Randall Wallace
He's a former preacher and Scots-Irish "hillbilly" who has fought his way into Tinseltown. As a screenwriter and director, he has produced some of the most popular-and best-films of the last decade, without drifting away from real Americans and their moral worldview.
Screenwriter and director Randall Wallace is a man on a mission to bring the values of America's heartland to Hollywood. Born in Tennessee of Scots-Irish and Southern Baptist stock, he studied theology at Duke and became a minister before discovering storytelling as another way to spread the beliefs at the core of his upbringing. His first major success as a screenwriter was one of the greatest of modern movies: 1995 Academy Award-winner Braveheart. Wallace followed up by writing and directing The Man In the Iron Mask and the Vietnam War gem We Were Soldiers.
Wallace's latest work, Love and Honor, takes an early American patriot on a secret mission to the court of Russia's Catherine the Great. TAE's Scott Walter and Daniel Kennelly sat down with Wallace to discuss books, war movies, morality in Hollywood, Celtic America, religion, and other topics.
TAE: Some of the reviewers of Love and Honor said it's a novel that feels like a movie. Do you find yourself thinking about both media when you write?
WALLACE: It's a double-edged sword to have done stories that people know as films: Braveheart, Pearl Harbor. We Were Soldiers was a book first and so was The Man In the Iron Mask, but they were adaptations of other people's books. I started as a novelist and had four novels before I was ever in the movie business. I worked on Love and Honor for four years as a novel before I ever wrote it as a screenplay. The fact that I do both helps me concentrate on the story to make it more entertaining and more focused thematically. Love and Honor was originally 1,600 pages long. When I wrote it as a screenplay, that helped me boil it down and decide what the heart of the story really needed to be.
TAE: Love and Honor is set during America's Revolutionary War. How did you settle on that era? Do you see any resonance between that period and our time?
WALLACE: I do. "Love" and "honor" aren't archaic concepts, and I certainly think that there are striking similarities and striking differences between their age and ours.
One difference is that people once were so motivated to fight for freedom that they went out and stood in battlefields to assert their right. Now we have elections and a surprising number of people don't even bother to go to the polls to be counted. On the other hand, in 1776 there were plenty of people who were against the Revolution. It may have been that half the populace didn't really want to take a stand. That timidity may be characteristic of humanity in every age. There are those who will get out and take a vivid and muscular stand for something, and those who will withdraw.
TAE: It seems a lot of your novels and screenplays end up having wartime connections. Is there a particular reason for this?
WALLACE: I've fretted some about why war and love are always linked in my work. The way I understand it is that war puts love into context. It's one thing to talk about what you cherish, but it's another to do so when that may actually cost you your life. I think you aren't wholly alive until you know what you would be willing to give your life for.
At the same time, I'm looking these days for a way to tell stories in which there isn't such a demand in the story for life and death. Love and Honor is the first tale I've written in many years in which the people we care about the most are still alive at the end!
TAE: What human qualities tend to be highlighted in time of war?
WALLACE: Times of stress expose the best and the worst in people. One of the company commanders who fought in the battle described in We Were Soldiers told me that in critical situations the thin veneer of civilization is stripped away. When people are terrified, they revert to savagery, and it's only leadership that prevents that from happening.
TAE: Do you think that it's likely any great films or books will come out of the Iraq war?
WALLACE: Not for a while. I think that people have to digest events and gain some perspective. A great story has to get beyond the individual facts, into the heart and soul of events. Certainly the actions in the current war are just as fertile as any for great stories, but I think it will take us some time to get a perspective on them.
TAE: Is this why it took 30 years for Hollywood to make We Were Soldiers--a Vietnam War movie that those involved in the battles appreciate and finally thought captured their experience?
WALLACE: It did take a long time to digest the issue. But my sense is that We Were Soldiers is about something timeless, not topical. Filmmakers sometimes want to argue the specifics of politics and interpretation, but a great story touches timeless themes of loyalty, and what you are willing to sacrifice your comfort for. I don't believe that courage and love and hope existed only in the past. But we had to get far enough out from the Vietnam War for people to be willing to listen to the fact that those soldiers didn't start the war, and were human beings, and that their families made sacrifices.
