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Brothers at War

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

 

Interview with Gary Sinise

 

Q: How did you get involved in this production?

Gary Sinise: There was a friend of mine, a mutual friend of the filmmaker Jake Rademacher and mine, who's an actor and former Marine who knew Jake. He had seen the film. His name is Michael Broderick. Michael introduced Jake to me thinking that we would get along and that I would appreciate the movie. So, Jake and I set up a screening, a time where we could see the movie together. I saw the film and very much appreciated it and enjoyed it and just kind of fell in love with that family and wanted to do what I could to help support it.

Q: What did the film do to enlighten you to some aspect of a military family, people involved in the military or in the war that you hadn't thought about or weren't aware before?

Gary Sinise: Well, I don't know. I think what it is, is that having gone on so many bases and visited so many troops and military families, performing for them this showed me what I kind of already knew. It reaffirmed that. It's a look at military families and military life and the Iraq war and the kind of integrity of the people that I know that are serving that I responded to positively and wanted to support that. Because Jake is a brother, he's not journalist, he's not someone looking for a story from the outside, he's inside looking for a story. He's someone who wants to know a little bit more about his brothers and what they do. So he's got a very personal interest and agenda, to just find out about his brothers and what makes them tick and to get to know them a little bit better and see why they're serving and what they're doing over there.

So that's the aspect of it that I liked a lot. It's just a guy who knows very little bit about the military, wanted to be in the service. Jake, years ago, thought or envisioned himself going to West Point and that kind of thing. Well, he didn't have the eyesight and didn't have certain things like that, but his two younger brothers joined. You can tell that there's an awkwardness in the beginning of the film with him and his older brother, when he first gets to Iraq. I don't know if you remember that part, but when he first gets to Iraq he hugs his brother and then his brother immediately sees one of the soldiers who's with him and jumps on that guy as if they're closer to each other than he is to his own brother.

That kind of tells you a little bit about what his mission is, to sort of understand his brothers a little bit more, get closer to them and find out what makes them tick. So it's this particular movie about brothers at war that's set in Iraq and on military bases back here at home with the families that has a personal heart to me. It had a lot of heart and it shows you a lot of very interesting things that I think people aren't that aware of or might have slightly been aware of. Unless you have a personal connection to someone in the military you probably don't know that much about what military families go through or why someone serves or what motivates them to do that and this helps explain that a little bit.

Q: Did you have any creative input into the film at all?

Gary Sinise: When I first saw it, it was cut. It's changed a bit since I saw it. Things have been trimmed and slightly adjusted. John Ondrasik's song at the end was added after a screening that I setup that he attended. John's a friend of mine and after I saw the movie I hosted a screening in Hollywood for a group of people and I brought a bunch of different people together, trying to get some distributors in there and some people that might be able to help the film and one of those people was John Ondrasik. He's a friend and he called me the next day and said, 'I was very moved by that movie.

I went home and…I'm sending you an mp3 of something that I whipped up on piano last  night when I got home.' He wrote the song that's on the end of the movie. He sent it to me. He didn't know what he was going to do with it or anything, but as we moved along and when they finally got distribution at Samuel Goldwyn we went back to John and Jake talked to him about adding the song in the end titles. I made little suggestions about this and that, but Jake was on his way with the film and basically I just said, 'How can I support?' So I started trying to introduce him to people that might be able to help him find a way to a distributor which eventually we did with Samuel Goldwyn.

Q: I had colleagues who didn't want to come today because they felt that the film was pro-war. How do you feel when you comments like that?

Gary Sinise: Had they seen the movie?

Q: I never asked them.

Gary Sinise: Well, it'd be interesting if they'd have that feeling about it. Like I said, it's a personal movie. There's a personal agenda by this filmmaker to understand his brothers a little bit more. That's the heart that I like about the film. We've seen a lot of footage from Iraq. We've seen news clips of bombs going off and all kinds of things going off. There's very little action in the movie until the end of the film when we see which we haven't seen which is an Iraqi patrol out on patrol and they get ambushed by Syrians, basically. The guys that blew those Iraqi's up in the movie, those were Syrians that came across the border. So Syrians came across the border and used a cell phone to blow up some Iraqi's. We don't really see our Marines working hand in hand with the Iraqi's in this way. That's what I see when I go over there.

