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Behind The Film: Soul Patrol with J.M. Harper · Indie Film Weekly

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Indie Film Weekly Behind the Film.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Glenn Reynolds.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm Jason Connell.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Today we're going behind Soul Patrol, a documentary about the first all-black special operations team to serve in Vietnam.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Fifty years later, the surviving soldiers reunite to tell a story of brotherhood, combat, and the lasting cost of war.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Our guest is director JM Harper.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: This movie is very moving.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: It gives these men the recognition they've been denied for decades, but what really stayed with me was how much of the war they're still carrying and what it means for them to finally share that burden.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: So let's meet JM and go behind Soul Patrol.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: JM, welcome to the podcast.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for joining us.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for having me.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate it.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: So every film starts somewhere.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: Where did Soul Patrol start for you?
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, it depends on how far you go back.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_02: I picked up the book Soul Patrol almost seven years ago now.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_02: And it just really affected me.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: I had been a student of the Vietnam War since I was a teenager.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_02: In high school, I picked up a book called Nam, The Vietnam Experience and Big Red Letters out of Barnes and Noble.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I just became kind of obsessed with it.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_02: It was like a 700-page book filled with, you know, some of the most stunning war photojournalism that has ever been made.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_02: But within that, there's a chapter of the book called Soul Brothers.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_02: And I saw a lot of young men, teenagers just like me, only they were in a very different situation, you know, slugging machine guns and ammo through rice patties or jungle.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: And what struck me particularly was what they had written on their helmets or on their flag jackets, um, in some cases, which were, you know, peace signs or Black Panther epithets, or sometimes there were things that they were saying, that they were thinking that was not always in line with what they were doing.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_02: And so the contradiction there really stuck with me for many years.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_02: And so I read and watched everything I could about Vietnam until I finally came across the book, Soul Patrol, and uh picked up the phone and called Ed.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: And then it was about six years from that first phone call to the film being released.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um, most of that process was just earning his trust to be able to tell a story.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, JM, we not only share a first name in Jason, but we share this kind of fascination with the war, the Vietnam War.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: I actually moved to Vietnam three weeks ago.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: So you're here now.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: You're there right now.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my god, where are you?
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: In Hanoi.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, wow.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, okay.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: I just got here three weeks ago.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's just to not necessarily to like do a documentary on the war, but it's always been a fascination of mine.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: And um living, working here, and slowly dipping into like go to Denang and see things that were just like in your head, like a dream.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: So when Glenn introduced the movie to me, I thought, Solvature, what a great title.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then I delve into what it is.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, oh my gosh, I'm meant to see your movie now.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's right.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: There's so many levels.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_02: It's made for you for sure.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_02: That's incredible that you're in annoyed.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_02: That's remarkable.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_02: I'm glad you found it.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_02: That it must yeah, have meant something particularly to you.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I was gonna ask you about the title, but that it was the book title because it's a great title.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_02: Ed struggled with the title because it was meant as an insult in his mind to call the team the Soul Patrol.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, it stuck, it wasn't insulting to everybody, but he felt that it was insulting just because of the connotations that came with it, that the documentary kind of delves into around what it meant to be a soul brother.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_02: That was interesting to talk with Ed about the title of the documentary, and it was something that he just knew that the team around Vietnam was known as the Soul Patrol, certainly in Benoit was known as Soul Patrol and Npu Chi.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: And so, yeah, just kind of stuck.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's definitely not just a lost chapter of military history.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's a story about men finally finding each other again.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: Was that always the film you wanted to make, or was that something you kind of found along the way?
