BENJAMIN MCKENZIE Plots His Course

VENICE MAGAZINE: "Building a diverse body of work was clearly important to McKenzie from the start of his career, as it is today. The O.C. wrapped its run in 2007, and McKenzie has sought out an interesting group of indie projects since then, including the upcoming Johnny Got His Gun, an adaptation of the famed Dalton Trumbo novel."

BEN MCKENZIE: "It's basically an adaptation of a stage play of the book. It had been made into a one-man play in the 70s or 80s, with Jeff Daniels when he was pretty much my age. It was probably one of his first breaks, and he won an Obie for it, starting his career. So, we took the stage play and shot it in a black box theater, without an audience. It's sort of a Spalding Gray-type production, except I'm playing a character, as opposed to a first person sort of thing or however you would describe Spalding Gray's material [laughs]. Meaning it's obviously not my take on Johnny Got His Gun. It's Dalton Trumbo's words, more or less, as adapted by the playwright Bradley Rand Smith. Kind of between Spalding Gray and Dogville, where there's no audience but you're clearly in a small theater, and you're performing it not unlike you would there. It's a weird and interesting synthesis of those things. I had to memorize it all, to be able to do the whole thing straight through. So that we could shoot it all without breaking much. That was just a great challenge and a lot of fun. The film was also something I believe in from a political standpoint. Trumbo was one of the Hollywood 10, and an admitted communist, although I don't follow him quite to that level. He actually set the story during World War I, but his criticisms of many of the wars we've been in since, including Korea and Vietnam, are very relevant to what's going on today. The story is much more pro-soldier than it is anti-war. It's about the travesty of these big institutions, these governments, fighting each other, and sacrificing their young and relatively innocent men, under the guise of some sort of loftier slogan, but the reality being that the poorer and less educated men are sent off to die and fight these wars, for causes they don't necessarily understand or agree with…" [more]