#1911 - Mark Boal

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience. Tell me why, tell me.

Mark Boal (0:13)

I mean, I can give you some theories.

Joe Rogan (0:14)

Okay, just keep this like a fist from your face, and we're good to go. What's your theory?

Mark Boal (0:21)

Okay, well, do I need these?

Joe Rogan (0:24)

Yeah, they're better. Keeps us from talking over each other, locks you in.

Mark Boal (0:27)

Holy shit.

Joe Rogan (0:28)

You get used to it.

Mark Boal (0:30)

Okay, it's a little trippy.

Joe Rogan (0:34)

Hearing your own voice, yeah.

Mark Boal (0:35)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (0:36)

I did so many radio shows back in the day. It's normal to me.

Mark Boal (0:40)

I'll get into it. But my theory has to do with authenticity and what you represent and how rare that is.

It's not that what you're doing isn't covered in other ways in the culture, but you as an individual and what you bring feels, and I think is, it's not like an illusion, very authentic. And that's super rare. And so-

Joe Rogan (1:15)

Shouldn't be super rare though, right? That's what's confusing.

People should just be able to be themselves.

Mark Boal (1:22)

I mean, there's big commercial interests in it not being- Yeah. I mean, it's hard to-

Joe Rogan (1:26)

There's also people who read a lot of social media, and they read comments about themselves, and they think about what people are saying, and then they self-analyze too much, and self-censor, and self-correct.

I do all that stuff on my own enough, where I'm pretty introspective, and I analyze myself, and I'm probably my harshest critic, so I don't need a lot of other people's input on that. And when you do get a lot of people's input on that, I think people start leaning in certain directions politically and socially, and they start saying things because they think it'll gain them favor with certain groups.

Mark Boal (2:04)

Yeah, I mean, the temptation when you're doing media is to sell something. So as soon as you're trying to sell something, you're gonna get into crafting it, just sort of like crafting a persona.

Do you know where to come across?

Joe Rogan (2:15)

Do you have those considerations when you put in together, like The Hurt Locker, for instance, which is one of my all time favorite movies?

Mark Boal (2:23)

Thank you.

Joe Rogan (2:24)

It's such a good movie.

Mark Boal (2:26)

Thank you.

Joe Rogan (2:27)

It's so good, because it's so like you can see how he would be like that. You could see how he would be drawn to go back there. You could see how the pull of, and the chaos of it all. And then there's a scene where he's, I believe he's in a supermarket, and it's just fucking boring.

Life is just the mundane, normal life, and he just wants to go back to war.

Mark Boal (2:51)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (2:53)

It's, and I'm like, I buy it all in, you know? It's like, it's very rare that, you know, you see him, there's like no suspension of disbelief.

You buy him, you're watching that film, and you're like, whoa, like I could see.

Mark Boal (3:06)

Well, that was a big part of what we were trying to do was to, so I had been in, I had been in Baghdad as a reporter in 2004, I guess. And I had seen some of what's depicted in the film. And so I had witnessed the bomb squad going out and defusing bombs. And then, and I wrote an article about it, and then the idea came along for a screenplay. I had the idea to write a screenplay, put it that way. And my whole thing is, over the course of a year, I didn't know how to write a screenplay, but my whole thing is I was learning how to do it and doing rewrites was to try to replicate the experience that I had, that I felt when I was there, okay? So to do that, there was a lot of craft and whatnot involved in creating that, that I had to learn. But it also meant breaking a lot of rules of narrative and storytelling that you normally would do to make a movie effective, but that in this case, would have made it less authentic to the experience. Like one, for example, is that most war movies are organized around a mission. It's like in the beginning of the movie, you're told, hey, this is what we gotta do, and then the rest of the movie plays out, like Saving Private Ryan or what have you.

When I was in Baghdad, one of the things I was struck by was this ceaseless, hamster wheel repetition of the war. That it wasn't organized around a single mission. It was this futile attempt to try to find all these bombs that had been dispersed throughout the country by the counterinsurgency. So I couldn't organize it around a mission. I had, at least in my mind, to keep it authentic. I had to kind of make the story similar enough to the reality, which was like everyday new mission, like a kind of episodic structure, they call it. So there are all these decisions along the way that get made to create that feeling that you have where you go, oh, I can suspend my disbelief because this feels real. And then there's the point at which, like you do all this research, I did all that research of actually going there, hanging out with these guys, talking to them, witnessing what they were doing, trying to get deep inside of it, learning about IEDs and how they work and really getting inside their mentality, hanging out with them. And then there's another point at which you kind of put yourself into the piece, too.