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: That's a great question.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_02: I was adamant that it wasn't a history lesson.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't a retrospective story.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_02: It's a real-time telling of how these men are still not just grappling with what happened in Vietnam, but what's happening in their lives now because of Vietnam.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, every single one of them will describe to you the feeling that they left a part of them, they left their soul in Vietnam.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_02: Uh or that they still feel like in some very real way they're still in the jungle.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_02: And so that meant we had to do all of these things in the film to keep reminding people that this wasn't something that happened, it's something that is happening in the present tense in the lives of not just these guys, but anybody who went to Vietnam.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_02: Nobody came back the same way that they went.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_02: And so a lot of the film was figuring out how do I take all of these stories that Ed's telling me over these six years of we had a standing weekly phone call for much of that time.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_02: And he would just for hours talk.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_02: The book is like a play-by-play of his year-long tour, but there's nothing before and nothing after, and then there's just a wealth of stuff that just there's an ocean beneath the storytelling of the book.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_02: And so all of the 50 years after the that single-year tour, there was so much of the war that was still happening in their lives, and so the film is about that as well.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you and Ed obviously built this rapport, this relationship, this trust.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: Was it easy to get the other veterans to open up and tell their stories as well?
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_02: There's this concept of team, which from the very first phone call, Ed asked me, Do you know what a team is?
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I said, you know, yes, you know, next question.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: And he I didn't know what it was.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't understand it.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_02: Not until I learned really who the Lerbs were.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_02: Did I it took me many years to understand?
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_02: There's a quotation from Dostoevsky where he says, the definition of love is to give someone else the power to destroy you and then to trust that they won't.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_02: And that that's the definition of a team.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_02: The way that they move through the jungle, you know, on a six-man team, the point man is meant to watch out front, and the man behind him watches one sector to the right or to the left, and the one behind him watches the opposite sector, all the way to the man in the back who only watches the rear.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_02: And so you've always got your back or what they call their six, you know, exposed.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and you trust that someone else is watching it.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_02: And if that person fails at their job on the team to watch your back, then you will die.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_02: And so the stakes are that when you're on a team, you are handing someone else your life and you're accepting theirs, and you're implicitly saying that we will live together or we'll die together.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_02: And that's the definition of team.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_02: So when to answer your question, Jason, when Ed asked me, Do you know what a team is?
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_02: And when I earned my right to be part of the team making this film, that meant that he was putting his life in my hands, and I was putting in many, in some ways, uh putting my life in his because we've just become totally bound.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_02: But when I was part of that team, the trust was automatic.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: When Ed said, Hey, he's with me, they the others let me in.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't have to go through the ritual.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: And you were a made man at that point, yeah, exactly, exactly.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_02: Made man.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_02: So I didn't have to go through that the same ritual with the rest of them because they knew they trust each other so much to this day that if Ed said I was good, then Thad knew I was good.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_02: He didn't have to ask any questions.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_02: He opened up from you know, from day one when he hadn't opened up in 50 years.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_02: So it took that that idea of becoming part of the team, which I had no idea what that meant.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_02: But I I learned that I'm still learning, and it ultimately just comes down to love, this great love that they had for each other, which was totally devastating when they were were broken apart.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: Talk about devastating.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: So Ed's cousin Ricky dies in Vietnam, and then Ed returns wanting revenge, and that's a devastating turn.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: How did you approach that part of the story?
