Revolution Studios In the film "Black Hawk Down," based
on the 1993 Somalian rescue mission, Grimes is played by
Ewan McGregor.
By Christopher Cobb
Daily Bruin Contributor
After a viewing of “Black Hawk Down,” at the
Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood Monday, director Ridley Scott and
producer Jerry Bruckheimer spoke on the process of turning the
events of U.N. intervention in 1993 Somalia into the current
blockbuster film.
“Black Hawk Down” is a major contender for next
month’s Academy Awards with four nominations, including one
for Scott, 64, as director.
Jerry Bruckheimer, 56, admits the film has been a long time in
the making. Bruckheimer had targeted the book by Mark Bowden, which
also lent its name for the film’s title. From there, it was
two and a half years before Bruckheimer could decide on a suitable
director.
Once on board, Scott became a major creative force for the
film.
“I talked to Ridley, and as soon as we had a script
“¦ he jumped right in and started re-working it and worked out
another four or five drafts,” Bruckheimer said.
Staff Sgt. Matt Eversmann, played by Josh Hartnett, in his
second war-related role in less than a year, easily became the
focus for the film.
“Josh represents a character who actually was the person
chosen essentially to be in charge of his troops,” Scott
said. “So we have this good mess to start with the character,
who is already feeling vulnerable, not because of what he did, but
because of the new role he had to take on that particular
day.” Choices for the rest of the cast were not as
simple.
“This was particularly difficult because it became easily
apparent that when these guys had their heads shaved and their
helmets on, I didn’t know who was who, and so this pertained
to the casting of the characters,” Scott said.
“I’d better have very descriptive faces, so that the
audience would understand, as soon as possible, who was
who.”
But before Scott had to deal with casting, producer Bruckheimer
knew he needed some other necessary support in order for the film
to be a success. Even having worked with the U.S. Military on
earlier films like 1986’s “Top Gun,” and last
year’s “Pearl Harbor,” getting cooperation would
be no small feat.
“This was under the Clinton Administration, and I’d
mentioned that we’d brought the book to Secretary of Defense
William Cohen, and he happened to be a fan of the book. Then I
talked to the secretary of the army and he also happened to be a
fan of the book. So we knew, at least in the Clinton
Administration, we had supporters for the project, and it would
have been very difficult to make the movie without them,”
Bruckheimer said.
 American Cinematheque Jerry Bruckheimer
(left) and
Ridley Scott (right) engage in a discussion
regarding the making of "Black Hawk Down."
In an already strong production company, Scott knew it would be
necessary to include advisers who were involved with the mission in
Somalia in order for a maximum of historical accuracy.
“This whole film became about a process,” Scott
said, “Them studying what goes down, which is really when the
cause and effect starts to kick in, and how the plan shifts from
Plan-A to Plan-B to Plan-C. I figured I really needed that
hour-by-hour situation, because it all became about accuracy. The
film you see is fairly accurate.”
Another member of Scott’s dream team was Pietro Scalia,
who worked as editor on the last three of Scott’s films. On
Sunday, Scalia took home this year’s American Cinema Editors
award for Best Editing for this latest endeavor.
For Scott, Scalia rounded out the job started by the writer.
“The process of making a good movie is (begun) ideally by
a great writer … and at the end is finished off with another
great storyteller, who is actually an editor,” Scott said.
“A great editor has all the great storytelling in his veins,
and Pietro has that.”
Revolution Studios Ty Burrell (left) plays
Wilkinson and Jeremy Piven (on stretcher) plays
Wolcott in the war flick "Black Hawk Down."
Because a rough cut of the film was finished by mid-August, and
a final edit almost complete weeks later, the events of Sept. 11
did not affect the release. In fact Scott hoped to go ahead with
the film in order to get back to normal.
Once the film was green-lighted for an early 2002 release, the
marketing campaign began. Bruckheimer wanted to show potential
audiences early on that this was not just another war epic.
“Ridley and I were presented with a number of ideas, and
felt the approach that everybody would take was the safe
approach,” he said. “It showed it as an action movie,
with multiple heads (of starring actors) and helicopters going
down, things we’d felt we’d seen before.”
The end result was a campaign that featured a solitary Josh
Hartnett looking down from a helicopter with the tagline
“Leave no man behind.”
According to Bruckheimer, studio executives were not
pleased.
“It’s pretty frightening for them to finance (a
marketing campaign) knowing we’re going for a more artistic
manner,” he said.
Of course, this fear appears to have been unfounded; the film
has already grossed over $100 million domestically with a
continually strong showing due to multiple Oscar nods. It looks to
be a blockbuster overseas as well.
This is not the first time Scott has tackled war for the big
screen. Scott has visited the genre in 1997’s “G.I.
Jane,” and in his first feature, 1977’s “The
Duelists.”
The character of the warrior seems to have particular
significance to Scott.
“In fact I never experienced actual service because it
ended the second year I was in college, and I remember this desire,
like a slight disappointment that somewhere in my genes, that I
wouldn’t be going to war,” he said. “It’s
also a character on the cutting edge of society, whatever that
society is, whether it’s Roman or if it’s Northeast
African.”
“So it must be something to do with my genes, and if
I’m experiencing it as a moviemaker then theoretically, the
audience is doing the same thing,” he added.