Mark Boone Junior talks about TTRL

In a recent interview with the A.V. Club, Mark Boone Junior (Pvt. Peale), probably best known now for his role in Sons of Anarchy, at one point discussed his experience of working on this film and how he was cast. I figured anyone who's a fan of this film might find it interesting. For the full interview go here: http://www.avclub.com/articles/mark-boone-junior-on-sons-of-anarchy-ch ristopher-n,96876/

AVC: How did you get cast in The Thin Red Line?

MBJ: Dianne Crittenden, the casting director, [is] a fantastic woman. I’d been in many meetings with Dianne before that. I don’t remember if she had cast me in anything, but we had tried to work together many times. She called me in on that, and I [tested] for the role that John C. Reilly ended up playing, the cook [Sgt. Storm]. I don’t know if he actually has a name other than “the cook,” even though that was like, the fourth biggest role in the script. And he’s barely in the movie. I don’t know if you know the story of all that.

AVC: Terrence Malick has a reputation for just cutting people out of movies.

MBJ: That script was 240 pages long. I’ve read a lot of scripts in my 35 years doing this, and that was absolutely one of the best scripts I’ve ever read, even at 240 pages. I think he shot all 240 pages, but the actual movie has about 10 percent of it, if I recall. There’s the famous story of… what's his name, the guy who went and won an Oscar later, huge nose?

AVC: Adrien Brody?

MBJ: Adrien Brody! He was the lead in the movie, they shot all his stuff, and he literally has two lines in the whole movie. Terry [Malick] would just take you out into the jungle and go like, [high pitched drawl] “Okay, um, just walk and think about home.” And we would shoot for two hours, doing that.

Anyway, over the course of five months, I went in and improvised for long periods of time with Dianne. It was literally five months. I never met Terry, because he was probably already in Australia. They were supposed to start shooting, and it was literally like three or four days before the movie was supposed to start. I had already turned down three movies for this thing, because it was for the fourth biggest role in the movie. It came down to this final weekend, and Dianne called me and said, “It looks pretty good, looks good.” Monday, 10 a.m., she calls and says, “Nope, you didn’t get it.”

So John C. Reilly got it and had to spend six months in Australia. Then he had, like, two lines in that movie, too, if I remember correctly. I had a six-month-old baby at the time, which I wasn’t really happy about the prospect of leaving for six months. Then they called me five months later and said, “Boone, do you want to go to Australia?” I’m like, “What do you mean, what for?” “Well, for this guy Peale.” I looked at my script that I dug out from somewhere, and it was a really good little bit, and I said sure.

I went over there for three weeks and shot, like, seven scenes, and that really good scene that I thought I was going over there to do never made it into the movie. The little pieces of me here and there from seven improvised scenes [did].