One of the sons of General Moore, the man who led the assault in the Ia Drang Valley depicted in We Were Soldiers, said to me that no one had ever described what it's like to be an eight- or nine-year-old boy watching television and have the TV news say that your father's unit is being hit by human wave assaults. He sat in his living room at Fort Benning, Georgia and had that experience.
TAE: You went to Army Ranger School before doing We Were Soldiers. Did you do the full course?
WALLACE: I did two weeks. The full course is 61 days. I don't know if my body could have held up to the battering for 61 days, but I sure would have liked to try it. I wanted to be a participant. I didn't want to be an observer. To be a writer, you have to be inspired. You have to inspire others, so first you have to inspire yourself.
I wrote to General Moore when I was making my first film, The Man In the Iron Mask, about the struggles I was going through--under-budgeted, in a foreign country, with a staff that I hadn't pulled together myself, surrounded by people I felt all wanted my job. Moore wrote back and said the job of a leader is to pull his own morale out of the mud. He's got to grab himself by the scruff of the neck. So quit complaining and start leading. I believed when I started making We Were Soldiers that I needed to toughen myself up and demonstrate my commitment, and then others would be inspired by that example.
TAE: Tell us a bit about where you were born, and how you grew up.
WALLACE: I was born in west Tennessee in a town called Jackson. My grandmother owned a country store with a pot belly stove right in the middle, so all the farmers would come in and hang out there, especially in the wintertime when the work was slower, and they visited and told their stories. I made a desk out of sacks of pig feed behind the stove and sat and wrote my own stories. Their stories opened up my imagination.
TAE: When did you start writing?
WALLACE: Oh, you know, I wrote stories my whole life. When I was a seven-year-old in the second grade in Memphis, my teacher told us we were supposed to submit poems for a citywide poetry contest. So I wrote one and turned it in. A few days later she announced which poems were being submitted, and mine wasn't on the list. I asked, "I thought I wrote a good poem, what happened?" She said, "No, you copied your poem out of some book. I haven't been able to find the book, but I know you did." I was really flattered. It was the first encouragement I had as a writer.
TAE: What about your religious life?
WALLACE: I grew up a Southern Baptist, with tent revivals. That had a profound effect on me. And not just the preaching. What I saw in the examples of my parents' lives was much more profound than the preaching I was constantly exposed to. But the power of narrative is huge in that-the storytelling, the oratory, the King James Bible, the music and the magic of that, the poetry of worship and the hymns of the Baptist church. There's nothing like 600 Baptists standing up singing at the top of their lungs. The faith is conveyed, I think, in the lyrics of those songs even more than the sermons and music.
I went to Duke University and majored in religion. Duke's of Methodist heritage, and it was where I first came across John Wesley's statement that if our hearts are together, there is no reason for us to argue.
TAE: A fascination for Russia shines through in Love and Honor. Where does that fascination come from?
WALLACE: It was at Duke when I first fell in love with the magic and mystery of Russia. A couple of my teachers were survivors of the siege of Leningrad, a 900-day siege in World War II. They exposed me to writers like Pushkin and Chekhov, writers who cared about the human spirit, who were writing primarily about that. Chekhov wrote a story in which he said, "There should be a man who runs through every village in the world and bangs on the front doors and yells 'do good, do good.'" Only a Russian would think of that.
TAE: Did you serve in the military?
WALLACE: I was going to sign up. I had the papers and permission from my father to sign up for the Marine Corps-in the Platoon Leader Corps. You take basic training through the summers in college, and when you graduate you're commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Marine Corps as platoon leader. I wanted to do that. I thought it was my war and my place. And then the My Lai massacre happened, and I started to think, This war is really different. It's not the Confederate cavalry at the gates of Richmond keeping the Yankees away from our women. This is a different war and I've got to figure out what my place should be in it.
TAE: Had anyone in your family served in the military?
