The strangest thing for Robert O'Connor about the film of his novel, 'Buffalo Soldiers', is that he likes it, he tells Michael Dwyer
Just under two years ago, Buffalo Soldiers generated widespread enthusiasm on its world première at the Toronto International Film Festival. Then, a few days later, came the atrocities of September 11th. Nobody in the film business wanted to know about a movie that depicted US soldiers, based in Stuttgart in 1989, as wildly irresponsible opportunists steeped in black marketeering and taking and dealing drugs.
The film features a brashly charismatic Joaquin Phoenix as Elwood, the ringleader, who operates with all the amoral aplomb of Sgt Bilko, while the colonel (Ed Harris) is just as gullible and ineffectual as Bilko's commanding officer, Col Hall. However, the tone of the movie is much closer to the darkness and anarchy of Catch-22 or M*A*S*H*, and the consequences of these men behaving badly prove disastrous in some cases.
Miramax, the film's US distributors, shelved the film indefinitely. When it surfaced again in January of this year, at the Sundance Film Festival in the US, one woman angrily accused Australian director Gregor Jordan of being anti-American, and flung a bottle at the screen, accidentally hitting one of the film's stars, Anna Paquin, on the head.
Buffalo Soliders was set for a US release in the spring when it was delayed again, following the US invasion of Iraq.
"We don't want this film to be misinterpreted," a Miramax spokesman explained. "And we want to be sensitive to the current situation in the world."
When Miramax finally opened the film in the US last month, it received dozens of complaints about its poster, which shows a uniformed Joaquin Phoenix flashing a peace sign. Behind him is a US flag in which all the stars are replaced by dollar signs, and the slogan reads: "Steal all you can steal." The root of all this controversy is a 1993 novel by Robert O'Connor, a mild-mannered 44-year-old assistant professor of creative writing and literature at the Oswego State University of New York. Buffalo Soldiers was his first novel and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
O'Connor insists that the story he tells is essentially true. "I was not in the army, I wasn't a drug dealer or an addict and I'd never been to Germany," he says. "What happened was I met this guy who began telling me these incredible stories about his time with the US army in Germany in 1989, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall. What he began describing was this army that started a war against itself. There were racial battles, drug-dealing and drug-taking all the time. It sounded like a war going on. That's what drew me in - discovering this secret place that I had never read about."
Could he trust this source? "He had the level of detail that led me to believe what he said," O'Connor says. "He had been a drug dealer, just like Elwood in the film. The hard thing was finding a way into him as a character in the story. He was a creepy guy. When he discovered that his girlfriend talked in her sleep, he would whisper to her and ask whom she really loved and listen for her to say someone else's name. She never did, but he did this every night. It was then I realised that there was this vast insecurity at the heart of him, as there is with Elwood, which is something that Joaquin Phoenix captures so well - this susceptible guy doing all these terrible things."
Understandably, O'Connor extended his research. "I talked to about 15 people who had been stationed in Germany at the time," he says. "They began describing things that were so appalling I felt I had to put them in the book. They told me that so many soldiers were shooting up drugs and stoned all the time, and screwing up at their work.
"For instance, the stuff about the nuclear arms base where the battle scene takes place. A woman MP who had been stationed in Germany told me these stories about these posts where the sentries had communication between the guard-towers. They got so bored that they would call each other up on the telephone and shout 'incoming' and shoot at the person. The other sentry was supposed to hit the deck as soon as they heard 'incoming'. To account for the bullets, they would saw off little pieces of a number two pencil and stick them in the magazines."
O'Connor is amused when I draw comparisons between the Elwood character and Bilko. "That's funny, because James Ellroy gave me a nice advance quote for the book-jacket, where he said it was like Sgt Bilko on scag \. It's like a meaner, realistic version of Bilko, with consequences for all the behaviour that goes on."
It comes as no surprise to learn that the producers of the film decided against requesting the assistance of the US army. "As far I know, the army always requests script approval," O'Connor says. "They don't make editorial suggestions. They just say yes or no. But the producers did get military advisers to help with the film."
Whereas writers are rarely satisfied with movies adapted from their books, O'Connor declares himself very happy with the film of Buffalo Soldiers, even though he was not involved in adapting it for the screen. "I've a lot of writer friends who glumly don't say anything, or else hide out when a film from one of their books is released. But I really love this film. When my agent called me up and said that Gregor Jordan was going to direct the film, I rented Gregor's first film, Two Hands, which had just come out on tape, and I was blown away by it. It had this energy and intelligence that Gregor brings to Buffalo Soldiers, and I liked the way he mixed the humour and violence."
O'Connor says he was astounded when he heard that his book was going to be made into a film. He thought that eventually the option would run out and the film would never be made.
"There were always bidders for it, and periodically I would get phone calls and refer them to my agent, but I didn't really believe the film would ever happen. The book felt too dark," he says. "In certain ways, a book has to make its own way in the world eventually. First there's the period where it's just you and the book. Then it's you and your editor and your agent. Then the book is gone from you - it's out there on its own. So I was overwhelmed when I found out the film was going ahead."
The title of the book was taken from the Bob Marley song of the same name.
"It's a metaphorical title," he says. "The original Buffalo Soldiers were at the end of the American Civil War. Suddenly, you had 25,000 black Americans who had been released from slavery, but the economy couldn't absorb them. Many of them went into the US army. They were paid terrible wages, $11 a month, which was bad even then, and they were sent to fight the Indians in the Indian Wars. It was basically a campaign of extermination - the hapless against the hopeless. One of the things that occurred to me was that has always been the soldier's lot.
"They are out there risking their lives, but they will not reap any of the rewards. Even if you win, you're going to lose in the end."
Meanwhile, O'Connor has moved on to his second novel, Lifesaving, based on his own experiences growing up in the New York suburbs and teaching at a maximum security prison in upstate New York, which he did for five years.
"I taught creative writing, screenwriting and Shakespeare. It was a fascinating experience. The worst moments came at the beginning, when I didn't know what I was doing and I ended up in these bizarre situations, and at the end, because all the prison education programmes were cut back. It was a shame, because it was a really good programme and the prisoners who got college degrees had half the recidivism rate of those who didn't. So it would have saved money in the long term to have kept those programmes going."
From 1982 to 1985 O'Connor himself studied creative writing at Syracuse University, where his tutors included the writers, Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff.
"I went there because it offered the opportunity to study under them," he says. "Both were really important in terms of my education. Ray Carver was terrific. He really focused on the line of a story and he would talk endlessly about how he constructed a paragraph, whereas Toby looked at the larger picture of the story. I learned so much from both of them.
"Ray had quit drinking for about a year and a half by that stage. He had what he called his Bad Ray days and his Good Ray days, but he was sober the whole time. He was a very jovial guy. He looked like someone who had really stared deep into the abyss and then got this renewed lease of life. He had gotten together with Tess Gallagher, who became his wife, and he was going through this period of real joy."
Buffalo Soldiers opens at selected cinemas on Friday