"Every film about war ends up being pro-war" with Michael Shannon | The Movie Racket

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2:30Michael Phillips:Hey folks, Michael Phillips here. Thanks for checking out this new enterprise called The Movie Racket. It's the latest addition to the expanding podcast lineup under the Film Spotting production banner. And, you know, some of you probably know that I've joined Adam and Josh over on Film Spotting here and there, now and then, for a few years now. And we've also talked about me doing something on my own for a little while, just so they could take a break from all my undermining of their opinions. So, here it is, Season 1 of The Movie Racket. And the idea is this. For more than a century, the movie industry has spun off a long list of unwritten rules and guidelines for what makes a movie work.

3:17Michael Phillips:The Secrets of Success, Theories to Live By, or at least Film By. You could start with screenwriter William Goldman's epic three-word reminder that in Hollywood, nobody knows anything. Comes from his book, Adventures in the Screen Trade, quite famous. And even people who don't know what the hell they're doing currently in Hollywood, even if they're 22, they have memorized those three words and pull them out at meetings just because they think they're the first one to quote William Goldman. Most of the great directors, a lot of ordinary ones, I think, too, had their own quippy theories over the years about their line of work.

3:58Michael Phillips:A good movie is three good scenes and no bad ones. Howard Hawks said that. Or this, what the public wants is a gun and a girl. That one's usually quoted the other way around, a girl and a gun. either way that's what makes a movie that's the idea sex and violence no argument we're done talking about it although in america we sexualize everything except sex but that's another story who said that who said what the public wants is a gun and a girl was not howard hawks wasn't jean le godard the answer may surprise you and we're going to get to that one in upcoming episode of the movie racket so the more we looked at these truisms these ideological beliefs about cinema the sneakier they got.

4:45The ones that sounded, and maybe still sound, like total BS

4:50Michael Phillips:actually might be hiding something kind of useful and instructive for young filmmakers, young audiences, young podcast listeners, old podcast listeners. The so-called rules, blueprints for success that sound reliable, solid, maybe time has done its thing and rendered them antiques, and maybe they never were all that to begin with. The writer is king here at Capital Pictures. We're only interested in one thing. Can you tell a story, Bob? Can you make us laugh? Can you make us cry? Can you make us want to break out? Enjoy a song. Is that more than one thing? Okay. Mondays here on the Movie Racket, our special guest co-star and I are going to examine a nugget of film theory, a truism that may or may not be true, a few words of Hollywood wisdom or filmmaking warning, and you might just come away with something new to think about.

5:40Michael Phillips:Sir Isaac Newton had his Laws of Motion. The 2026 season of the Movie Racket gives you the Laws of Motion pictures. And this week's guest, our first guest, is actor, director, REM, cover band, touring phenom, and two-time Academy Award nominee, Michael Shannon. Since he's a two-time Academy Award nominee for Revolutionary Road and for Nocturnal Animals, I gave the guy a couple of options to pick for our inaugural movie law, and Michael Cho is the one you're about to hear. It comes from Francois Truffaut, and this interview he did with Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune, that was three film critics before me, back in 1973.

6:21Michael Phillips:This is when Truffaut was promoting the U.S. release of Day for Night. So Siskel and Truffaut got on the topic of what Truffaut believed to be the central paradox with war films, especially war movies partly or largely driven by combat, life and death survival. And Truffaut said simply this, every film about war ends up being pro-war. In other words, there's no such thing as an anti-war film. And Siskel was like, wait a minute, Francois, what about Kubrick's Paths of Glory? And Truffaut said, no. And he wouldn't budge. And Siskel thought he was just being reductive or dismissive. And then, as Siskel wrote later on, he couldn't shake Truffaut's assertion that had so shaken his own ideas about anti-war films and war on screen in general.

7:10Michael Phillips:So was Truffaut right? Does putting war and combat on screen somehow invariably juice the narrative you're telling in the direction of excitement and a kind of bloodthirsty instinct even in a well-behaved audience or the most pacifist temperament? Shannon goes at that question as a working actor and as a longtime movie lover, and he also reveals which war movie for him was the first one that really meant something to him as a young moviegoer. And he talks about working on Pearl Harbor, the movie, not the actual event, with director Michael Bay, who will never be confused with an anti-war filmmaking temperament.

7:56Michael Phillips:We're going to talk today about something that Francois Truffaut said in an interview with Gene Siskel in the Chicago Tribune back in 1973. And the sentence is very simple. Truffaut said, every film about war ends up being pro-war. I know that I've always been fascinated by war for a variety of reasons. I find it one of the most confusing things that human beings do is that we wage war upon one another. I've never heard a reason for it that's made any sense to me and the fundamental question I think for me with war is is war necessary because it seems like it must be necessary because it happens all the time it's been happening for millennia and people have to form groups and be in opposition to one another.

