“We wanted to show that these guys were human beings and not Terminators,” says Scott Waugh, the co-director of the unconventional new feature Act of Valor, an action movie starring real-life Navy SEALS.
“Originally, they turned us down, saying that they weren’t actors, and that they weren’t Hollywood guys. “We told them that we only wanted them to be themselves.”
Waugh is a former stuntman and his co-director Mike McCoy used to race motorcycles for a living, so it’s no surprise that they were able to relate to a group of alpha-male types. Act of Valor grew out of documentaries the pair made for the Air Force and the Navy, but it’s a fictional narrative, featuring scripted dialogue, plot twists, and actors in supporting roles (mostly as the terrorist villains on the wrong end of the SEALS’ gunsights).
McCoy says that the story is rooted in reality, however. “Everything that happens to a SEAL in the film has happened to a SEAL on the battlefield.”
In some cases, the line between filmmaking and field work blurred together: a scene where the SEAL team rendez-vous with a nuclear submarine was shot using the real thing.
“We waited until a true insertion operation was planned and then hopped on,” says Waugh, who says that they weren’t given exact coordinates on the sub’s location until the morning of the shoot. “All that stuff is real and shot in real time.”
“We avoided CGI,” adds McCoy. “It’s all real stuff, like in the action movies we were raised on.”
That also means that the SEALs did their own stunts, which McCoy says was less of a stretch than one might think. “The way they train, they’re the most physically capable people on the planet.”
While Waugh and McCoy acknowledge that releasing such a pro-military movie into such a polarized political moment is a risk, they say they don’t have any agenda: their admiration for their subjects and subject matter is sincere. “We had one goal when we started the film,” says Waugh, “and that’s that the guys would still want to have a beer with us when we were done. And I’m proud to say that we’re still drinking beer together.”