I talk to these guys all the time. I talk to them about what they're doing. Generally they want to complete the mission. They want to succeed. They want to have the Iraqi's standup and secure their country and come home, having succeeded. Also, having known that what they did over there meant something and left something that might have a chance to last over there and be better. So it's not your usual, typical bombs going off, chaos type stuff going on. It just shows the military families and what they're going through. When Isaac comes home to meet his little baby who was born right after he deployed, or just before he deployed, he knows that she's not going to have a clue as to who he is. That's not an un-typical thing that happens to someone who gets sent off to war. These young families, they have kids and then they go off and then their kids don't know who they are. So it's interesting to watch him get to know her. Now I've seen him with her and she can't get enough of him. He's a great dad, a wonderful leader and his men that are serving with him look up to him.

I see a lot of that in the military when I go out there. There's a lot of integrity that we don't get to see often enough, a lot of very dedicated and committed people that serve. People serve for various reasons. Some of them for very patriotic reasons. They just want to serve their country. Some want to get out of their town and see the world or get an education or get some benefits, whatever it is that they're serving for. But the folks like Isaac, that's a military guy. That's a guy who went to West Point. He wants a career in the military and he's going to serve his country for a long time, until  he's done. Those folks have a high degree of integrity and they're good folks. That's what I'd say.

Q: This movie seems to be made for this time as opposed to the beginning of the war. It seemed appropriate that it was less about the immediate dangers and more about how they function in that environment. Would you agree that this couldn't have been the same movie that was made at the beginning of the war?

Gary Sinise: Well, he happened to be over there at a very dangerous time. This was a time, when he was there in 2005 and 2006 into 2007, and he went back twice, it was a very dangerous and explosive time over there.

Q: But I think the perspective is different from then to now in the film, as it's come together and edited and is put together.

Gary Sinise: Yeah, I'm not sure what the question is.

Q: Do you think it would've been a different film at the beginning than what we see now, edited and put together at this point?

Gary Sinise: It might've been. I don't know. Yeah, maybe it would've been.?That's hard to say. Again, he says in the beginning of the film, I want to know why my brothers are serving. I want to see what they're doing there.' So that's what he goes in search of. It's kind of humorous a little bit at the beginning of the movie, he's kind of bumbling and doesn't know what he's doing over there and he's throwing up on the side of the road and asking for sunscreen, but at the end I think that he learns something not only about his brothers through those that are serving with his brothers, he learns some good things about himself. His brothers are closer because of it. You can see his relationship with his younger brother Joe. Joe doesn't trust him. Joe says basically, 'You don't know. You went over there on one trip.

You don't know what we do over there. You're pretending you're a know it all about what's going on.' So he goes back without his brothers being there to find out more about who his brothers are. That's when he ends up in a crossfire with these terrorists firing at the Iraqi's and he sees the integrity of our Marines over there and what they're doing to try and help those Iraqi troops get better and standup and take care of themselves. He comes back and his brother has a more accepting feeling towards him because he knows that he cared enough about finding out a little bit more about what's going on over there to go and put himself in harm's way. His younger brother gains a lot of respect for him, I think, through that.

Q: It seems like Jake really wanted to be a part of that to experience what his brothers were going through. He finally did get the ambush, as you spoke about with the Syrians attacking the Iraqi patrol. Do you think the film would've been the same sans that scene?

Gary Sinise: Well, you mean had he not seen combat like that? Well, I don't know. I think that was an important part of it, the fact that he placed himself in harm's way and went out mission after mission after mission with these guys just to try to understand them and what they were doing, I think that was a part of his younger brother's really –.

Q: Disappointment in him?

Gary Sinise: Well, no. His gaining respect for him. You see that. I mean, he was close with his brothers, but remember when he comes home the first time and he jumps on the bed with his brother and he tries to hug him, his younger brother just gets up and runs down the stairs. He kind of doesn't want to have anything to do with him and he kind of won't talk to him. It was Jake's feeling that was hurting him that was another motivating factor for him to go back a second time to try to understand a little bit more about what his younger brother had seen. His younger brother had seen some pretty bad stuff, some difficult stuff. Jake just said, 'I'm going to go try to find that part of it – the uglier side of it. Seeing Iraqi's get blown up there is not pretty and that was difficult for him.

Q: The recent smatterings of Iraq war films haven't been successful at the box office. I think it's hard to release films like this at times of war. Can you talk about releasing a film like this while we're still engaged in the war and what you've thought of the recent slate of Iraq war films?

