to balance out every view point of war. It’s a dangerous game to play, because at the end of the day you have to come down on one side or another as an individual, but that’s up to the audience rather than to me.”
