On my last day of SXSW, the final film I screened was Vincent Grashaw’s dramatic thriller, Coldwater (review here). Later in the day I had the chance to interview the director and the lead actor but I also had an opportunity to sit down with the voice of Frank Woods from COD: Black Ops 2, actor James C. Burns, who plays the antagonist in this film Colonel Frank Reichert along with the producer of the film Joe Bilotta. Check out the entertaining interview below and, if you get the opportunity, be sure to check out Coldwater, it’s a really good feature. (Oh, and I do realize that SXSW is long over but I really enjoyed this interview and it deserves to be poster)
Alex DiGiovanna: How did you get involved with this film?
James C. Burns: I had this felony charge and Joe promised. Na here’s the deal. Call of Duty had me going back to back for COD 2, then I was on a film in Utah for six weeks and the call came in for this, I said what’s the story because basically this character, if you took Frank Woods from Black Ops 2 when he loses his shit, that’s basically the Colonel so it was a very easy rollover, well not easy, but it just made sense, I didn’t have to do any dynamic changes, I just kind of kept doing what I was doing and I just rolled it right into Coldwater, that’s why it just made sense to me. How did they find me? I have no idea. I think I was in the gutter someplace and Joe felt sorry for me, so you know, give that guy an opportunity cause no one else will, that kind of thing.
AD: In terms of your character, when I was ready to watch the movie and you’re first introduced, I was expecting the Drill Sergeant from Full Metal Jacket, was it your idea to kind of scale back be this sensitive figure?
JCB: I always insist on, I call these characters the antagonists, nobody is evil, you get there over time or the most evil deeds are done with the best intentions in mind. So here is a guy who truly believes he can effect change in these young men. He has done it, he’s done it in the marine core, he’s turned lives around, and he’s very effective at doing his job. This is what I learned from touring with the USO, what happens when he leaves the military is that all this structure you have: you’re fed, your whole life is basically given to you. You have this huge structure and all you have to do is your job and so his job was to transform boys into men. And he had this huge institution behind him, he had subordinates who were capable and what he didn’t add into the equation was that he didn’t have the same support mechanism around him. So things he took for granted came back to bite him, he didn’t have great support staff, he promoted people and that is great in military because you have all this other pressure to keep them in line, he’s on his own, he has no wife, he has no emotional support system, he has no friend system that’s there with him so all of a sudden the Colonel is stuck in a situation [in which] he doesn’t have the right support to do the job properly so he turns to what he knows best and he becomes more aggressive because he knows what to do but he just doesn’t have the environment to prove it to the kids and that’s where it all falls apart for the Colonel.
That’s when he has a drink and so one lapse in judgment and he starts to drink leads to another lapse in judgment and all of a sudden it’s a downward spiral and that’s where it goes. And what’s great about the film, and Vince and I talked about this at length, is about having it be grey areas. Like the kids are there not because they’re innocent, it’s not like this evil Colonel, these innocent kids, they’re not angels, they’re there because they fucked up and so now you have this great arc but these aren’t innocent kids but do they deserve this? And you know you have this wonderful mix, well here’s this guy who had great intentions but he loses himself along the way and here’s these kids with an odd start and can they redeem themselves, can these two elements cross in the middle and effect the change but obviously not, or rather a change for the better I should say.
AD: Now that you mention some of these things and I’m thinking, the way he promotes the kids to essentially be his support staff, throughout the film he almost had a hands off approach to what they were doing to a certain extent and do you think if the Colonel was around for all of it it would have been different cause it almost seemed like he encouraged some of the things like the beating?
Joe Bilotta: You know, one of the things that we did in the movie that was a reality based thing is that you have that, you’ll have a football coach where his assistant coach is a pedophile or you’ll have a group where you’ll have the captain of a football team and the coach has no idea that he set up this hazing ritual for the kids and so it’s just almost a delusional thing when someone so confident in their abilities like the Colonel doesn’t even think that the people that he promoted to these positions would be doing these unthinkable acts so he’s as much surprised, there not under his mandate, the kicking and the hosing and that’s kind of the reality of it.
