Gregor Jordan is an Australian director who first got recognition after his short film "Swinger" took the Jury Prize for Best Short Film at the 1995 Cannes film festival. A second short, "Stitched," followed that same year. After having success working in Australian television, Jordan released his first feature "Two Hands" in 1999. "Two Hands" was a fast paced gangster comedy set in Sydney's Kings Cross district. Written and directed by Jordan, the film stared Bryan Brown and Heath Ledger and was a big hit in Australia. It took five prizes at the Australian Film Institute Awards, including Best Feature, Best Director and Best Screenplay. "Buffalo Soldiers" is Jordan's second feature film. His third film, "Ned Kelly," due out next year also stars Heath Ledger together with Orlando Bloom.

Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Jordan when he passed through Atlanta on a publicity tour for his film "Buffalo Soldiers." The film was actually set to be released soon after 911, but due to its subject matter Miramax decided it would be better to wait awhile. Finally, it will be released on July 25th, and it is a film for which co-writer and director Jordan is very proud (with good reason). The strong cast features Joaquin Phoenix, Ed Harris, Scott Glenn, and Anna Paquin. After viewing the film and quite enjoying it, I was wanted to pick Jordan's brain. EI gave me the chance to do so.

Entertainment Insiders: Why make "Buffalo Soldiers?"

Gregor Jordan: Well is guess it was just something really different. I mean there were a lot of things. I first heard about it through one of the agents at ICM which is my American agent. They said there's this film about bored soldiers in West Germany during the Cold War that get up to no good because they've got no war to fight. I just went, that sounds interesting. I got sent a copy of the book and there was a quote by Nietzsche that started the book which said, "When there is peace, the warlike man attacks himself." I just went that's a really interesting idea because it's this notion that war is something that a lot of people out there actually really like, and they want, and if there's no war they'll kind of make one. I thought it really goes against the themes of a lot of war movies, you know that war is this terrible thing that we should try to avoid at all costs, and it takes a terrible effect on young people. I had never really seen it expressed in that way and then also I guess depicting that world of West Germany and these big army bases that were there. You know I had never seen that in a film before, and so I just saw it as an opportunity to do something quite different.

EI: I know you did an adaptation of the screenplay. What elements did you add that weren't really in the book?

Jordan: Well, the book was very bleak in its tone, Elwood was a junkie who gets his girlfriend into heroin, and he kills someone and hires prostitutes. He's a much nastier kind of character, and I guess the whole world that is depicted is much more violent, and bleak, and nasty. I sort of thought trying to work out the tone was one thing and I guess I just didn't want to make a film that was gonna be depressing. I wanted the film to be kind of fun, and you know have an energy to it that would make people want to watch it. Also, the book was reasonable structureless or very fractured in its narrative style. It sort of had lots of stories all taking place simultaneously and a lot of them not ending up anywhere. There were flash backs and flash forwards and it was very hard to work out what the actual story was. I guess adapting it involved really working out the story by sort of saying "O.K. the A story is Elwood and Sgt. Lee, and then the B story is Elwood and Col. Berman." And then constructing the plot lines and having them intersect at some point with this tone in mind.

A lot of the best scenes in the film come strait from the book and a lot of actually really great lines come strait from the book. But, I guess it involved quite a bit of creation and also really trying to get into the character and Elwood's head a lot as well. I reset the film to the Berlin wall. It was originally set in 1983. But also I created this sort of idea about falling which was kind of there in the book. I mean he falls out the window at the end and he does the scene on the diving board as well and Robin is a diver. I guess I sort of added to that idea and created this metaphor for the bomb and this self-destructive nihilistic character of Elwood as well.

EI: That touches on one of my other questions. Just how do you see the significance of Elwood's falling dream and how does that work into everything?

