Jeri Jacquin
Coming to Netflix on April 21st from screenwriter Chris Roessner, Treehouse
Pictures along with director Fernando Coimbra comes a look at the people and place
that carry the realities of war with SAND
CASTLE.
The film tells the story of Private Matt Ocre (Nicholas
Hoult), a young man who intended to serve in the reserves to pay for college.
When September 11th occurs, he hurts himself hopefully to be sent
home.
Instead, he is sent back to his regiment to catch up with
Sgt. Chutzky (Glen Powell), Cpt. Enzo (Neil Brown, Jr.), Sgt. Burton (Beau
Knapp) and squad leader Sgt. Harper (Logan Marshall-Green). Learning they are
all to be sent to Baghdad,
Ocre comes in close contact with insurgents and after a firefight moves into an
abandoned palace.
After a few months, Pvt. Ocre and the other soldiers will be
sent to Baqubah where a water station has been damaged. Their mission is to
delivery water to the local residents and find a way to fix the pumping
station.
They arrive to the greeting of Special Forces Cpt. Syverson
(Henry Cavill) who tells them the villagers don’t want them there and that the
danger surrounding them is very real. With a tanker truck to retrieve the
water, almost immediately their nerves are tested when dealing with a truck
that is eager to run up on them on the dirt road.
Arriving at the pumping station, it is clear that this is
not an ordinary fix-it job. Cpt. Syverson and Sgt. Harper meet with the local
Sheik (Salim Daw) to ask for help in getting the station up and running. His
reply is since Americans destroyed it, they should fix it.
Disheartened by the Sheiks lack of help, the soldier return
to retrieving water in the tank. On the way back they are hit by insurgents and
the tanker is shot up. Explaining why there is no water to the residents become
tumultuous at best. The local school teacher Kadeer (Navid Naghaban) tells Pvt.
Ocre that they are asking for help from the wrong people.
Harper tells Syverson about his conversation with Kadeer and
believes he is the key to getting help to repair the station. The next day
Kadeer shows up with his brother Arif (Nabil Elouahabi) who is an engineer and
now they are working together.
Celebrating that night their success in reaching the
villagers, it is only met with horror in the morning. Arif tells the soldiers
where they can find insurgents and a raid turns up wounded to the platoon.
Returning to the pumping station, Pvt. Ocre is more determined to get the job
done. They are almost finished until a bomb explodes.
Back in Baghdad,
Pvt. Ocre meets with Lt. Anthony, Sgt. Major MacGregor (Tommy Flanagan) and
Sgt. Harper to discover that plans have been made about his future.
Chris Roessner is the screenwriter for the film SAND CASTLE.
A former soldier who served for six years, he was based in Iraq for twelve
months with the 4th Infantry Division which is part of a Civil
Affairs unit. He says of his work, “Our job was to interact with the locals;
the cliché is ‘win the hearts and minds of the people’.
After leaving the army, Roessner attended USC in their film
school writing Sand
Castle his final
semester. I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with Chris to learn about his
time in the service, the need to write the script and how long it took to complete.
Jeri Jacquin: Hi Chris, thank you for taking the time to
speak with me today about SAND CASTLE and, of course I wanted to say thank you
for your service.
Chris Roessner: Hi Jeri, thank you, that’s very kind of you,
I appreciate that.
JJ: I am a military mom and my son also served three tours
of duty in Iraq.
CR: Well, then please tell him thank you for his service as
well and give him a nice firm handshake from me.
JJ: Absolutely, I wanted to tell you that there are a couple
of scenes in the film that reminded me exactly of pictures he had shown me,
especially the scene inside the palace.
CR: I feel like every young teen that came through that
palace thought the same thing, take a picture of it and sliding down the
banister.
JJ: I read the notes and it said you were taking from your
experiences during the time there, how deep did you go with that? Is it
extremely close to being autobiographical?
CR: I went as deep as humanly possible until it hurt a just
a little too much. I would say that what is authentic and what I cared about
most is the way I portrayed the American soldiers and how I portrayed the Iraqi
people. That’s what I cared most about more than anything. I feel that I hit
that goal and I feel like the actors hit that goal. Some of the events were
lifted from my experience but it was more important to me that the feeling of
being at war was translated. Even if that meant I had to change and
fictionalize some things. When I sat down to think about it I asked myself what
is the feeling of war in one sentence. What would that feel like? I came up
with the feeling of pushing a rock up a hill and watching it roll back down. I
wanted to portray that feeling. This film is not about a singular mission with
success or failure; it’s about the feeling of being at war risking your life,
dying, being hurt, and your friends being hurt or killed and for the soul
purpose of taking this giant ship and shifting it half a degree. That’s the
feeling of war and I don’t think I’ve seen that fictionalized in cinema before.
Again, even if the events aren’t entirely true, I think they are truer than
true if that makes sense.
JJ: One thing that just really intrigued me is that you
wanted to portray the truth of the Iraqi people. I have to go with that because
when I was watching the film I don’t think I’ve seen that before in films about
the Iraqi war.
CR: Not at all and I am as proud of that as anything else in
this movie. Our job was unique but you learn early on that you can not be
successful unless you have the inclusion of the Iraqi people – you just can’t.
You need interpreters, you need informants and you need people joining the
police force or join the Iraqi military so you can train them. To me, if you
are going to make a war film you have to find out what is unique about that
particular war. How was the Iraq
war different from Vietnam?
