Interview - John C. Reilly on The Thin Red Line

John C. Reilly on The Thin Red Line.

“We were up in far north Queensland in the rain forest area of Australia and then for about a month in Guadalcanal. He’s an amazing guy. He’s, despite his reputation, he’s not some Howard Hughes-like hermit figure whose afraid to talk to people. He’s very open and friendly and warm and encouraging. He’s just a very private person. He’s almost like… I heard that he’s studied philosophy before he started directing films, before he made Badlands, when he went to AFI, the American Film Institute, using their first class. He was a philosophy student before that, and it makes sense when you meet him, because it doesn’t really, he doesn’t really seem like a film director. He doesn’t have any of that… he just seems like a truth seeker. He’s someone… I’ll give you an example of a story. We’re making The Thin Red Line and there was this day when there was this army base, and there was hundreds and hundreds of extras and this huge base with tents and trucks, and vintage airplanes taking off and landing. It was this big massive shot, and the camera was gonna’ be in the back of this truck with some of the main actors, myself included, as it drove through the camp.”

“So in order to get the shot, they had to orchestrate this massive group of people, like an entire camp, and they were like, ‘STAND BY! SHOOT THE AIRPLANES! GET THE TRUCKS GOING! OKAY, EXTRAS!’ There was dust everywhere and there was noise, and everybody’s waiting you know, and we’re in the back of the truck, ‘Here we go, here we go…’ and ‘STAND BY!’ And all of a sudden, Terry’s like, ‘Oh look, there’s a Red-Tailed Hawk! Look! John, John [Toll] get the camera! Get the camera! There he is!’ We’re all like [imitating a confused slack-jawed look]. ‘Are we really filming a hawk right now? Are you kidding? There’s airplanes taking off!’ And we sat there for five or ten minutes while he got different angles of this bird flying through the sky, you know, but that’s how, it was like the script didn’t really matter to him, the story didn’t matter, although we shot the script and we shot the story, the movie didn’t really resemble the script by the time he finished editing it. I think that shows real vision, you know, he didn’t let anything distract him from what he found to be truthful or meaningful, whether it was a Red-Tailed Hawk or whether it was a bug landing on a leaf, or whether it was an extra suddenly starting to cry because he was moved by something, or whether it was the main actor doing a speech. So, it was just like he was gathering moments, just taking them with him and then he’d get back and say ‘Let’s turn this into a movie.’” — John C. Reilly on The Thin Red Line