Novelist David Morrell looks not one bit like a pumped-up, anger-fuelled, out-of-control one-man-force of lethal destruction, but he does know a thing or two about that — having created the character John Rambo in his novel First Blood, and in the novelizations of the subsequent films in the popular franchise.
I first met Morrell at Chicon V, the 1991 World Science Fiction Convention. We were sitting next to each other at a mass book signing. As we waited for the doors to open, we discussed, among other things, how the incredible shades of gray in his novel First Blood shifted into the very black-and-white morality of the blockbuster film starring Sylvester Stallone.
Recently, I had a chance to see Rambo, the latest film in the series, which Stallone also produced and directed. Set in Myanmar (called “Burma” in the film, possibly as a nod of support to resistance groups who still prefer the ancient name for their country), the film reveals the intense repression of isolated Karen Christian tribes by the military junta in power. In the film, John Rambo is in self-imposed exile in Thailand. After he ferries a group of Christian missionaries on a clandestine trip into Burma, he is drawn into the conflict there. Though Rambo is a whole lot older than he was in 1982, the film captures the character Morrell created in ways the jingoistic second and cartoonish third films did not.
Connecting with him at his home in Santa Fe, N.M., it feels almost as if we are continuing the conversation we started some 17 years ago.
When the film first hit theaters, Myanmar was far off the world’s scope. Sadly, following the cyclone, that’s not the case any longer. Why is Rambo set there?
David Morrell: When Sylvester started to research the movie, he phoned various places, like the State Department and Soldier of Fortune magazine, to find out the worst place in the world in terms of a repressive regime. Everyone agreed that Myanmar was at the top. Maybe the DVD release of the film will help make a difference.
I remember when we first talked, I had just read First Blood and commented how different the tone seemed from that of the film.
The book was written during the Vietnam era and the country was polarized by the war. Universities had shut down. There were riots, things like that. The book was written to replicate that kind of conflict, as if Vietnam in miniature were occurring in the United States. Rambo is a medal of honor recipient who hates what happened over there, who hates what he found out about himself — that one of the few things he’s good at is killing people. So he’s basically a very pissed off individual. And he comes into conflict with the police chief who had been a war hero in Korea, and is a kind of Eisenhower Republican. He’s old enough to be Rambo’s father and he was trained in conventional warfare as opposed to the guerilla warfare Rambo was trained in.
When I was writing that book I was also teaching at Penn State and one of the books we were required to teach was the Last Days of Socrates. And there’s a big speech that Plato has Socrates make in which Socrates says that nobody does evil intentionally. Now that’s not quite true, I think some sociopaths do get pleasure out of that, but those we might call a normal rational person get into extreme behavior for what they consider to be defensible reasons. So I wanted to show how these two people were basically doing what they did for reasons that were understandable in their world. But if we step back to look, we say, “What’s the matter with you people?” Which is sort of how I felt about what was happening in the Vietnam era — all the riots and what-have-you in the U.S.
I was born and raised in Canada, and when I wrote First Blood I was only a Canadian citizen (Note: he now holds dual U.S. and Canadian citizenship). In those days, you signed loyalty oaths and it was understood that as a visitor you could not have political opinions. So the trick in writing First Blood was to create an anti-Vietnam book and also deplore what was happening the country but to do it in a way that didn’t look like I was being political. And that’s why the book held on and is still published and read 36 years later, because it doesn’t feel like it is mired in that moment in history.
The book was taught in high schools and colleges throughout the ’70s and into the early ’80s. And then the movies came out. The first one was pretty safe. It basically just took the plot and changed it a little and modified the character so he was no longer angry, but a victim. The movie was very successful. Then in 1985 the second movie came out and [Rambo] had been turned into a jingoistic figure. … Reagan identified with Rambo in a very big way and frequently mentioned Rambo in press conferences. On one occasion he joked that he had seen a Rambo movie the night before and now he knew what to do if there was ever a terrorist hostage crisis. (laughs)
And at that point, they stopped teaching that book in high schools and colleges. About the same time, I was in Britain on a book tour and the U.S. had bombed Libya and the headline in a British newspaper I read said, “U.S. Rambo Jets Bomb Libya.” So it got politicized. And then the third movie injected Rambo into the Afghanistan issue. I think the second movie has a lot of fun to it, as a kind of cartoon experience. The third one was kind of, I believe, dull. Of course, the timing was awful. The day the movie came out was the day the Russians left Afghanistan, so it had no timely quality whatsoever.
Sylvester had called me two years ago to talk about the fourth movie and what he wanted to do. He had two thoughts about it. One was, none of the movies captured the anger, so to speak, or the despair of the novel. This time around he was going to capture that in this film. The second thing was, he felt that perhaps the second and third films glamorized the violence in a way that he wasn’t happy going back to. And this fourth movie was going to be ultraviolent in a shocking way that would try to replicate what the violence would be like in real life. He would use this in order to show the impact this would have on the character — how this would deaden his soul. So we had this conversation and we went off.
