channing tatum - stop loss production notes
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  Chapters Cast & Crew Other MoviesThe Vow 2012
21 Jump Street 2012
Haywire 2012
The Son of No One 2011
Dear John 2010
Fighting 2009
Stop-Loss 2008
Step Up 2006
She's the Man 2006
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 The production began filming in Texas in early August. Peirce sat down with each actor before the rehearsal “to get to know them, absorb who they are, what’s important to them, how they see themselves. Whether they know it or not, they generally tell me their life story as if they were the character. Once I feel they’ve told me all the essentials and I have a feel for them, we naturally start talking about the character.”After rehearsal, she again met with them individually and then paired them up based on the relationships they have in the film and their scenes in common. “Rather than reciting lines, I ease them into ‘getting the scene on its feet,’” says Peirce. “We work loosely, get to the core of the scene emotionally, what each character wants, how they go about getting it; we improvise it and wonderful stuff comes out.”
Once production commenced, before shooting each day Peirce had a general run-through of the scene, loosely putting it on its feet and letting the actors find their way through the space. “It’s basically to help the scene find its natural shape and then to push on points of conflict,” she says. “I’m always amazed at the new level of clarity we all have when the actors run through the action and dialogue with other actors on the set.”
Working alongside her during the rehearsal process was director of photography Chris Menges. “I’d rehearse a scene until the point where it had a natural and dramatic shape,” says Peirce. “He’d watch the rehearsal and generally figure out where to put the camera (and where to move the camera) so the scene plays out in one shot. That gives it the advantage of retaining the inherent dramatic shape of the scene. Then we can go in for more movement.”
Menges excelled at utilizing handheld cameras, Steadicams and a crane, when needed, which Peirce says allowed her to capture a sort of dynamism and energy as well as a sense of intimacy. “And he’s phenomenal with light. He tends to go with natural light whenever he can.”
The cast and crew stayed in Austin, the cosmopolitan state capitol, home to the University of Texas and a world-famous music scene. However, most of the film’s locations were in outlying small towns, such as Lockhart, Texas, the self-proclaimed Barbecue Capital of Texas. One of the movie’s pivotal sequences took place there – the parade in which the town welcomes home its war heroes and the subsequent awards ceremony. This also happened to be the first scenes filmed in the movie. Lockhart was the perfect venue, with its wide streets lined by Norman Rockwell-esque shops in brick and Victorian-styled buildings and an eye-popping courthouse with mansard roofs, colorful turrets and a high central tower featuring a four-way clock. Equally important, the residents enthusiastically welcomed the film company and nearly 600 townsfolk signed on to be extras, cheering the returning soldiers over the course of two days.
One of the key sequences, in which Tommy shoots his wedding gifts and the tensions and rifts between Brandon and best friend Steve begin to surface, took place at a sprawling ranch known as the Double C. The Double C provided the perfect, vast expanse of desiccated grass and thatch of gnarled trees that provided some shade for the actors during the first part of the scene, set during the day. The night work required a “hunt club,” where Brandon and Steve’s friendship would begin to fray. Production designer David Wasco created a hardscrabble, tin structure that melded perfectly into the beautiful but brutal landscape.
“The script called for a dusty, dried grass kind of place with scraggly oaks. At first, we looked for an existing deer camp, which is essentially a shack. It’s the most rudimentary kind of cover -a series of interconnected cardboard boxes. Ours was board and batten, with standing seam tin for the roof and walls, metal and fiberglass insulation, remnants of carpet on the wall, not pretty. We also had to provide something that was film friendly, so that the camera and lights could be in any position. So, we were lucky to come to the Double C Ranch, which is a multi-thousand acre ranch that offered so many possibilities. It provided a place for the earlier portion of the scene, the “target practice” sequence, and then Kim and the actors could move organically to the deer camp, as they do in the script, which we built nearby. It was essentially a wild-walled movie set – if we would have gone to a practical location, we would have been much more limited, in terms of the shots we could have achieved,” Wasco says.
Wasco adds that the unprecedented drought that summer made for good production design. “This is as authentic as you’re going to get. This was one of the few opportunities in the movie that opens up to show true Texas prairie. We were in the midst of the strongest drought in memory, which gave us these golden fields and dusty prairie, which looks beautiful on film. It’s quite a heartland America thing that is such a contrast to Iraq and New York,” says Wasco.
Wasco adds that in general, his color scheme was a gradual “spiral down with Brandon. As we go on the journey with Brandon and his circumstances become increasingly dire, the colors go darker and darker, until they become almost monochromatic. The only break in that patina is in New York, where, of course, the colors are much more vibrant and jarring.”
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