Gary Sinise: I haven't seen a lot of those movies so I can't speak to that. I can speak to some of the reaction that this movie is getting from the people who serve because we have opened it in some of these military towns like Columbus, Georgia and Fayetteville, North Carolina where Fort Bragg is. It's in Jacksonville, North Carolina at Camp Lejeune and we've screened it at Fort Hood and some other places. Jake even took it over to Iraq one time to screen it for folks over there. They're responding positively to it. The military wives that have to deal with these deployments respond to those two young wives in the movie and what they're going through and how difficult it is for them. They seem to have a very positive reaction to it. I don't know…it'd be hard for me to speak about those other movies because I haven't seen them.

Q: Can you talk about the Iraqi Children's Foundation that you founded and what it means when someone with your stature supports these types of causes?

Gary Sinise: The Operation Iraqi Children Program I started in 2004 after my second trip to Iraq. On my second trip to Iraq I was able to go out and visit schools all around the area that I was in. These schools had been rebuilt by our troops. I visited one school that was originally nothing but a dirt floor and some walls and the troops came in and they poured this concrete floor in there. They knocked holes in the walls for windows. They put up ceiling fans. They painted the place. There was no toilet at this school. There was a hole in the back for the kids to go in. They put toilets in.

The troops rebuilt this school for the kids. This was early on. This was in November 2003, very early on. At every desk which were desks maybe about this big there were three or four kids sitting at each desk. Nothing by our standards. Even some of our schools that have less money to put into them there's at least things on the wall that the kids paint. Here the walls were just white. Nothing was there. A concrete floor, desks and that's it. A blackboard. I remember seeing these kids, they had one pencil between three or four kids and very little in the way of school supplies but they had this great love for the troops that had given them this new school. The Iraqi headmaster took me into his office which was about as big as this corner over here, very small like a custodial closet or something. It was nothing big.

But on the wall he had made this plaque and he wanted me to see it. I got my picture taken with the headmaster of the school. It was a plaque that was a thank you to the Coalition Forces who had come in and rebuilt their school. So I wanted to help support that good feeling in some way, between the troops and the Iraqis. That's how were going to move forward, by keeping these relationships strong and good and positive with the new generation of these kids that are coming up. These kids clearly saw our troops as guys that were helping them. I wanted to reinforce that. So I went to my kid's school and we started collecting school supplies, pens and pencils and paper and Beanie Babies and soccer balls and things like that. We boxed them all up and we shipped them over to the base that I was on.

They took them out and gave them to the kids that they had helped. Out of that I teamed up with Laura Hillenbrand. Laura wrote 'Seabiscuit'. Laura had a program and she was trying to get her book 'Seabiscuit' translated into Arabic because one of the colonel's over there was reading the book and the kids started asking him about the book and so he contacted her and asked if we could get Arabic translations of the book. So we did a program where we made fifteen thousand copies of 'Seabiscuit' in Arabic and sent it over there. Then Laura and I teamed up to fund Operation Iraqi Children so that other people could do what I did which was collect school supplies and send them over to the troops. Out of that we partnered with People to People International run by Mary Eisenhower. He grandfather Dwight Eisenhower started an organization called People to People International.

They go all over the world and help kids. They contacted us and so we teamed up with them. We started the website up, www.iraqichildren.org, in 2004 and so for the past five years we've been shipping supplies over there. We've sent hundreds and hundreds of thousands of supplies over to the troops. They've taken this stuff out and given it to the kids all around the country. Next month we have American Airlines doing an airlift of our supplies. They're taking twenty five tons of Operation Iraqi Children supplies over to Iraq and distributing them. Now we're sending our stuff to Afghanistan to the troops there so that they can take the supplies out and give them to the kids. It's a way to extend the hand of friendship between our troops who are over there. It helps them. It helps the kids. It's a win win.

Q: How do you find the time with the TV schedule?

Gary Sinise: Well, the TV schedule, because it's stable and steady I can kind of maneuver things around. They're very supportive of the stuff that I've been doing. I have tomorrow off. I'm playing a concert for the troops here tomorrow at the Lexington Amory on 25th. There's a unit down there called The Fighting 69th and they've actually lost twenty five guys in the war. I'm going to go down and do a concert for them and support them. 'CSI' is very, very [good about it]. They work well with me on some of these things and allow me to have some days off here.

Q: Did Jake or Isaac or Joe participate in any way in the troops giving to the children?

Gary Sinise: Not Jake. I don't know if Isaac or Joe have been a part of units that have actually taken our supplies out. I never asked them that, if they ran into our supplies at all.

Gary Sinise Q: What about efforts to rebuild schools and things like that?

GS: Oh, yeah. Isaac could tell you all kinds of stuff about that, stories.

Q: We didn't see any of that.

Gary Sinise: Yeah, but there's a lot of that that goes on. Maybe we'll make another documentary and show you some more.