What’s next for Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Robert Rodat? The Peloponnesian War?
His last two mega-budget pictures were “The Patriot,” set in the Revolutionary War, and “Saving Private Ryan,” set in World War II.
“Well, actually, I’m working on a drama about the great stock market crash of 1929,” Rodat said.
Given the high expectations for “The Patriot”–the epic family saga stars Mel Gibson as a conflicted warrior-turned-pacifist–no one in Hollywood would blame Rodat for riding the gravy train past every military conflict.
Somehow, though, people have forgotten that this thoughtful 40-year-old father of two young sons–neither of whom has been allowed to see “Saving Private Ryan”–first made a name for himself in this town by co-writing “Fly Away Home.” The heartwarming family film told the story of a Canadian girl who raised a flock of geese, and, with the help of her eccentric father, taught them how to migrate.
When asked how likely it is he’ll work on another small, independent project, Rodat said, “Right now, big-canvas films excite me. Downstream, I’d love to do miniatures again. But, at the moment, I’d like to keep making big-canvas projects, with a miniaturist’s perspective.”
Thus, in “The Patriot,” Rodat is able to evoke South Carolina farmer Benjamin Martin’s pain over the cold-blooded murder of his son by repeatedly–and quietly–showing him melting down the boy’s toy soldiers and turning them into musket balls. The reshaped lead will be used to exact the father’s vengeance on British dragoons. Simple images, to be sure, but they sear their way into the hearts of viewers.
Even before the picture was first previewed for audiences, Tinseltown wags were branding it, “a colonial `Braveheart.'” Just as in that 13th Century Scottish battlefield drama, Gibson’s war-hero character in “The Patriot” is motivated as much by revenge as the pursuit of independence–and, of course, the formula already has proven successful at awards time.
Fair enough, but being from New England, Rodat already had a keen interest in the Revolutionary War (as did producer Mark Gordon, a Virginian who grew up near Williamsburg and Yorktown) long before “Braveheart.”
“The movie isn’t about the American Revolution as much as it’s about how one man deals with his conflicting responsibilities of family and principle,” Rodat said. “There’s a link in both `Ryan’ and `Patriot’ between the close and the personal, and the larger sphere of responsibility. I think that when John Miller goes off to save Ryan, he’s, in effect, saving all of us, as Americans, even as he struggles to protect those seven men in his command.
“In the case of Benjamin Martin, it’s only by saving the families of other men that he’s able to protect his own family. It’s that move from the personal to the larger community … the nation as a family … that is the essence of patriotism.”
We learn early on that Martin, a hero in the French and Indian War, returned from that conflict deeply scarred by what he discovered about himself in battle. Even though he believes in the movement toward independence, the single father of seven children firmly rejects violence as way to achieve it–until his son is murdered.
“Benjamin Martin is a composite of three South Carolina guerrilla fighters: Thomas Sumter, Andrew Pickens and Francis Marion, as well as Daniel Morgan and Elijah Clark,” explained Rodat, who has degrees from Colgate, Harvard and Southern Cal and last year moved his family from Los Angeles to Cambridge. “At one point, I considered having one of those historic figures be the main character, but I was trying to make a quintessentially American Revolution movie and found that the constraints of pure history wouldn’t have allowed as much of a picture.”
Martin will remind most viewers of Marion but, as Rodat pointed out, “The Swamp Fox” had no children. “Even so, he was a man who grappled–more so than Sumter or Pickens–with how, in the indecent world of war, one can behave decently to both your comrades and the opposing side,” he said.
As is demonstrated to great effect in “The Patriot,” guerrilla-style war was an extreme departure from then-accepted battlefield codes. Indeed, it was considered to be immoral.
“In the 18th Century, we had highly mannered aristocrats–officers–fighting according to stringent rules of conduct, when the only people in serious jeopardy were lower-class people, who became cannon fodder,” said Rodat.
Rodat consciously chose to place Martin and his men in the South, rather than on the familiar soil of New England.
“In many ways, in the popular imagination, it’s perceived as a New England conflict,” he said. “But at least half of the key battles took place in the South: Charleston, Camden, Kings Mountain, Cowpens and Guilford Courthouse, which we combined into one battle, and, of course, Yorktown.”