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: I don't want to spoil things that happen later in the film, but it's so critical to understand that there's this idea of vendetta, and Ed wasn't the only one.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_02: Thad's brother had been wounded in Vietnam.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_02: We didn't put it in the dock, but one of the reasons that he went over, besides his generationally his family always being in the military, is that his brother had gone over and been almost fatally wounded, and they couldn't get any any information from the military on where his brother was.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_02: So he decided to sign up because he knew that if he was in the military, then he could somehow get better answers.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_02: When Ricky died, Ricky was Ed's protector, and that protection was destroyed, and it started this kind of calculation in Ed's, you know, 19-year-old brain that I need to stop this from happening to other people like me, and I need to kill as many people as I possibly can, because killing them means that people it means it will stop the death.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_02: He had a still has a yearbook.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: Company F-51st, they had it like a yearbook like you'd get when you graduate high school, but it was the LERP yearbook, and on the back of it, Ed had sewn this patch that you see briefly in the documentary when he opens it and he's showing you who the LERP teams were, and it says kill for peace.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_02: And I asked him where he had gotten that patch, and he's like, I made it back then when he was you know 1819, and it had is it had sewn it on the back of the yearbook, and I think that sums up his mentality after Ricky died was that to get to peace, I have to kill, like I have to wage war.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: And the most devastating way for them personally, but they were highly trained killers, and when they came back, in other ancient cultures and Native American cultures and cultures around the world, there are rituals around sending warriors out and kind of giving them the mantle of fighting, of killing, of death, of going out to do whatever, protect the community.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_02: But then there are also rituals of return where those warriors come back and that that is lifted from them, or it's not their responsibility anymore to kill.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_02: And these guys never had that.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_02: So when they came back, they would have been some of them in the field, like uh Willie Brown was saying, he had three days he was short, and he had they would say you probably they'd say they were short when they only had a month left in country.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_02: And oftentimes, if they had a good officer, that officer wouldn't let them go out.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_02: They'd put them on some other kind of duty, even if it was latrine duty, so that they didn't have to go out.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_02: If you survived 11 months, they weren't gonna put you out there.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_02: But Willie Brown said, you know, he was with a lieutenant that sent him out uh when he became a ranger.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_02: He was going out on missions three days before he came home.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_02: And that that means 72 hours after being out in the jungle, in the field, watching your back, going out, conducting ambushes.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_02: 72 hours later, you're out there on a Monday, and then by a Wednesday or a Thursday, you're sitting, you know, at a party with your friends in Compton or in Charleston, and you're supposed to just like turn that off and and all of a sudden no, and you're out of the military, and all of a sudden know that you're not this thing that they made you.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_02: It's totally impossible.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_02: Totally impossible.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_02: So that adjustment for these guys was really hard.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_02: And as dad says, you know, you sit in a bar and see somebody looking at you, and he wants to take their head off because yeah, that that when he said that, I at first I thought, oh, it's just you know, he wanted to take their head off because that's how he was trained to respond to threats was to just act.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_02: But then what he said next was really fascinating to me, which is that the reason he felt threatened was because he didn't know if that person was a friend or whether they were in Thad's mind saying, you know, you went off and fought that war instead of staying here and fighting this war with us, and so looking looking down on him, condescending to him with a look because they could tell he was in had been in the military.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so there are all of these layers beneath what might come out as rage in some cases.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_02: There's a quote from C.S.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_02: Lewis I read recently that said, uh, after he lost his his wife to cancer, he said, I sat with my anger until she told me her true name, which was grief.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_02: And I think these guys suffer from that from that grief incredibly.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_02: The original title of the Iliad was was Rage.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_02: And that was, of course, about a soldier who's betrayed by Agamemnon, betrayed by his country.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_02: And it's a that's a story, PTSD, it's which is great why people are seeing it now in the Odyssey.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_02: But I think a lot of veterans are looking at that film in a different way.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you said early on that you didn't want to go off and make this historical movie about Vietnam, but I'm sure you were influenced by like the Ken Burns documentary series, which is so amazing and 18 hours of your you feel like you're there, also your own history and studying, and you have all this archival footage.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: So, how did you walk that line of not falling into that?