WALLACE: My father had not. He was a bit young when World War II had broken out and then he had a number of physical problems. One of my uncles, my mother's eldest brother, had been at Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge and so he was the veteran I knew the best. He had suffered a great deal. Those guys had gone through massive emotional experiences. He couldn't even speak of the war. In our little hometown there in Tennessee, there had been 12 guys who had gone, and only two had come back alive, and he was one of them.
TAE: What interested you in the Marine Corps?
WALLACE: I just thought they were the most hard core. If you're going to go into a fight, you want to go into it with guys who are stubborn and dedicated and determined to win, and I perceived that as being the Marines.
TAE: Is there something to James Webb's thesis about the importance of the Scots-Irish in America? From your description of your own upbringing, you're a page out of his book, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America.
WALLACE: The premise of his story is that the American character has been deeply stamped by this group of people who are our least recognized ethnic group, and in some ways the least valued. There's no lobby for hillbillies, if you will. Yet when wars have broken out, they've been the ones who have signed up in vastly disproportionate numbers. (See TAE's interview with James Webb, March/April 1997.)
The Scots-Irish assertion, which is the essential American assertion, that leaders will not be accepted who don't come from within our people and embody our values, has made America what it is today. Other groups came to this country with notions like the divine right of kings. The Scots-Irish came with the idea that, if you think you are going to tell us what to do, you're mistaken. And then of course there's the cultural vitality, the music, the poetry, the delight of life that came with the Scots-Irish.
TAE: The standard, sophisticated American view is that these people are rednecks and lunkheads. Why do liberal elites have that condescending view of the rural, heavily Southern, religious, scrappy Americans who descended from the Scots-Irish? And why do you think these unappreciated folks are so often impressive as leaders, musicians, poets, and warriors?
WALLACE: The essential difference is whether you live from your heart or from your head. A Persian proverb says, "When the heart is willing, it'll find a thousand ways, and when it's unwilling, it'll find a thousand excuses." To me, the most distinctive aspect of regular Americans is that they judge from their hearts.
Hollywood does not believe that these people actually exist. Hence it was utterly stunned that The Passion did well at all, much less became arguably the most successful movie in history. Braveheart was lumped by many reviewers into the summer "action film" category, along with Die Hard 2. If people see only what's trendy, what's connected to fashion, they aren't going to appreciate the kind of people who lined up in droves to enlist when Pearl Harbor happened.
Many elites believe their thought processes make them superior to others. Like many regular Americans, I value character traits and believe that courage and honor make a person superior. People of the mountains have always celebrated those personal qualities. Far too frequently, when people live in big cities, they lose the sense of how important character is.
TAE: Do you think Hollywood takes a hit financially because of its inability to appreciate moral and religious concepts?
WALLACE: Absolutely. Hollywood misses its audience by failing to appreciate that those traditional values and desires are shared by most of the people in this country. Whenever there's a movie that a family can go watch together, and it's a great story, those movies do tremendously well. They're vast profit centers. Yet they are seldom made. Again, Braveheart is an example. It's probably bigger now in terms of the public consciousness than it was when it first came out.
But here's the problem. If you go to a Hollywood studio and pitch them a television show, as I have, even if they loved Braveheart, We Were Soldiers, and the other films, they're thinking, Our biggest show last week was Paris Hilton. Is the guy who brought us Braveheart going to bring us Paris Hilton?
TAE: How do you counteract that?
WALLACE: I've never been out to try to talk other people into being a Baptist or a Presbyterian, and I'm certainly not trying to talk them into my political point of view. I want to share with them what moves me.
It's my responsibility, if I have these values, to tell a great story. To tell a story that's compelling. Not preaching at people, but involving them emotionally. If I tell a great enough story, then my values will come through. It's not like I'm trying to make a Trojan horse for my values. It's that I want to be a powerful storyteller, and the engine of all that is what I believe in my heart.
TAE: Are the highest levels of Hollywood really as devoid of people who are religious or culturally traditional as a lot of people think?
WALLACE: Yes.
TAE: Ben Stein has long said that if you're talking to studio executives, it's a moral wasteland. But if you're talking to make-up artists or gaffers or other rank-and-file workers in the industry, the values are much more traditional.