To ensure a snappy military look on the battlefield, the producers enlisted scores of re-enactors, weekend soldiers who probably would have volunteered for the assignment anyway and worked for free.
“I think, all told, there were 38 drafts,” said Rodat, who gets sole writing credit. “Historians from the Smithsonian came in halfway through that process, and, with producer Dean Devlin and director Roland Emmerich, we dissected the script in great detail … taking some things out and adding others.”
According to Lee Woodman, executive producer of Smithsonian Entertainment, “We were very impressed, certainly by Robert, but also by Roland and Dean’s desire to get the history right. Most of the things written about that period are dry or inaccurate. I was astonished at how good the script was in its first iteration.”
Before a draft of the script first made its way around the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History, Rodat had broken down his own research into three stages.
First, he read the general histories of war and geo-political studies. He then sought out biographies of all the characters–Pickens, Cornwallis, Washington, George III–before moving on to various journals and collections of letters.
Finally, Rodat gave Martin–like John Miller, in “Saving Private Ryan”–an almost impossibly difficult duty to perform.
“I like the idea of giving a character mutually exclusive moral imperatives: `You have to do A, and you have to do B, but you can’t do both … so what are you going to do?'” he allowed. “The way they work their way through the confusing mess of responsibility, in the madness of war, shows us what kind of men they are. Martin had to grapple with conflicting issues involving family and nation, while, for Miller, it involved struggling to save both an unknown private and the seven men in his unit.
“The way they reveal their decency defines them and, ultimately, us.”
DREADING THE HISTORICAL SECOND GUESSING
The only thing more certain than an American victory over the British in “The Patriot” will be the inevitable appearance of articles comparing events in the film to the historical record.
“The Patriot” screenwriter Robert Rodat has been through this before, with “Saving Private Ryan” and he’s not looking forward to another inquisition.
“I think there’s a trend right now, hopefully it’s a fad, to evaluate historical fiction using academic standards, but history and historical fiction are two very different things,” he said. “These articles will take a historically based period film and put it up against the historical record, then say it’s somehow less of a movie because it doesn’t adhere to the record in certain ways. That’s troublesome to me.”
Rodat acknowledged that writers have a strong responsibility to be true to the people who lived in the period described in the film.
But, “When you think of the great works of historical fiction–from `The Iliad,’ `Macbeth’ and `The Last of the Mohicans’ to `The Bridge on the River Kwai,’ `Lawrence of Arabia’ and `Doctor Zhivago’–they have value because they elevate us, inform us and help us understand the nature of human interaction. They also provide a window into a historical period.”
Rodat further stressed that there was a radical difference between the historical Macbeth and Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.” But anyone who would consider Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” to be a lesser work because of the discrepancies would be missing the point.
“If you look at the great historians of the American Revolution, the first great one was Parson Weems, who wrote in the early 1800s,” Rodat said. “He was the one who made up that thing about George Washington and the cherry tree, and he also wrote the first biography of Francis Marion. . . .
“Weems saw history as having two functions. For him, it was establishing the historical record–and he played fast and loose with it–and to offer moral education.”
Academics go through as many different phases and fashions as automakers and fashion designers. Truths evolve, and one era’s acceptable embellishments often are another’s mortal sins.
“In the 1970s, there was a period of writing about history, in which statistics were dominant,” Rodat said. “I remember seeing this book that tried to analyze the history of Wisconsin, and it only looked at voting records and county deed transfers. It was the most boring, mind-numbing, non-elevating historical nonsense I’ve ever read, and I learned nothing from it.
“But even that was colored by the choice of which statistics to include and the manner in which they were analyzed. You can’t divorce history from creativity.”
What about the complaint that too many people get their history lessons only at the local multiplex?
“As historians who often work with filmmakers, we have to understand the both the exegeses and opportunities provided by dramatic storytelling, and balance that with a desire for historical accuracy,” said Lee Woodman, executive producer of Smithsonian Entertainment. “Ultimately, our curators felt as if they had made a contribution. Sometimes, the illuminating power of film is underestimated by those making the comparisons.”
Indeed, Rodat said, “I have a friend who’s an archeologist … a tenured professor at a major university, and his area of expertise is ancient Rome. He got into that period because, when he was a child, he watched gladiator movies and other Steve Reeves nonsense.
“That’s what excited him, and provided a window for the serious study of history.”