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: Because that's easy to do to start to give things context.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: And but yet you already had this in your mind.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe talk to that a little.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_02: The Ken Burns series is so expansive, but what it didn't do for and which created an opportunity for us was spend a lot of time on that particular story, on the plight of these black soldiers who were given this impossible decision of do I go and fight for a country that does not stand for me and cannot stand me in some cases.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_02: And then there were other films that had come out like Spikley's The Five Bloods, but the Lerps would watch that and be like, this is nothing like our experience.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_02: This is just not real.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_02: And that was a treasure hunt story that he had retooled.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um, not to say it didn't have some truth in it, but the veterans that I talked to are just, you know, they don't see themselves in that film.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_02: So there needed to be clearly, even with everything that had been done, there was something that hadn't.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_02: And so I took it as my job to figure out what that was.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_02: And a lot of it was this idea of the past rearing its head in unlikely places and mundane places like the grocery store, and of these guys having to figure out how to stare down the 19-year-old versions of themselves, even though they were you know 78 years old.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I would often find myself over the course of the years of making the film, talking to the 19-year-old, not the 78-year-old, and just having this really distinct feeling with some of the guys that they had upon first meeting them or having a first phone call with them, sounding like they just came out of the jungle.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_02: And that was shocking to me to get the sense of that they were still there.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_02: And so some of the tools that we used that hadn't been used by Burns or hadn't been used by even the sort of great Vietnam films, Apocalypse Now and Platoon, and you know, all the the kind of full metal jacket.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_02: I wanted to do something new.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_02: We didn't have those the resources of those films, but we knew we knew that if we could keep the scope kind of small enough, then we could do what we needed to do, which was that show that that kind of subjective eye-level experience of the LERPs when they were out there.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_02: There was never a camera out there with them.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_02: You know, they were totally silent, they barely went to the bathroom, they only spoke in whispers, you know, lip to ear for five days.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_02: So it's the sound of a Bolex, you know, or a bell and howl 16 millimeter camera going, it's you're basically that'll be the last thing that you do.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so we knew we had to film some version of what because they spent all their time on missions.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_02: They'd go out five, six days, they'd come out for a few days to rest, and then be back out for a year.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, it was with RR at a six-month point, too.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_02: It was less a rest and recuperation, more a realization that once you leave, you're not leaving.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_02: There are things that I don't that aren't even in the documentary that Ed said to me over the years of like when you take a shower, you can smell the cordite coming off your skin from the RPG rounds exploding around you, and that'll that'll flash them back.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_02: So we created these what I call adaptations of the book, which aren't recreations, because I'm not trying to say that Ed literally sees himself in the grocery store.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_02: But I do know that these guys have described to me walking into a grocery store and knowing that if a crowd has gathered around the checkout that wasn't there before, they that they know to set down their basket and work their way out because they can't deal with the crowds or sitting at a restaurant and knowing to keep their their back to the wall.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_02: Kind of standard issue PTSD stuff.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_02: I certainly didn't think about how this is like an everyday thing.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_02: Every time you go to a restaurant, every time you get in a car.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_02: Thad hasn't been on an airplane since he came back from Vietnam.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_02: He made a promise to God because he that plane felt like it was going down.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_02: And he said, like, I'll never get on a plane again.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_02: So like these guys, they're still there in their head, they're still behaving as if somebody's waiting around the corner to take their life, which is what, as Thad says in the doc, you know, he didn't have anybody to watch his back.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_02: And understanding what it meant to have somebody watching your back, that was your that was everything.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_02: That was how does it feel to feel exposed without friends?
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_02: That so learning that was the process of making a film, and that was stuff that you had seen sort of prisms of it in some of the documentary work and in some of the other films, but not with this specific group and not in this way.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_02: So I felt we had an opportunity to say something new.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: There's a moment when the North Vietnamese troops appear to spare them, and Ed can't explain why.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: That really stayed with me.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: How did you approach a memory that remains so mysterious?