8:57And I guess one of the things that struck me about what Truffaut said is that I think fundamentally, like underneath it all, I think everybody understands that killing another human being is not something you should do for any reason. It's kind of like in the film I directed, Eric LaRue, at the end of the film, Eric LaRue, who is in prison for killing people, says to his mother no human being should kill another human being period and this is a person who has actually killed people so he should know and yet we constantly are killing people and trying to justify it with history or religion but all that say i think filmmaking can't help but make whatever it's portraying alluring.

9:51Whether it's war or murder, you don't make a film to bore the heck out of people. You don't say, okay, let's get all these cameras and this big crew and go out and make the most boring, unappealing nonsense we can possibly make so that nobody will have any interest in watching it. So if you're making a film about something, you're going to make it look interesting intriguing you want people to be curious about it and so that's uh inherent in the process whether you're making a picture about war or anything else but i also think it's because like i said people know people know it's wrong like i don't care i've heard all this stuff you know you take the israel palestine situation and you try and insert yourself into that and people will say, well, it's too complicated for you to understand.

10:46You don't understand the history of this place, this land. You don't understand how many centuries this has been going on. I'm like, I may not. I may not understand it as well as you do. I may not be as informed as you are about the history of it. But the one thing that I and every other sentient human being in the universe knows is that you shouldn't kill somebody. Like you just shouldn't kill somebody. period so it's a huge obstacle to overcome if you're going to go out and kill a bunch of people is that that fundamental understanding that we all have and part of that i think is cinema of war it makes war look like it is a noble thing to go out and kill people like and it's justified or you know and i'm god this answer is like two hours long but it's all right the show is gonna be six so don't worry okay cool and inevitably a war film has a hero like you can't help if there's a war there's a hero and if you're making a film about war you're not going to leave the hero out of the film because that would be silly because again it goes back to the earlier point i was making about wanting to make a film that's appealing and intriguing to other people to watch so one way you do that is you put a hero in the movie.

12:08So every movie about war, I think is going to have a hero.

12:12Michael Phillips:I guess I would push back though with you on one thing, Michael, so far of what you said. I don't know if these are commercial dictates of the medium of movies that must make films about war focus on what you say, you know, the hero, or just see the kind of visceral gripping thrill of some of the action, the life and death moment to moment kind of rhythmic beats of combat and who's living and who's dying. You can't help but be gripped by that. And I think we all were at a certain age, especially boys, you know, I mean, it took me a while to realize at age eight, when I saw the Green Berets on TV, I thought it was, I don't know, I thought it was all right.

13:00Michael Phillips:Pretty good. Fighting soldiers from the sky, fearless men who jump and die. You know, and then I saw it as an adolescent, and then by then the aggravating critic nerd was born, and I thought, what in hell did I fall for when I was just a kid at age eight? This is Two Niners Savoy. Over. Up to ground. Where do you want it? Put it on the camp. Those people have it. We don't. Over. It'll only take a minute. You know, in other words, a war movie that only has propaganda and villainizing the obvious adversary on its mind. I mean, that was mine, my kind of awakening. But I, you know, when you're young, you don't really think through what's going on in a movie because it is literally life and death all the time, which is, as a moviegoer, is kind of almost beyond aesthetics.

14:00Michael Phillips:But I don't know. Was there a war movie for you when you were young? It's sort of just like, yeah, wow, that really grabbed me. This one grabbed me. Yeah, Star Wars. Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station. And what of the Rebellion? If the Rebels have obtained a complete technical readout of this station, it is possible, however unlikely, that they might find a weakness and exploit it. The plans you refer to will soon be back in our hands. Any attack made by the Rebels against this station would be a useless gesture, no matter what technical data they've obtained.

14:36Michael Phillips:This station is now the ultimate power in the universe. I suggest we use it. war film interesting nobody calls it that and it's in the title yeah it's in the title but you know i don't want to like toot my own horn or anything but i've had the i don't know if i'd say the pleasure but the opportunity to participate in a lot of movies about war and the military and also a lot of movies that have violence in them and i i don't dispute what you're saying i was just thinking about what the proposal that truffo is making with his statement that a film about war has to be pro-war and i'm not even necessarily agreeing or disagreeing with what he's saying but i do think again i just go back to and this is based on my experiences like i said having participated in so many projects having to do with war is that war is inexplicable and ridiculous and we do it and we have to spend a lot of mental energy like justifying why we do it because it's it really shouldn't happen there's no justification for it in my mind it makes no sense you know but my favorite writer is ian esco eugene ian esco and um he used to say i actually did a play and you might have seen it because we did it at red Orchid.