WALLACE: He's right. I hasten to add, it's not that studio executives don't love their children, don't want them to grow up in a decent world. But Hollywood is part of a larger world that is in the midst of a battle between cynicism and faith. The same struggle is going on in politics, even in the church itself.
When I was a divinity student, I worked as an intern at a powerful and thriving church in North Carolina. Within the church there were wonderful people, and there were political battles. I'm always a bit amused when people say the church is full of hypocrites. Well, I hope so. Where else should they be?
In the Army, which sometimes has values that are better than even the society it protects, there are still people of moral cowardice. But the ones with courage and faith are the ones who stand up, and will always appear to stand alone. In any group, including Hollywood, everyone wants to be an inspiration. But that takes courage.
TAE: Can you point to any people or institutions that are helping those kinds of artists in Hollywood? Mel Gibson is obviously trying to do some of this. Are there other people or institutions trying to help hold a beachhead for moral virtue in the entertainment industry?
WALLACE: I'll tell you something I see happening now that I haven't seen in Hollywood the past couple of decades I've been there. I think individual churches are more vibrant now than they have been in the past. I'm not sure why. I think 9/11 was a turning point. I never saw churches as filled and as passionate as then. That's true across the country.
Tolstoy said in War and Peace that one man throwing down his rifle and running back through his own army screaming, "we've lost, we've lost," can panic your entire army. But in a panicked army, one man snatching up the battle flag and running toward the enemy can rally your whole army.
It's not up to me to look around and count up who's with me. It's up to me to stand up and say. This is who I am. People who do that often attract followers.
TAE: You and Mel Gibson have collaborated several times, on Braveheart and We Were Soldiers. Is he a work colleague or a personal friend?
WALLACE: One of the things I try hard to do is to respect private relationships and not use them. I have a real personal admiration and affection for him, and I hope and believe he does for me as well. Our pasts have borne that out. I think in Braveheart and again in We Were Soldiers the guy who grew up a Catholic in Australia and the guy who grew up a Southern Baptist in Tennessee found we had something profoundly in common--which was the belief that movies are like human beings, if they don't have a spirit, they're dead things.
TAE: How do the different perspectives of an Australian Catholic and a Tennessee Southern Baptist meet?
WALLACE: Our contrasting backgrounds give us some different perspective on things, but we share much more common ground. We discuss the nature of God, the nature of forgiveness, the nature of love. How often in Hollywood does that happen? As opposed to talking about a new guru who can give you enlightenment in 15 minutes or less. Mel Gibson doesn't have that perspective, and neither do I. He takes his faith profoundly seriously, and that's been the basis for a lot of discussions, not just about how one applies faith to the world, but on how we stand directly with God.
I think it was Karl Barth who said "Religion is man's way to God and is always erroneous. Revelation is God's way to man and is always perfect." Mel and I both try to work in that direction.
TAE: Having done a lot of historical fiction yourself, do you think Americans still love our history, and are we taught it well enough?
WALLACE: Appreciation for history is a function of age. As people grow older, they appreciate history more because they start to value experience in time. I think we could be taught better, because history is so alive. One of the great things about being a Southerner is that Southerners don't believe that history is past. History is in us. Its stories tell us who we are. We're part of a tradition that instructs us as to what it means to be a man, what it means to be honorable, and so forth.
TAE: Are you ever going to take on the Civil War in a novel or on the screen?
WALLACE: I would love to write about the Civil War. I even tried to sell a network on a television idea. That was where I encountered the problem about studio executives thinking the audience only wants to see Paris Hilton.
TAE: Do you ever get tired of swimming against the Hollywood stream?
WALLACE: What I love about the story in Love and Honor is that it's about a guy who is confronted with the idea that he'll achieve his goal if he just caves in to the pressures all around him. He eventually understands that what he really needs to do is be faithful to what he truly believes. Only then does he begin to achieve his goal. I believe that's true. What prevailed in the American Revolution was not our resources, not our numbers, but the power of our ideas.
