When you follow a movie like "Saving Private Ryan" -- which is trying to make a statement about war, and does it partly by piling on the atrocities -- does it make it more difficult to direct a World War II film that's more in the adventure-movie vein of "The Great Escape" or "The Dirty Dozen"?

Certain people were pissed off, and let us know in some negative reviews, because they came wanting to see "Das Boot" meets "Saving Private Ryan." And that's not what this movie is. I conceived this movie well before "Saving Private Ryan" -- I was inspired by "The Great Escape" and pictures like that. I remember going to see an early screening of "Saving Private Ryan" and walking out thinking, "Can I make this movie now?" Because "Private Ryan" did change the rules.

The answer I got came from the submarine veterans themselves. It came in two ways. One was finding out that, every year, there's a convention of World War II submarine veterans. And they all come: Guys show up with oxygen tubes going up the nose, wheeling oxygen tanks behind them. They will not be kept away. And this is quite in contrast to infantry veterans, many of whom don't want to attend that kind of event, and don't even want to talk about what it was like in the infantry with their own families -- it was horrific and they want it left behind.

So why are submariners so different? The answer lies in the nature of what they did. If you take infantry combat and you depict it authentically on-screen, you get the first 20 minutes of "Private Ryan." And all you can do as a human being is go, "My God, to what depths has humanity sunk?" Take submarine combat and depict it authentically on-screen, as I believe we've done, and the audience goes, "Wow, that's amazing, I can't believe people did that stuff." But it's not bloody, in-your-face stuff. Submarining in World War II was really the dawn of push-button warfare. You pressed a button and launched a torpedo against the enemy a half-mile away.

When I realized there are people who get together every year to celebrate this kind of thing, I sat down with a lot of them and told them the story of the movie. I said, "This is going to be a sea yarn; here it is." And they all had the same reaction, which was, first, that it was a great sea yarn and, second, that if we got the details of the submarining right, they could show their grandkids what they did. My goal was to re-create their visceral experience of being in a submarine and wrap it inside of this adventure.

The reviews of the finished film that count to me the most have been from the veterans who have watched it. It brings back memories for them: in the details of how the men behave, and the handling of technology, and the relationships of the men and the officers. We had an admiral who was the commander of one of our large fleets crying at the end of the movie.

What was the fictional starting point of the yarn? Was it the idea of Americans disguising one of their old subs as a U-boat, and using it as a Trojan horse [to steal the Germans' secret coding device, the Enigma]?

This came a little ass-backwards, in the sense that I wanted to make a World War II submarine movie first. I did a ton of research. Then I trimmed down to the coolest stuff, taken from the pages of history but reading like it was from the pages of a screenplay -- all about the Battle of the Atlantic and secret codes and crazy plans to defeat the enemy. But I still needed a narrative to weave it together.

The submarine service is called the "silent service" for a reason; it's usually involved in stealth operations. Reading about them kind of gave me the idea for the Trojan horse concept, but it was probably more drawn from the Israeli raid on Entebbe [Uganda], where the Israelis disguised a limo as Idi Amin's limo and landed it at the end of an airstrip in the middle of the night, and drove right into the belly of the beast and got the drop on him that way.

In fact, the British at one point did rebuild a German bomber they had shot down and recruited a team of commandos to man it, all of whom spoke perfect German. The idea was to have them pretend that it was a German fighter plane. The plan was that after the next German raid over Britain, the commandos' plane would start to return with the retreating German bombers. Then it would deliberately crash into the ocean near a German surface ship, so that the commandos would be pulled aboard -- because the Germans would think these were downed German aviators. Once aboard, the commandos would pull out their weapons, shoot the crew and steal the Enigma device.

That plan was authored by a young British intelligence officer named Ian Fleming, who went on to another career. World War II is full of these crazy schemes. The British rebuilt the bomber and recruited the team of commandos (it was right out of the movies -- one of these guys had been left at the altar two weeks before by his bride, literally left at the altar), but they never pulled off the mission. I don't think they could find the right situation.

All your research pays off. Even if we in the audience can't understand exactly what's happening to the sub when a screw pops or a valve is closed, you succeed in making us believe that it's happening the right way.

Exactly. Audiences are smart; they intuit that stuff. You can strip out some of the dialogue alone and it'll read like a copy of Chilton's auto repair manual. But the audience loves that the movie doesn't stop to talk down to them; they can figure it out. It pulls you into the experience, and doesn't dumb anything down.

But there are a couple of narrative gaps that bothered me. I couldn't tell where we lost Jon Bon Jovi's character [McConaughey's best Navy buddy] and David Keith's [the Marine major who trains the submariners for the boarding party].

With Jon Bon Jovi, I made the only true compromise that I had to make to get a PG-13 rating. That was eliminating a shot of his head being decapitated. You do see a quick shot of his death, but it's not a decapitation. I didn't think it violated the integrity of the film to change a decapitation to the violent end of him being hit by some object. And the difference between a PG-13 and an R in this movie is huge in terms of the audience it can reach.

As for David Keith, I did shoot his death and it didn't work. It was an effect that was a little cheesy, and it wasn't possible to redo it. There were 75 other characters dying at the same time, so I thought people would intuit that he died, too. I had no problem with that point when I tested the movie. All I can say is, I thought I had my bases covered. What I take as a good sign is that people cared enough to wonder what happened.

For people who say they don't care about the characters but [wonder] what happened to David Keith, or for people who say that the film is thrilling and suspenseful but they didn't care about the characters, I say, "You know what? It wouldn't be thrilling or suspenseful if you didn't care about the characters."

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