AD: Good point
JCB: It’s also part in partial to what rick did before, in the military a Colonel would not be dealing with a corporal, he would deal with chain of command and again that’s part of his miscalculation of his environment. He has a merit based achievement idea so you do certain things you show certain behaviors you get promoted, just like in the military you pass certain levels of tests, accomplishment, you get promoted, now he miscalculated the fact that some of these kids are not ready to handle certain kinds of responsibility and, again, like what the military does, you teach responsibility by giving responsibility here, now, do it. You know and then you’re allowed to make your mistakes, and so you say ok you train through the mistakes, you teach them about the mistake first that’s why in boot camp he puts them through these very stressful environments where they make their mistakes and then you teach them, ok, you screwed this up, let me tell you why, let’s go back and do it again. So when it comes in combat that reaction is already engrained to be the right reaction, what he didn’t have was he didn’t have enough repetition and he just miscalculated the ability of the people he’s promoting to do the job correctly, he didn’t add in the rest of the flaws and dysfunction cause, again, he was used to having subordinate command institutions around him to suppress and keep them in order. It’s part of the whole idea of how to be in command and plus he’s busy, he’s got shit to do.
AD: It’s true. So is that why, was it under his mandate or was it the mandate of his subordinates, the whole hosing of when they first arrived.
JB: He was looking the other way so to speak. You get these guys under control, he says let them spend a little time in isolation I don’t think he mandated the hosing, I know that towards the end in his frustration he did mandate some of the other stuff but I thought it was the ultimate example of the peter principle where he had promoted beyond their capabilities and so those issues all play in this movie, it’s simple but it’s intricate.
JCB: Again, the Colonel is very pragmatic. I don’t know if you’ve ever been around youths at risk, I ran a house for kids at risk in NY up in the Berkshires and a lot of these guys come from environments where they are not taught hygiene, so the hosing is an extension of, you come in, you’ve got to delouse them, you’ve got to hose them, just like being in prison, you’ve got to clean them up and I think, again, the hosing just became a deterioration. You know there’s a bit of sadism in these guys to do this stuff and they saw how much discomfort there was and so the hosing is there to basically clean them and getting them right and then this became more of a torture device. They saw how uncomfortable it made them so we will clean you up with it but we’ll keep cleaning you and it’s also he would condone that it’s telling you hey, you gotta clean up, it’s a shock and it’s a non-lethal shock, it’s something where it’s going to teach you a lesson, like hey, don’t do that anymore. It’s like training a dog, you give it lessons by inflicting discomfort and water is just discomfort you know what I mean?
AD: You can both answer this, a lot of the cast was comprised of first time actors, you know it takes a lot of trust to invest a lot of money in a lot of novices, why did you decide to go through with it and what was it like working with a lot of first time actors?
JCB: First off, knowing Joe for a while now, he’s an artist, he comes off as this business guy but he’s a musician, he see’s beyond just what’s on the page, I can’t say enough about the set of balls he has and for his insight to see inside the script, so it’s a risk but I also know he’s enough of an artist to see the possibilities and that’s all you can ask from an investor, you know, see the possibilities. As for working with the young guys, I spent a lot of time with the military, Call of Duty is a young audience and I love being around young guys. I was a hockey coach for 20 years so I love the teenage energy, I love that male high energy, high strung and that’s what we had. This was a great group of kids, not just the film’s set camaraderie bullshit, I mean I like all these guys, these kids were great, they were fun, high energy, smart, great sense of humor, they could take a ribbin’, they could give a ribbin’, it was like being on a hockey team again, like being on a real team.
JB: They were good guys
JCB: As far as their acting stuff goes, not once did I get on a scene with a kid who was not prepared. They were prepared, everybody came in prepared, you can’t ask for anything more than that. I’ve been around pros, I’ve been on Call of Duty and people didn’t know their frickin’ lines. Now these kids, everyone came in ready to do it, to adjust to changes, to make adaptations of story and environment, it was a real perfect storm. Joe with his openness to possibilities, this cast that was really eager to do well because everyone had a chance to do something big here and it was a great opportunity for me to be involved with that.
Joe: Not only that, it went as far as my musicians at my studio, I have a recording studio called Flying Pig Productions, we wrote everything in that film, all of the scores, we wrote the opera and we translated it and it was good people all the way from top to bottom who knew what they were doing and were happy to do it.
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