On paper Rod Lurie would seem the ideal director to be helming "The Outpost," a new movie adapted from CNN anchor Jake Tappert's book about of the Battle of Kamdesh on Oct. 3, 2009.
Approximately 400 Afghani insurgents attacked Combat Outpost Keating, near the border with Pakistan. The attack cost eight Americans their lives. Two soldiers, Staff Sgt. Clinton Romesha and Sgt. Ty Carter, received Medals of Honor for their courage under fire, and several of their fellow survivors received similar commendations.
Lurie is a graduate from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and has served as artillery officer.
"When I graduated from West Point in 1984, I went to Germany to the air defense artillery, and not only that, but I was in the peacetime army, so I never served in any kind of combat" Lurie says from Los Angeles. "So the experiences of the people in the GWOT (Global War on Terror) are completely different from anything that I had experienced, including the weapons that they're with. I had M16s. They have M4s. And a lot of the vernacular in over 30 plus years, so much had changed, that I needed to have on the set with me military experts that could properly guide me through all this. People said, 'We're going to hire the West Pointer, he's going to come on. He's going to know his s*. He's going to know absolutely everything.'
"It's better than having a civilian director, but the truth is I needed a lot of help."
If there was one thing Lurie did understand without much assistance, it was how soldiers behave. While the valor of soldiers who fought at the now-defunct COP Keating is unquestioned, the troops in his movie squabble and have many of the same foibles civilians have. One later-decorated soldier begins the film almost destroying his career with his hashish habit.
"Ty Carter (Caleb Landry Jones) is not a well-liked dude," explains Lurie. "He's a little obnoxious. He's a little full of himself. He's a little bit separated from everybody else. We're not portraying a Clint Eastwood-like hero in this film at all. In fact, when you look at other movies in this genre, all of them true stories -- 'American Sniper,' 'Lone Survivor,' '12 Strong,' even 'Zero Dark Thirty,' these are all the Navy SEALs, the special forces. They're the Rangers. They're not regular grunts, and that's what these guys were. They were just the grunts on the ground over there. They just wanted to get through this f mess and get home. The didn't make movies about these guys until 'The Outpost.'"
Logistical Hurdles
Ironically, Clint Eastwood's son Scott helped Lurie make a more down-to-earth film by playing Romesha. In addition to the other challenges of playing a real-life war hero, Eastwood performed despite having an injured ankle.
"'Busted' is a nice way to put it," Lurie says. "He completely broke his ankle. It was disastrous at first. We found out about six weeks before shooting, and this takes months to recover from, not weeks. It almost killed the movie. I had to convince the insurance company that not only could Scott do it, but that I had a game plan for how to do it, which is completely reschedule the film. It's not the kind of thing you want to do with this tight a schedule and this tight of budget, but we had no choice, really. I had to shoot his standing scenes first, followed by his panting scenes, followed by taking two or three step scenes. Then I gave him time off, and in the last two weeks we did Scott's most physical work."
If the physical conditions in Bulgarian mountains subbing for Nuristan (the region of Afghanistan that inspired Rudyard Kipling's 'The Man Who Would Be King') were tough on Lurie and his star, the modest expenditures ended up making the battle look more realistic and terrifying. Lurie says he consulted with Ridley Scott about the making of his 'Black Hawk Down,' and that not having computer generated visuals ended up helping his own film.
"We didn't have the money to make a big CGI film," he says. "We also didn't have the money to be a big special effects film, so we really had to do the best that we could.
"We had to be extraordinarily prepared, but our special effects people were just literally the best that I've ever worked with. Most of the explosions and most of the bullets flying, that's real. That also affects performance to a great degree. It immerses the actor in a way that he normally would not be. There are times we have explosions going on, and the actors react to those explosions by turning their heads. If you're running full speed ahead, and you hear a massive rumble, you will turn around for a spit second. Too often in many war films that I see, many people run past explosions and bullets and don't even know they exist."
He pauses, and adds: "In some cases, if I'm being very frank, there is a little bit of danger in that these explosions set off stones from the ground, and its uncomfortable and a little scary if it gets into people's eyes. They're experiencing enough discomfort to make it seem very real on screen."
No One Trick Pony
Lurie's military career has influenced his other movies like "The Last Castle," where Robert Redford leads a revolt in military prison. While there is some action in that film and in his remake of Sam Peckinpah's "Straw Dogs," most of Lurie's films and TV series like "The Contender" and "Commander-in-Chief" tend to be dialogue heavy. Having also worked as a journalist and a critic before becoming a full-time filmmaker, he's clearly at home with words as well as things that go boom.
"Even 'The Last Castle' was a very dialogue-heavy film, and that was an action movie. I've had a lot of action in my movies like 'The Last Castle' and 'Straw Dogs' and in my TV series and even in the National Geographic TV-movie I made on the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan. There was a lot of physicality, and that's something I'm particularly adept at. It's a challenge, and not one I'm unaccustomed to."
His career as a reporter helped inform a movie that has reflected a personal nightmare for me and other journalists. In 'Resurrecting the Champ,' Josh Hartnett learns that his hot scoop is bogus.
"I was a journalist for much of my career, and I was an investigative journalist," he says. "There were a couple of times where people were outright lying to me. Once or twice, I got caught with my pants down, and I got fooled by people, so when I made that film I was actually relating to events that hurt me, and I think most investigative reporters have been been lied to in articles that they are writing. Josh Hartnett's character in the way that he deals with it, it ends up being rather virtuous in the end in a way that I wish I might have behaved."