Jordan: When I was thinking about the film and the time that it was set which I remember very well. It came out of this period where people thought we're gonna die in a nuclear war. They sort of looked up all the time to see if someone was gonna drop a bomb on their head. At the time it was not a question of if it was gonna happen but when. People really thought they were gonna die in a nuclear war, and they weren't gonna live to old age. I thought about the subliminal psychological affect it had on everyone, but also just on a specific character like Elwood and how he is quite fucked up and he is quite nihilistic. I guess he just takes that idea to an extreme believing he is gonna die and so really all he needs to do is sort of not be bored and find a way of distracting himself from thinking about that. That's what life is for him. He says, "life for me is about distractions."

I took that idea about having nightmares about the bomb and Elwood takes it one step further and he dreams that he actually is the bomb.

EI: The film has really got a sort of antimilitary tone in that none of the military characters really have any redeeming qualities. I mean you like Elwood, but he's a bastard himself. How well do you think that's gonna go over in the current political climate?

Jordan: I don't think it is necessarily antimilitary. I guess its sort of looking at a problem. It's looking at the military in a slightly more realistic way than a lot of films really do. I mean there's this idea that we should sort of pretend that the military is this sort of perfect, absolutely efficient, glorious institution, but the reality is its not. It's actually very complicated and those kinds of elements are present there but they're mixed in with a lot of other things. For me to pretend that the army is somehow perfect I think is just bullshit. This is looking at an area of the military and a time and place in history that's real. This really happened. I mean it's a work of fiction, put it this way there's nothing in the film that didn't really happen.

I've got a lot of statistics, which are Pentagon documents on murder rates military bases, suicides, and accidental deaths. There were between 25 and 30 murders per year on these bases. Literally billions of dollars worth of weapons were stolen. They just went missing and were never recovered. Drug use was so rife that they actually started instituting drug testing. We had this military adviser on the film that was an ex-US Army Ranger and he put it really well. He said, "look, I spent 13 years in the military and I'm very proud of the military and I'm really proud of my country. But I don't pretend that the military is perfect. To me it's like any big organization and its open to corruption. I really hate military movies that somehow depict army life as this sort of utopic, idyllic thing and army movies that somehow sanitize or glorify life in the army. It's not all rosy some of it is horrible." He went on to say, " the weird thing is your film is actually much closer to my experience in the military than any other film I've seen, and I really appreciate that for its honesty."

EI: I remember somebody saying that "Apocalypse Now" was the closest to realism of any of the Vietnam movies and that it showed there was more going on.

Jordan: My father was in Vietnam. He was in the Australian Air Force, and he was always saying that he hates war movies because they're all bullshit. I asked him what he thought about "Apocalypse Now." He said, "I thought it was pretty good, but I felt like they didn't have enough money to really do it properly." I said what do you mean and he goes. "well the chopper strike, you know that famous scene of the strike on the village, there was about ten or twelve helicopters. When one of those cavalry units would hit a village there'd be over a hundred helicopters," He said the whole thing just seemed sort of unrealistic. With something like that which is really a famous moment in cinema is not really all that accurate in how it depicts the reality of the situation. I guess historically in movies people are so touchy about trying to depict the military accurately. So I don't know, it's really complicated.

EI: You said that most of the significant events are true even the tank scene. I think that was one of the greatest scenes, but was there actually a tank that ran over a gas station?

Jordan: Well, there was a tank that ran over a VW Beetle, but in the real life event, the people didn't get out of the car. I actually had that in an earlier draft of the script, but people just said it's too nasty and too bleak. "Buffalo Soldiers" might seem slightly farcical, but if anything it's actually toned down from what really happened. What really happened was way worse.

EI: Where did you get the tanks?

Jordan: There are people in Germany who own tanks. You got to think there was between 350,000 and 500,000 troops permanently stationed in Germany for 45 years. So there's a huge amount of military equipment, and uniforms that just gets decommissioned and then gets sold to private companies. The tanks were a little bit different, because a tank is obviously such a dangerous weapon that you can't just go and sell a tank to anyone. In fact, when the US Army decommissioned M1 Tanks they're pretty careful about who they give them to and usually they scrap them. These were actually German Leopard Tanks that were refitted to look like American M1 Tanks. They were owned by private people who were ex-military.