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not exaggerating when I say that Ed has told me that story hundreds of times on almost every phone call.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_02: And I know when I'm on the phone with him, if it starts to go one way, then I'm gonna hear the entire story, as if he hasn't told me before.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_02: And that's because he's kind of stuck in a loop there.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_02: When he says his soul died in Vietnam, and he describes that moment of just feeling like he was watching it from a distance and paying attention because he wanted to tell Ricky.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_02: He kept his eyes wide open because he wanted to tell Ricky, this is exactly how I died.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_02: You know, when he after he died, he imagined he'd see Ricky and say, This is how it happened.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_02: And so when their lives were spared, he said something off camera that should have included in the film.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_02: And it just sums it all up.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_02: He's he was talking to Mackie, so he wasn't Mike, so he was off camera and he said, They showed us mercy, and instead of killing us, they destroyed us for the rest of our lives.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_02: And that was like that I knew was kind of the thesis of the film when I heard that.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_02: And he's still there, like he's very much still there.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_02: He wakes up with that mission every day, he still gets the headaches thinking about that mission.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_02: He doesn't understand it, he can't explain it.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_02: I'm just repeating what he's said to me many, many times over that he can't explain it.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_02: They weren't supposed to come back.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_02: They knew they were there.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_02: The grass was about knee high.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_02: There was no cover in the film.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_02: We kind of shoot in place where there's sporadic trees.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_02: There were no trees.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_02: So to have a whole company march by you, then 15 feet.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_02: But you've been mortared by them all night, you've been seen by a scouting team, you know, there's there's just the impossibility of remaining hidden totally destroys them.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_02: And when they left, they called in artillery after their lives had been spared.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_02: It was a fundamentally existence brick shattering, something broke and still has not been repaired.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_02: And so it sticks with Ed as well.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_02: Like you're saying, Glenn, it sticks with you.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: Ed is still very much there in his head.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, having made a documentary years ago that kind of culminates to a reunion in the end, I navigated that, like doing the reunion, being a filmmaker, having a relationship with all the characters or the people, I should say.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: What was that like for you?
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now you have this connection with everybody, but you're also the documentarian and you don't really want to get in the way.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: So, what was that dance like?
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_02: The way Thad put it to me, when we arrived at the hotel, he said, These guys have never gotten a welcome home.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_02: This is their first welcome home.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_02: And I felt like I couldn't do any wrong just by putting it on, by putting it on in the first place.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, like everything was good just because we were there, period.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_02: They had had reunions before that they had kind of put on for themselves, but that constellation of guys specifically had never been together ever since they were in Vietnam 50 years previous.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_02: So they were moved just by the fact that someone had taken the time to recognize them.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_02: And then I think that it was that small gesture that opened a door for them to say, This is their words, that they said this is their final mission was to tell their story.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_02: So the reunion was just a gesture.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: And Ed told me once to never tell him thank you for your service.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_02: He said, This don't tell me that, and don't tell these guys that.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_02: The only thing that you you should say is welcome home.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_02: And so from that point on, when I see somebody wearing that hat, you know, that's what I tell them.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: Nice.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that reunion with Mackie after years of isolation is definitely one of the film's most moving developments.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: What was it like documenting that?
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_02: We lost Mackie two weeks before the reunion, and he had bought his tuxedo, he was so excited to go.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_02: And for Eddie was really putting on the reunion for Mackie because he was like his little brother, like it was his job to protect him.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_02: And Mackie died two weeks before we put that on.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: I had done an interview with Mackie two years previous.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_02: I interviewed Mackie Ed and Thad just as a basis to kind of understand the story and start mapping out what the film could be.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_02: And so fortunately I had interviewed Mackie.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_02: He was the only interview where I asked one question.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_02: And Mackie, we interviewed each of those guys.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_02: I think I interviewed Mackie over over the course of two days.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_02: Unbroken, he just spoke.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_02: But other guys, I had to, you know, I prompt them and I lead them in a certain way.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_02: And I asked him a whole list of questions that we go through for that, you know, four hours or eight hours.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_02: I asked Mackie one question, he just went, and then I tried to interrupt him once, and I realized that I just had to sit back and listen.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_02: And that and I did, and he just went through.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_02: That was Mackie.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_02: And he became kind of the spiritual sort of center of the film.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_02: You hear his voice opening the film, talking about team.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_02: And to me, it means unity, strength, dignity, honor, all those things together.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_02: And then it's just like being born again.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_02: Gives me chills just to think about it.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_02: His voice really became, even though he had passed, or maybe because he had passed, he became kind of the guide of the experience.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's why I chose to book in the film with what he's saying.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_02: And that hopefully the viewer, when they hear him say that in the beginning versus when they hear him say that at the very end, and to say that we were there, that you have a different understanding of what that means.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_02: So hopefully the viewer has changed so that they can receive and hear that in a different way at the end than they did at the beginning.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, so much of filmmaking is in the edit bay, you know, post-productions, especially documentaries.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you're taking it all in there, and then you're building.
