You play John "Doc" Bradley, a medic who was one of the Iwo Jima flag-raisers captured in the famous photograph. Did you meet his son, James, who cowrote the book that the film is based on? I had some amazing moments with James Bradley on set. There’s a moment in the film where Doc is wounded While he’s on the ground, he hears someone screaming for a corpsman and crawls with shrapnel in his leg in rain over rock to find this guy. I looked over and saw James Bradley watching me do this really heroic thing that his father had done. He had tears in his eyes, and I started crying, and he gave me the thumbs-up.
I imagine Clint Eastwood took pains to get the period details just right. He would sometimes stage images that he remembered seeing in Time or Life. There were times where 500 guys were shooting guns and moving toward our enemy. You’re always conscious of the fact that it’s not real, but when the explosions are going off, it feels as close to the real thing as you could get. If a guy sprained his ankle, I’d tape it up. I had a life-size dummy in my hotel room that I could practice on, because with Mr. Easywood, he expects you to be ready. It was probably very strange the first ime the maid came to clean.
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Were you at all interested in science or medicine in school? I was never the one to become a doctor, but I won an award in scienece class for brain surgery on a fetal pig.
You’re making another film about war, Kimberley Peirce’s Stop-Loss. It’s loosely based on her brother. He was in Iraq. If I’m spending time away from my kids [he has two, with wife Reese Witherspoon], I want to be working on something that matters.
Do you have plans to write or direct? [Directing] is something I think I will do within the next year, but I’m not in a rush. I’ve written a couple things. I like the idea of people making mistakes. I love desperation; I think there’s a lot of comedy that comes out of desperation. the best kind of film give you something ynew to think about. I don’t want to sit in the theater for two hours and have this numb experience. I want to get pissed off.
– Premiere Magazine, Fall Movie 2006 Preview