How was Vietnam
different than World War II? For me the center of all of this is that you must
work with the local population to be successful. They may get hurt and you feel
that emotionally, when you get hurt they feel that emotionally. Your goal is
one in the same.
JJ: I’m so glad you put it that way. I think that it is
something important; you have to get into a mindset in order for things to work
together.
CR: Yes, I think that’s what I learned in my Iraq experience
and what I hope the audience learns is that it takes courage to remain
empathetic. There are things that happen that are beyond your wildest
imaginings, it takes real courage to maintain your value set. It takes real
courage to maintain empathy. I feel like that is something getting lost in our
culture. Since returning home I feel like people see empathy as a weakness and
the opposite is true. It takes real courage to remain empathetic and indeed
it’s the only way to win wars like this or even change the tide. We have to
remain true to our values and our empathy even in the face of very difficult
circumstances.
JJ: When did you decide that you wanted to make this film?
CR: I knew that I wanted to make a film about the Iraq war and I
can remember the exact moment it happened. When I was 19 and I was in the
presidential palace in Tikrit, Iraq
and I was on watch all night in case there was an emergency of some kind. What
that usually means is that you are up all night watching movies which is what I
did. I put Oliver Stone’s movie PLATOON into the DVD player at about three in
the morning. As I watched it and it was over I knew immediately what I wanted
to do. I wanted to try to make a film that was as emotional as that one because
I had never seen anything like it. It took me seven years to actually sit down
and write it but I think that moment in the palace at 3 in the morning was the
start of this whole journey.
JJ: You said it took seven years to put it together, was
that due to the writing process for you?
CR: Actually I didn’t try to sit down and write it until I
was twenty-seven. I think the seven year gap after returning from Iraq and
sitting down to write it was me not knowing, again, why I would make this film.
I didn’t want to sit down and write just anything. That question of what makes
this war different and what were my experiences different took me seven years
to answer those questions. I was 20 when I got back and had all this stuff in
my brain, all these experiences and I was confused. I did a lot of work on
myself just like anybody else. I kind of needed to be a kid a little bit
because I missed this whole portion of my life with college and the like. I
think I just needed that much time to get a little bit of distance so when I
did sit down to write it, it wouldn’t hurt so bad. I need that amount of
distance from it.
JJ: That actually was what I was going to ask about the
process, you kind of have to find your place again to write something like this.
CR: Absolutely, you have to find a new sense of purpose.
When you are in the military your purpose is very clear and very defined. You
are what I call a single function device and have a clear goal on a day to day
basis. You are pointed in a direction and that’s where you go. After living
that way for several years and come home at 20 or 21 and that’s gone, you have
to find that purpose again. It’s a tough adjustment.
JJ: When that time passed, is there something that said
inside you to get this done?
CR: Yes, it was Christmas break in 2011-12 and I was in California going to
college and I couldn’t afford to go home for Christmas. I was feeling a little
off anyway and thought I’d sit down and write something. I wrote the first
draft in three weeks all through Christmas break. I kind of dumped it all out
and it was enough for me to recognize that it felt right. It felt like this is
what I needed to do. That three week period was exhilarating but then the hard
work began. I was ready to do that hard work and felt emotionally fortified
like I knew I could do this and come out the other side.
JJ: Tell me what your next step was once the script was
written?
CR: Well, I was very lucky because when I finished the
script I gave it to a friend of mine who worked for Mark Gordon who is one of
the Executive Producers on this film. He produced SAVING PRIVATE RYAN and is a
really great guy. He read it on a Friday night and by Sunday night of that same
weekend my whole life changed. The script was passed around Hollywood very quickly and Mark called me
Sunday night and said, ‘This is good but not good enough. I’m going to help
make it good and help get this thing made’. It was ten years of not making any
money, struggling, getting eviction notices to my life changing.
JJ: When people are watching the story, what would you like
them to take away from the film?
CR: A couple of things, first, that we were only successful
when working alongside the Iraqi people, that is very important to know.
Second, the actors in the film were cast because they were good actors but also
because they looked the right age. The average age of a person in Iraq was 20
maybe 22. It’s important that people recognize that. I would say those two
things are most important. I would also hope that if their humanity is touched
a bit that they realize that patriotism is a very active thing. It is not a
bumper sticker or crying every time you hear the national anthem. You have to
make sure that the young men and women you serve are taken care of by affording
education and affording healthcare. People should consider how to involve
themselves in these causes otherwise it is not patriotic. You have to be
passionate and involve yourself actively!
JJ: Thank you so much Chris for everything – for your
service and for your dedication to getting this film made. It means a lot to me
not just as a writer but as a Mom, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
CR: Thank you Jeri, that means so very much to me.
SAND CASTLE is a film that experiences so much human in
emotion on both sides of the Iraq
war. The soldiers who come to understand they are not wanted in Iraq
but have to be there to the villagers that do want help but to do so can
decimate families and in between are insurgents who only want to destroy.
The cast, set and cinematography bring realism to viewers
and into this important story. I am very sure that former and current military
men and women will recognize the dilemmas and emotions of these characters.
Roessner has shared part of himself and that makes all the
difference. For me, to make a story such as this portray so much tension,
danger, anxiety, sadness and hope – this young screenwriter did not hesitate to
include not only the lives of the soldiers, but the Iraqi people.
I encourage everyone to take a moment to view the film SAND CASTLE
premiering on Netflix April 21st.