• 23:42
  unknown: Right.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so I know you went in there with ideas and even just having him pass and you wanted to bookend the film.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: But what other revelations came through editing, or like, oh, you know what?
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: Let's introduce this, or I'm sure that was such an amazing process.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_02: But the Nietzsche came like so.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_02: We opened the film with a quote from Nietzsche, which was a way of kind of signaling that you were going to continue to hear from Nietzsche.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_02: Because I I wanted those quotations had been written, you know, in the 1800s.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_02: So it was already like almost a couple hundred years old.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_02: And what I was trying to say with that was like by putting his words in their mouths, that we were really witnessing this perennial thing.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_02: Like this is like a human experience that was thousands of years old, hundreds of years old, and that these guys were just the latest vessels for a story like this.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_02: So that came in the edit of just experimenting and trying that out as we were building.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_02: And then, like, the choice to do the reunion in the round table in black and white was a way to one, make the past, which is in vivid color, feel more present than that sort of desaturation of reality of the real-time story.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_02: And then also just to help people, because there's so much going on that you know, we don't to avoid confusion and keep the emotional through lines clear.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_02: There were all sorts of ways to weave that tapestry of the edits that you could get the adaptations, you could get the incredible archival, which was discovered totally serendipitously.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_02: Like at the end of the reunion, Willie Brown said, you know, I have some Super 8 that I shot at the time of the guys like, Would you want to see that?
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, you know, as a documentary, and you're just like, Yeah, I would like to see that.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_02: And it was just unbelievable that it had survived.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_02: And he had spliced it with home video footage, super eight footage that he had filmed of his family back in the 70s.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_02: And so that just gave us so much, not just of the life of the like in-between battles of them at Company F-51st, but then also of just the home life of what was going on at home.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_02: And that plugged right into this interplay of Johnson and MLK and RFK and JFK, and you know, the protests going on at home and uh all of the uh incredible black voices speaking against the war and these guys going out in that atmosphere going to war.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_02: There was a wealth of personal archival, and then like really late in the game, maybe like two or three months before we were supposed to lock the picture after six years of making it.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, Ed, we need more photos of Ricky.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_02: We only have like one photo of Ricky.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_02: And he was like, I might have a shoebox.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_02: He had two shoeboxes, and that was like 1400 photos.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, Ed, you know, thank you.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, this would have been good to have earlier.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_02: So then there was those photos told the story, not just a ton of them from the tour.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_02: And these guys brought two of them, it was specifically John Willis um and Wooly Brown.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_02: They both brought, I think it was a total of like 700 photos to the reunion, and then we just scanned them just like as fast as we could, um, because the reunion only lasted a couple of days, and then Ed's shoeboxes of photos then told the trajectory of his life over 50 years so that we could then give that a visual you know representation.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_02: So the archive was a huge responsibility, but the kind of thing you dream of as a documentarian that helps you to paint the picture.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_01: A quick question for you before we move on.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_01: Sundance, what surprised you about the response at Sundance where you won the US uh documentary directing award?
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: Anything, any uh interesting surprises at Sundance?