16:03We did it at Red Orchid twice, actually. We did it in our early days, and then we remounted it. It's called Victims of Duty by Eugene Ionesco. And in the play, there's a character who has a line who says, every story is a detective story. I believe that. I believe that's true. Every story is a detective story. You're always trying to solve a mystery. And so, yeah, war movies are trying to solve the mystery of why we go to war, I guess. It's such a waste, war. It's not just a waste of human life. It's a waste of money, resources, time, and it never seems to lead to anything. I mean, I guess every movie about war winds up being pro-war because in a war, there are at least two sides, and you're going to align yourself with one of the two sides as a person if you're watching group a and group b at war and you're watching a movie about it eventually you're going to be like well i want group b to win or i want group a to win i want somebody to win you don't want both sides to lose right you don't want everybody to just die and that's the end like somebody wins so that's what i guess true foe probably was maybe was thinking is that if you're watching a movie about war you wind up rooting for somebody but i don't know how you can make a movie about this current conflict and have a side that you're rooting for i mean look one of my closest dearest friends is a filmmaker i've worked with a couple times ramin barani and we just had lunch the other week and he's his family's from iran and he spent a few years there and his wife is iranian and he can't even talk about it he's so upset he can't even about it and yeah like you said i you know i don't think this is a podcast in which people will discover the secret to world peace or something but i i do think it's it's very strange how they changed the name of the department of defense back to the department of war that didn't seem necessary or beneficial to anyone really right i get the feeling that there's a lot stuff that's happening right now that is basically what it boils down to is there are super rich people that kind of want things to happen the way they want them to happen and if that sounds like a conspiracy theory so be it but it is all connected it's connected in scary freaky ways now because what happened is destroying show business and this industry that i somehow managed to find my way into is that big tech billionaires said hey let's take over hollywood and that is like destroying the whole shebang but there's always been money in hollywood that comes from questionable places but it's really beyond the pale right now but so war movies are expensive by and large it's pretty difficult to make a cheap war movie yeah and so that money's got to come from somewhere and i mean particularly nowadays maybe back in the 20s you could have made a cheap war movie i don't know you know out in the desert or something but nowadays they got to have all the exciting uh effects and the gizmos and all that and you know big expensive movie stars and all that So they need a lot of money.

19:34So the people that give the money to make the war film are like, we will give you this mountain of money to make this movie as long as the movie says this. And it makes these people look like this. And it makes the audience feel this way. Then we'll give you the money. If you don't want to do it, if you don't want to agree to all that ahead of time, then you can go somewhere else and see who will give you a mountain of money because it won't be us. And that's kind of how it goes.

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23:17Michael Phillips:Yeah. In honor of our trip to Japan, I got us some Victory Cigars! Yeah, Victory Cigars! There you go. Put that in your inside pocket next to your heart. You know, Jack, we may lose this battle, but we're going to win this war. You know how I know? No. Them. because they're rare. What's your memory of the whole thing? It's not the best-ridden war film over. Oh, it's funny you say that because, yeah, it was not a script that you get embossed in gold or something and frame for posterity. But there's two things I would say about that. One day I was on the set, because we spent a considerable amount of time in Pearl Harbor itself.

24:05And the whole Pearl Harbor sequence we shot and filmed there. And we took it over. We ran around like crazy people for a while, a month or so. I remember getting these incredible headaches from just running around, inhaling smoke and listening to explosions all day long. And you played? I just played some random, you know, I was a co-pilot. Goose was my name. I was a surfer. but the main heroes were ben afleck and josh harna there were some of us to add a little bit of color or character funniness or comedy so that was me and a couple other fellas ewan bremner who's remained a dear friend of mine he played a character named red because he had red hair you know these are the massive concepts we're dealing with but it was a very very odd thing to run around where this actually happened and pretend it pretend to recreate it because it was a catastrophe it was a complete disaster it was one of the saddest events in human history and yet we're here and it's not like we're trying to make it seem like something else like it was a big party or something i mean we are running for our lives you know people are dying and things are on fire and like i said there's explosions and smoke and all this but it is being recreated for the entertainment of other people like i said it's not being recreated to be like a drag or like something you don't want to watch it is being recreated specifically and thought about as like i said as michael like you were saying michael bay he's not thinking about the moral dilemma he's thinking about how do i make this as irresistible as possible that is his that's what he wakes up thinking about when he's making that move whether he's successful or not you can debate that there's some people that think the movie's crap there's some people that love it i've heard every kind of opinion you could possibly hear about perl harbour you can't surprise me but But that is what he was doing when he went to work every day.

