‘Sean Played Dangerous Boy To The End’: This Actor Put Michael Fox Through Hell On The Set Of This Great War Movie

Brian De Palma waited until 1989 to deliver his own vision of the war film with languid indignation. Based on a 1969 article by New Yorker journalist Daniel Lang victims of war (which is also the original title of the film), the film is based on a brutal story that took place in the middle of the Vietnam War. In 1966, a squad of American soldiers kidnapped a young Vietnamese woman, raped and killed her.

The article attracted the attention of screenwriters David Raab and Brian De Palma, who had wanted to make a film based on the journalist’s article and later his book since the late 1970s. But due to the film’s subject matter, sensitive and anti-commercial, the studios did not rush to his door to finance it.

Even when your name is Brian De Palma and you’ve just made three good movies, Carrie at the Devil’s Ball, Rage and Obsession. It wasn’t until Journey to the End of Hell, Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket made way for De Palma to make a film.

“He was running like he was Kryptonite!”

Outrages Michael J. One of the best films of Fox’s career, it always leads to the simple register of comedy in which he excelled. It goes without saying that Sean Penn, who plays opposite him, made Fox’s experience hell on set. Penn really had his own way of slipping into the skin of his character, Sergeant Meserve, as Brian De Palma recalls. Cinema lesson.

Shawn did not speak to Michael throughout the film. He did not leave his role as a sergeant, he was friends with the army boys and ignored Michael. There weren’t thousands of places in the jungle, but Shawn. He saw it as Kryptonite. Michael is a very friendly guy, he walks off the stage, talks to everyone. It’s gone too far.

We rehearsed the scene several times when Michael is chasing him with the oar. Sean was provoking, he didn’t stop. And suddenly, in one of the supports, he literally knocked him to the ground. Michael stood up and glared at her, and we kept that on film. As the soldiers walk past him after the court, Shawn whispers something in his ear. What do you think he told her? “Bad TV Actor!”

“Sean played the dangerous boy to the end”

On another occasion, he apparently abused Michael Fox’s wife. “Something like ‘I’ve run off your wife a few times and now it’s your turn.’ Sean played the dangerous guy to the end.” De Palma will say in a book of interviews with Samuel Blumenfeld, published in 2019.

Therefore, the extreme method that we imagine Michael J. Fox would do well. If the result on the screen works really well, unfortunately it will not be enoughAnger success. The film, released in mid-August 1989 in the United States, was a commercial failure.

A very unfair sanction for a work that has the power of an uppercut, where the characters and the audience become complicit in this terrible story and underline the moral bankruptcy of the individual and even the nation.