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_02: Just personal ones like my dad watching the film and him just breaking into tears within the first you know 20 minutes because he recognized you know his brother.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_02: His brother was you know 10 years his senior, and him and his friends would be hanging out in Newark, New Jersey, just waiting for their draft number to get called.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um that kind of thing, or crowd members coming up afterwards at the festivals along the way after Sundance have shown it in over a dozen festivals in the lead up to the theatrical release over the course of last year.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_02: And a woman came up to me and she just she said, I was one of the people that spit on the soldiers when they came back.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_02: And it wasn't until now that I'm able to release that.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_02: She said, I've just carried this guilt with me over all these years of what I did, and something about the experience of watching their stories and I guess understanding them.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_02: And understanding is a form there's probably well, it's just a very deep form of love, is understanding.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_02: For her to understand them meant that she could finally release that.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_02: So those kind of stories were incredible ones.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_02: So we couldn't find so Brock, the guy's team leader, and just happened to be from Ed's hometown in Compton, you know, from a different high school.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_02: And so he, you know, he had done 30, 40 missions, he was the most one of the most highly respected guys.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, was had with multiple tours in 20 years old, you know, had a special relationship with the colonel.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_02: They were drinking buddies, and that's why he got to choose his team, and that's how Soul Patrol came to be.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_02: But we couldn't find his wife for like we tried really, really, really hard to find his wife or his sister, and all the phone numbers were dead, and we couldn't, so we only had a handful of photos of him from the guy's collection.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_02: And after the movie came out, Ed received a handwritten letter from Brock's ex-wife and his son, who was also named Jerry Brock, is Jerry Brock Jr.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_02: And she said, Thank you for making this.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_02: We had no idea.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_02: Brock had gone blind and died.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_02: He had Agent Orange had done its work on him after spending so much time in the field.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_02: And he had a really hard life coming back, very hard time adjusting, and died young.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_02: And she said, We never knew any of this.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_02: He never spoke a single word about being about anything.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_02: This guy was the most storied guy, you know, in Company F 51st, uh the most highly respected for all of his exploits, and he never said a word when he came back.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_02: And she said the only thing that he ever told us was, I never lost a man.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_02: That's all he ever told me.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_02: The film and the book were massive for his wife and his son who had no idea who he was.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's a strange experience kind of knowing more about these people than their own family members do.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_02: But that I hear over and over, both at Sundance and then at the festivals as they went on.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_02: I have a father, I have an uncle, I have a brother, I have a grandfather who never said anything, and they're gone now and they won't talk about it.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_02: Or veterans in Vietnam who come to watch the film.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_02: That's some of the most powerful stuff.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_02: And they stand up and they'll say one or two things, but they just express gratitude.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_02: And it's hard not to shed a tear in a room like that.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_02: So that started at Sundance and has continued, and I hope it continues as it goes into the world, you know, on Veterans Day.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_02: I hope that the people who are meant to watch it, I hope they do see it and learn about it.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_02: There's not that much time left for people who have been there to see the film.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_00: So well, congratulations on all the success at Sundance.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: That had to be very surreal, and the movie's gonna get out there, and we want nothing but the most success for you and to reach others.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_00: But we're gonna pivot now, Jay, and we're gonna get away from filmmaking and talk about the theatrical experience.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: This is 10 rapid fire questions.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: So you don't have to think about it.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's fun, it's off the cuff, and we do this to all of our guests.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'll do my best after a film about a team that depended on each other for survival.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: This should be a little less stressful.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: So Jason, Jason, you started us off.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, here we go.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: Popcorn or candy?
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: Popcorn, butter or no butter, butter, aisle seat or center seat.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_01: Center, center, better sound.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_01: And how many trailers is too many?
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: I can't have too many trailers.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_01: 30 minutes of trailers.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: 30 minutes.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: I love it.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: Matinee or late night screening.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'll go to matinee because I have young kids.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: So at a favorite movie theater either now or growing up.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, maybe growing up.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_02: We had one called Showplace 16.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know who officially owned it, probably AMC, but I remember yeah, driving my car to that theater.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_02: I remember leaving at night.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you come when it's packed, and at the end there's no cars in the parking lot.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_02: You just come out of a movie.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_02: Showplace 16, Rockford, Illinois, farmtown in northern Illinois.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what was the first movie you remember seeing in a theater?
