Operation Red Wings of 2005 in Afghanistan is etched in Marcus luttrell’s memory forever because he was the lone survivor of this botched-up American operation. Three of his Navy SEAl teammates were killed, and luttrell, barely survived — found unconscious with a number of fractures, a broken back, numerous shrapnel and gunshot wounds. But today he is glad this incident is being brought to public domain in the form of a Hollywood film. Excerpts from the interview
Now that your book —lone Survivor has become a movie, how does it feelIJ
Most of my closest friends and my family won’t watch the movie. As far as myself, it plays over in my head everyday because I went through it in real life, so when I watched it on screen, basically I would say to myself, ‘I remember that happening. I remember it being worse than that,’ or, ‘You missed something here,’ but what Peter Berg (the director) did from what happened to me in real life to what he put on the screen, I’m absolutely overjoyed. You have to realise, in real life, the gun battle lasted for over three hours and the movie’s only two hours long. My hat’s off to all those stuntmen who laid it on the line and hurt themselves doing what they had to do to get that done because in real life, we all died and the only reason I’m sitting here is because of modern medicine. I’m basically all titanium.
How was the responses from the people after knowing about your experience in Navy SEAl mission in AfghanistanIJ
People always ask me, ‘I don’t know how you could watch that, how that effects you,’ and I just tell them, ‘I went through it in real life, so it’s like pilots watching cyclists watching a bicycle movie,’ something like that. You know that that was as close as you could get, but you want me to take my shirt off and show you what it really looks likeIJ But it’s movie. It’s entertainment and that’s what it’s supposed to be. In real life it’s war and war’s not entertainment. War is old men lying and young men dying kind of deal. That’s a saying; I didn’t make that up.
How true-to-life is the movie adaptationIJ
We could obviously only take so much from real life and put it into a book and you can only take so much from a book and put it into a movie. They had to condense that down to where they had— there’s so much to deal with in Hollywood, budgets, the time constraints, the locations etc.
Is there any classified informationIJ
Yes, some parts were classified. The same with the book. The Seal team just said that we needed to put the story out to squash any rumours that were going around about what happened on the mountain that day. Because they believed that the families would call me and say, ‘Hey, why didn’t you tell me about thisIJ I didn’t know this had happened.’ It happened so much that our higher commander actually said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna’ declassify this.
I was out there for five days and to make a movie like that would have been probably a mini-series or two-part series. So the director did a great job with taking all the information that he had, condensing it and then putting it on the film.
Were you involved in training Mark Wahlberg and other actors for the movieIJ
We made the actors work together as a SEAl team. We worked them from sunup to sundown like a SEAl team. That’s how you create a brotherhood, through blood, pain and sweat. The SEAl teams from the time we start to the time that we either get out or we die, we’re training everyday or we’re fighting everyday, and that's the difference between our unit and the other branches of the military.
Did you have a call on who will be cast in the movie to play your character and that of your colleagues/friends whom you lost back in 2005IJ
Yes, I thought about everyone else, but the guy who was going to play me. Everybody was coming at me from all different directions like, ‘You need to have Matt Damon, Brad Pitt,’ and my reply to them was, ‘Okay, if I have somebody like that playing me, and you go and watch a movie called lone Survivor, who do you think is going to make it off the mountainIJ’ Because in real life, when the parents were at home just sitting by the phone waiting to see which one of us made it off the mountain alive, nobody knew. I wasn’t special. I wasn’t the best frogman out there. I told Pete that he needed to blend the cast with all actors on the same level, so when it goes down and the last guy’s standing, the audience should be like, wow, I didn’t see that coming.’ He picked Mark Wahlberg. I didn’t have a problem with that.
What about the rest of the starcastIJ
Ben Foster was the guy I really liked. That guy is probably one of the best actors in Hollywood in my opinion. Nothing against the other actors — Taylor and Emile, I love those guys like brothers for what they did — but there’s something about Foster. He’s good. I would have loved him to play my part but I let Pete decide.