26:30He was not saying, oh, I should really think about this big moral issue about war. There's not, no, nothing. But, you know, you'd run around and you'd have these fake rounds being fired out of like Gatling guns and all this and strapping that was done with special effects, you know, little bags that would explode with dust in it and make it look like bullets. but you'd run past the building and you would see actual bullet holes from back in the day when it was actually happening like i saw actual bullet holes from the actual december 7 1941 assault on on pro harbor well and then for a bonus i got to go up in a plane because they actually had some pilots there that had flown around in these planes like the p-42s i think it's been a while i think it's p-42 is it called and we went i went up in a plane and ewan went up in a plane we flew in a formation over the uss arizona and i looked down out of this little two-seater plane into the water and i saw the entirety when you go out on that little bridge that's over the top of it, you see the oil bubbling up and you're like, oh my God, there's still oil in there.

27:51But you don't get a sense of what you're standing on top of. But when you're up in the sky and you look down at it, I mean, it's one of the most awe-inspiring things I've ever seen in my life. And also one of the saddest, because you know that that vessel is just filled with corpses and like i said so unnecessary and at the time you know nowadays if if somebody came to me and said hey we're making pro harbor and i was at the point i'm in now in my career i would probably frankly would say you know what i think i'm good but back then i was i had just gotten la i was in fight or flight mode it was like you know people um were going to la from chicago and a lot of people weren't getting any bites.

28:43And, you know, I was lucky. I was lucky I got in that room at all. I got in a room with Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer, you know, two of the most powerful guys in Hollywood at the time. When they said, yes, you, I would have been a fool to say, oh, no, I'm leaving. But now I don't know. I don't know if I'm going to tell that story now. I don't know. Why? It just feels what to you? Well, it kind of, like I said, it just feels like, you know, I had that opportunity to look down at the USS Arizona from that plane, the story I just told. I had that opportunity after we finished filming. And I think it dawned on me as I was looking down at that ship in the water.

29:23I was like, oh, this is really sad. And I'm not sure that this movie is going to capture that or be so concerned with that, with how sad this is. you know i don't know if truffo is is he saying you can set out to make a film that you think is depicting the horror of war and yet in the process of doing that you're just going to make a film that makes war look alluring but in the case of pearl harbor i'm not even sure like i think we both said i don't think michael bay was saying i'm going to make a film that makes everybody realize how horrible war is. Right, right. I don't think that was ever in his diary, his journal, his notebook.

30:13That's what I'm going to do.

30:14Michael Phillips:For context, let me just throw out a couple of things because there's an interesting triangle here. First of all, the full quote that Siskel got Truffaut during that interview in 73, Truffaut said, I think that violence is very ambiguous in movies. For example, some films claim to be anti-war, but I don't think I've ever really seen an anti-war film. Every film about war ends up being pro-war. So that's his line. So you have other major filmmakers who have come to the much different conclusion, and a couple of them surprised me, frankly. And I want to talk about these two films, Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, Francis Ford Coppola, the former, Stanley Kubrick, the latter.

30:58Michael Phillips:The interview in The Guardian that Coppola did back in 2019 said that he will not ever put the phrase anti-war as a description of Apocalypse Now. He says nobody wants to make a pro-war film, but, you know, an anti-war film, this is not, basically, I'm paraphrasing there, but he said, quote, an anti-war film shouldn't have sequences of violence that inspire a lust for violence. We don't sign war off, they get loud. and the Romeo Fox. Shall we dance? Apocalypse Now has stirring scenes of helicopters attacking innocent people. That's not anti-war.

31:45Outstanding, Red Team, outstanding. Get your case of beer for that one.

31:51Michael Phillips:And then he went on to say an anti-war film cannot glorify war, and Apocalypse Now arguably does. To your point, the word alluring. Yeah. I think the reason that film is still talked about, I mean, A, it was such a crazy undertaking and such an insanely expensive undertaking. And, you know, you had a director essentially losing his mind while making it and then regaining it. But it's not the kind of war film you can point to one ideology in it. You have the screenplay coming from a guy like John Milius, who was just a proudly right-wing reactionary, delightful, delightful guy. I interviewed him once, you know, who wrote Red Dawn, which is a hilarious comic book of a movie from the mid-'80s, and it couldn't be, you know, simpler in its sort of political directive of, like, kill these commies.