Directors Scott Waugh and Mike McCoy (l-r, wearing earphones) discuss a scene with their anonymous SEAL leading men.
You won’t see the stars of this Friday’s “Act of Valor” walking the red carpet at the premiere with a Kardashian. You won’t see them regaling Jay Leno with a canned anecdote about something hilarious that happened in their trailer. In fact, you may never even know their names.
The leads in the film are not actors. They’re actual active-duty Navy SEALs, and because of the classified nature of their work — killing Osama bin Laden, for instance — we may never know much more about them than what we see on-screen.
“Act of Valor” is a fictional action picture, but the producers-directors, Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh, got unprecedented cooperation from the Navy and a chance to spend more than two years in the SEALs’ world. The result, they hope, is the most realistic depiction ever of how the military commandos actually operate.
The idea for the movie began within the Navy. After 9/11, the armed forces sought to build their ranks and began more aggressive and creative outreach programs. (The Army, for example, released a popular video game called “America’s Army” in 2002.)
Capt. Duncan Smith, a veteran SEAL, floated the idea of a feature film as a way for outsiders to see how the secretive commandos work and the sacrifices they make. The Navy reviewed four proposals from film studios and ultimately chose the one from McCoy and Waugh, who’d previously shot a short film about the SEALs.
The directors initially considered using actors but quickly changed their minds. “When you meet an active-duty US Navy SEAL, he has a look,” Waugh says. “He has an intensity and an aura that’s almost impossible to replicate. He may have been on active duty for 20 years. How can an actor re-create that?”
McCoy and Waugh identified eight SEALs that they wanted to star in the film. All eight declined. The SEALs didn’t feel comfortable being in the spotlight and preferred to go about their work. “We became friends with them and said, ‘This is an opportunity for you guys to have a hand in the film and make sure it’s done accurately and authentically,’ ” Waugh says. “They thought about it for the better part of a month, and they began to trust us.”
The SEALs are capable of doing all sorts of dangerous jobs, but one thing that might be out of their comfort zone is acting.
“The difference on this film is they’re not actors playing characters, they’re playing themselves,” McCoy says. “We had to encourage them to be themselves and not worry about us.”
Screenwriter Kurt Johnstad created a story that finds the team rescuing a captured CIA operative (actress Roselyn Sanchez) and stopping a Chechen terrorist from bombing American cities.
Much of the SEALs’ dialogue was rewritten by the men themselves so that it sounded the way they actually talk. The stars also provided a blueprint for the action scenes.
“We’d tell them, ‘We have a bad guy, he’s on a yacht in the middle of the ocean. He’s got two counter-piracy boats [protecting him].’ They’d bring out the whiteboards and design the entire ops plans,” McCoy says. “We would develop the camera plan around that.”
In the scene in which the SEALs storm the yacht to snatch the bad guy, the ops plan involved the military overtaking the boat with two heavily armed ships and destroying the counter-piracy vessels with heavy guns while the rest of the team rappels onto the yacht from a helicopter.
Because the SEALs were forbidden from neglecting their usual duties to participate in the film, many of the action scenes in “Act of Valor” also served as training missions. Some of the locations, including a jungle drug den and the 180-foot yacht, were provided by the filmmakers, but the action that unfolds was part of their training regimen. The filmmakers simply set up cameras — often as many as 12 — and captured it.
The directors were given control over all aspects of the film, with the exception of final cut. The Navy reserved the right to excise any security compromises. One cut detail involved a scene in which the SEALs storm a drug dealer’s compound; the formation used to approach the house wasn’t shown.
When the film was conceived, no one in Hollywood was interested because of the lack of stars. So the directors raised the $20 million budget themselves. (The Navy’s cooperation made it considerably cheaper to shoot.) Just as filming wrapped last year, news of Osama bin Laden’s May 2 death broke. Suddenly, SEAL Team 6 were international heroes and Relativity Media snapped up the rights for a reported $13 million.
“Act of Valor” recalls another military-friendly flick, “Top Gun,” that also relied on collaboration with the Pentagon. The 1986 blockbuster helped spike enlistement. But Waugh and McCoy aren’t worried about whether the film is propaganda. “First of all, you see sacrifice in this film. Second, the Navy is in a position of downsizing,” Waugh says. “We had one goal when we started this film and that was that the guys would want to drink a beer with us when this was all done,” McCoy says. “They still want to drink beer with us.”