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_02: In a theater?
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's tougher.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_02: Oof.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_02: In a theater.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_02: The first movie that I remember seeing was Sound of Music and then Ben Her, which are both dual VHS tapes.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_02: So it's four tapes, and my mom would play it because it was me and my two brothers.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_02: And that would keep us occupied for like oh, for sure.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_02: For the whole weekend.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_02: And then yeah, and then we just rewind them and repeat it.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_02: The first theater film that I saw.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_02: I grew up in St.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_02: Louis.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_02: We didn't really go to movies then.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_02: We moved to Rockford and went to Show Place.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I can't.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_02: That's a great question.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna have to sit with that one.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know of the first movie that I went in a theater.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_02: How about the movie you've seen the most in a theater?
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_02: That's a little embarrassing.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_02: I would have been like 14 years old or 15, or I was in sophomore in college when the Lord of the Rings came out.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_02: The theater would be so packed once that there were no seats left, or I was too awkward to kind of like go through, you know, 30 people.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_02: And so I sat on the stairs for the whole movie.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_02: I remember doing that.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's probably the one that I saw the most in the theater.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_02: I was there for it.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, Peter Jackson.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: Nice.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_02: Now, what was the last movie you saw in a theater?
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_02: Last night I went to see uh Resident Evil.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, nice.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_02: So that that's the last one that I saw.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_02: And it's been cool to see Zach Krager's career and approach evolve.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_02: And I was in the mood for a horror film.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_02: Was that a thumbs up then?
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_02: I would say it's a thumbs up.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_02: It's a ride, it's very interesting, lead character, too.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_02: He's just kind of adult, and so you don't really like a D-O-L-T.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_02: Like he's not, he's just not smart.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_02: So it's weird to see that person at the front of a film.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_02: But somebody had watched, I showed Soul Patrol at USC a few nights ago.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_02: There was an audience member who was 14 or 15.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_02: He came up to me and he said that it he was like, This felt like a horror film, like the suspense.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_02: People have probably seen the film if they're listening to this, but the suspense of that ambush mission before that first shot is fired.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_02: And if the sound is mixed right in the theater, the whole audience jumps.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_02: And when that first bullet is fired for the ambush, and so he said it felt like a horror film.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_02: So I felt like going to see a horror film.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a good compliment from a teenager, actually.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you know what?
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_02: It makes me want to look deeper into doing that.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: So on every behind-the-film episode, we have one last question we call the final cut.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: And Glenn, take it away.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: So, Jaden, years from now, when these men are no longer here to tell their story themselves, what do you most want audiences to remember about them?
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_02: I want audiences to remember that they were kids, that they were 18, 19, Mackie's case, 17, you know, and dad's case, 17 and a half when he joined.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_02: To remind us of the responsibility that we have for those that we send to war in the way that we bring them back, that we have this huge responsibility.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_02: And hopefully, this film is evergreen in the sense that unfortunately this is a world that has been at war for as long as we've existed.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_02: This film helps us to think twice about those who we send to war and how we bring them back.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_02: And hopefully not to send them to war at all.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_02: That would be the ultimate hope, but just to see what it does to a human being and to take great care in making a choice like that.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_02: I hope that it has some real-world effect on people and politicians and the decision makers who send these people off into the unknown.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_02: So that's one of my hopes.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: Beautiful.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_00: So, JM, tell us where can people see Soul Patrol?
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_02: Soul Patrol goes into theaters nationwide, this Veterans Day, which is November 11th, and that weekend you can see it all across the country.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_02: So please do bring your friends, bring your family members, especially those who have some connection to Vietnam with the film that will change you.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_02: Nationwide Veterans Day, November 11th.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you, JM, for everything and the best success with the film.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: And like you just said, maybe it makes changes in the world, we hope.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_02: That's the hope.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_00: I'm certainly changed.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, I hope others are by watching it.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for this conversation.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_02: This is really wonderful.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_02: Appreciate it.