Interview with John Wayne | Interviews
There was something fascinating in the sight of this expensive director lining up a publicity photo.
After the picture was taken, Wayne handed out souvenir cigaret lighters. Then it, was time to talk to the visitor. He walked over and stuck out his hand.
"John Wayne," he said.
The visitor, who could think of nothing else to say, said: "I recognized the face."
The face was burned a dark brown from the summer of working in Georgia. It looked down from 4 inches over 6 feet, and it looked exactly the way it does in the movies. The way it has looked in dozens and dozens of movies since 1929. It was not an old man's face, but it was creased with wrinkles around the mouth and eyes. The hair was thinning; there wasn't a lot left down the middle. Wayne wasn't fat, but he had a gut.
But could you say, here was John Wayne and he had wrinkles and a gut? No, you couldn't. Here was John Wayne, and he looked like John Wayne and talked like John Wayne and it absolutely did not matter about anything else.
Wayne said he was making "The Green Berets" because he thought a movie ought to be made about the Vietnam War. It will be the first Hollywood movie about the war. A curious state of affairs, because Hollywood turned out dozens of World War II and Korean War movies. But this war doesn't seem to be as popular as the others and Hollywood has shunned Vietnam as an almost sure money-loser. Wayne decided to produce the movie with his own production company, Batjac, and Warner Bros. put up $7,000,000 to finance it.
"I've been to Vietnam, and I've talked to the men there, and I don't have the slightest doubt about the correctness of what we are doing," Wayne said.
Wayne said the story, in a way, could be about any war. "It's about this war, but it's also about this special kind of soldier," he said. "The average Green Beret is a little older, more experienced, more professional than the average soldier," he said. "He's a man who has made up his mind about things, and who takes a pride in doing what it looks like has to be done. A word like duty doesn't sound strange to him."
