Mark Wahlberg digs deep for Lone Survivor
Mark Wahlberg tells Richard James Havis about boot camps and bonding in an effort to craft an authentic retelling of a botched US Navy Seal mission in Afghanistan and a memorial to those who didn't make it back
DESPITE GETTING shot at, and occasionally getting hit, it seems being a US Navy Seal is an easier job than being a Hollywood movie star. "I thought my job was hard," retired Petty Officer First Class Marcus Luttrell says to his newfound best buddy Mark Wahlberg, during the chaos of a press event for Lone Survivor in New York, "but hats off to you for going through all this ever since you were a kid."
Luttrell and Wahlberg make an unlikely pair. One is a towering, mountainous ex-Seal who took a number of bullets and beatings during his tour of duty in Afghanistan, one of the world's most brutal theatres of war; the other is a well-groomed, somewhat charismatic, vaguely attractive Hollywood star from Boston.
But the two now share a deep bond that transcends their differences. The fact that Wahlberg portrays Luttrell, a bona fide war hero who used intelligence and courage to single-handedly escape from the Taliban in a remote and mountainous region of Kunar province, in Lone Survivor made them friends, Wahlberg says.
It was the months of military-style boot camp training that the former military man gave Wahlberg, and the shared hardships of a physically demanding film shoot in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico, that brought them closer. Wahlberg says that the bonding which occurred in training between the all-male cast and the former Seals, who were hired to make sure the actors got the soldiering right, was akin to that between troops on the battlefield.
"I have never worked with a group of people who single-mindedly shared one goal - to make a great film - before in my whole career," Wahlberg says. "And I doubt that I ever will again. No one had their own personal agenda; everybody who worked on Lone Survivor just wanted to make a tribute to those guys, those colleagues of Marcus, who sacrificed their lives to protect us."
Lone Survivor is an unusual mix for a war movie. It's an action film that is also part docudrama, part propaganda and part military tribute to a group of Seals who perished on a remote mountain in Afghanistan during their tour of duty.