They were actually tank drivers from the German army. So we were just able to rent them and they came complete with a driver.

EI: What was it like shooting in Germany and setting up an army base there?

Jordan: It was fantastic. We found this base that had been abandoned by the Americans about five years earlier. Before the Americans came it was actually a German Army base built in the 1930's by the Nazis, so there were a lot of ghosts in the corridors there.

When the American Military moved out they just locked the doors and left so the place was really in perfect condition. All we had to do was mow the lawn. It was great because we were able to use it as our production offices and our interior and exterior locations. We had editing suites there, and makeup rooms, and the costume department was there. There were so many buildings there to be able to use. It was really like a little studio lot out there in Germany, and it just made everything so easy.

EI: What is the origin and significance of the soldiers walking on the American Flag in the opening sequence?

Jordan: It was actually inspired by something that was real. A friend of mine lived in West Germany and he was saying he visited one of the American Bases. He said he would never forget the massive stars and stripes flag painted in the middle of the parade ground so you could see it from the air. I was just thinking that's so bizarre because the soldiers would actually be marching on it and walking on their own flag, but it was real. Did anyone not think about that? I thought it was a striking image to put in the film, and I guess it has a metaphorical significance as well of these guys being disrespectful, but it was real.

EI: How did you decide on Joaquin Phoenix for the role of Elwood?

Jordan: Casting is an interesting process. You start with literally 150 names and then you whittle it down to ten and then down to five and then down to one. I guess Joaquin was always the favorite because he was the right age, he was the right sort of price, and he had a great range for it. When I looked at all his stuff I couldn't really see a lot of similarities between any two performances. He is just incredibly dynamic as an actor. I guess what he brought to it is the one thing he seems to have in all his characters which is this sensitivity, but also a real darkness. There is something quite pained about him, and I thought that was really important to the essence of this character of Elwood. There were other elements of the character that I saw in different performances. Also, I wanted people to be fascinated by the character, but I didn't want people to like him too much. I didn't want to send out the message that what he was doing was O.K. There's something about Joaquin as an actor that is very charming and charismatic, but there's something also sort of slightly shifty about him as well. I think if you had cast Leonardo in the role it might have sent out the wrong message that what he's doing is actually O.K.

EI: Is it true that Ed Harris was originally intended to play Sgt. Lee rather than Col. Berman?

Jordan: When we were looking at casting those two characters we sort of realized that there were a lot of actors who could play both. I was just thinking Ed Harris would be great to play Col. Berman. But the politics of casting are such that I was told you can't offer him that role you have to offer him the role of the Sergeant because it's a better, juicier role. So we actually offered him the role of the Sergeant and he came back and said, "well you know I really like the script, but I've played the tough Vietnam Vet before. I really like the role of the Colonel." So he kind of cast himself in the role.

EI: When can we expect your next film "Ned Kelly" to open in the States and will it be renamed "The Kelly Gang?"

Jordan: What happened there was there was actually a MGM film with Mick Jagger made in the seventies, and we wanted to use the same title. There was just a period were they had to go through the whole legal protocol to get the rights to the title. So during that period we were in preproduction and we weren't allowed to call it "Ned Kelly," we had to call it "The Kelly Gang," but it was always gonna be called "Ned Kelly." It is coming out here early next year, and it is coming out in September in the U.K.

EI: What project are you working on currently?

Jordan: Well, I've started looking at some books and interesting things. I'm talking with some people about them but I haven't signed any deals yet. I plan to sit down and start writing again in September, but I don't have anything amazing to talk about yet.

Gregor Jordan was a terrific interview and his new film "Buffalo Soldiers," which IS pretty damned amazing at times, opens Friday.

Jackson Giles