[When Rambo was released] I didn’t know what to expect [but] it had some really stupid villains in it.
It seemed odd that there was never an exchange between the missionaries and the army leader.
I guess Sylvester didn’t want to humanize the villains because we’d feel sorry when they got all shot up. But there are ways. These are really bad people in real life and they’re that way because they are making so much money in the heroin trade. And if we were shown the greed that forced the farmers to grow these poppies and the villages to make the heroin and sell it — basically they have a slave trade going on — this could have been educating and pretty interesting and we might have said, “Yeah these people don’t deserve to be on the planet.” So it could have been done better. But that aside, Rambo spent so much time in the rain and he’s washing his hands and putting water over his head, all these cleansing rituals. And we see him at the beginning indifferent to handling cobras, and the cobras are sort of indifferent to being handled by him because they sort of recognize one another. And the whole thing, to me, came together in the internal speech Rambo gives as he is forging the knife [he will use when he goes to rescue the missionaries]. Sylvester is all about metaphor. He tried to find metaphor in an image to correspond to what he is trying to say about the character. So in the forging sequence he’s forging himself as much as he is forging the knife and then he has the line, “Admit it, you didn’t kill for your country. You killed for yourself and for that God will not forgive you.”
Those are some big lines. … What it comes down to is when you are a soldier in a firing line, you’re not thinking about politics or all these glorified abstractions politicians like to use. You’re killing to save your life and in a way expressing an internal primal cheer because you survived. That gets complicated. There are guilt issues that creep in. For Rambo, a lot of the stuff was working on him, so I felt that this fourth movie got into some very interesting elements that we would not have expected in a Rambo film.
You know, he’s almost never called Rambo in the film. He’s always “Boatman.” And the stuff that occurred to me was the River Styx and the journey through death and hell and all that. And when he’s hammering the blade, he is forging the hammer of the gods. I’d explored that in some of the novelizations and they had got that idea from that.
So on balance, emphasizing how badly the villains are portrayed, having said that, it’s a pretty interesting film. The New York Times treated the film seriously as did the LA Times, but Entertainment Weekly showed the terrible shape of American film criticism is now. I don’t think they really saw the film in the sense that I am describing it to you, the sophistication of a lot of stuff that is in that movie, especially the metaphor. That he’s a salvage expert working with metals, salvaging himself. I felt that some of the reviewers should have paid more attention.
I watched it with a local reviewer when I saw it here in Santa Fe and we were sitting in a dead spot for the dialog. And I could hear a lot of it but in some cases I couldn’t. And he’d lean over to me and ask, “What did he say?” … And in the review he refers to the simplistic dialog, which he couldn’t hear. But that to him was justifiable because he had obviously come with a pre-idea and so he was just going to say that anyway. I sometimes don’t see a lot of integrity from the people who are trying to tell us about our culture. So it’s interesting, when as you and I are talking, it seems that both of us have seen the same movie.
The people who are putting together the DVD got Sly to sit down for an interview and one of the things he talks about at length is the metaphor in the image that tells us about the character. I don’t think a lot of people know how to watch movies, to tell the truth. And he got into the whole issue of how he chooses the images and what they are supposed to represent.
What I find really interesting about the latest movie, is the metaphor for current American culture. We are cynical and jaded, and we have just about been pushed too far. Rambo seems to tap into the American psyche from Vietnam to Iraq. Did you feel that way?
I did. Sylvester did an interview for, I think it was Time Magazine, in which he said he’d done a lot of thinking about that. And he said that wars are fought to put an end to some terrible thing. Then he said, “Let’s look at a police officer, say you’re in a bad part of Chicago and your career has been there all your life and there you have been doing your best. You’ve been shot at and seen terrible things, and now you’ve retired. And you should say, ‘I’ve done my part, I fought evil.'” And Sylvester said, “If you look at it from another point of view, you did nothing, you made no difference whatsoever because the power of the evil you have been fighting is just going to keep coming and coming and coming.”
That was where he placed Rambo at the start of this film. [When the missionaries] say, “Bad things are happening, we have to change them.” And he says, “Are you taking weapons with you?” and they say no and he says, “Then you ain’t changing nothing.”
[Rambo] is a logical extension of what I was writing about. We’ve got to go back to the allegory of First Blood, both sides in the polarization of America failed. And the winner is Col. Sam Trautman, who is deliberately named Sam for Uncle Sam, who is the symbol of military industrial complex Eisenhower talked about. And the system that created Rambo kills him at the end. And the only one left standing is Trautman, who was quite different from the Trautman portrayed by the wonderful Richard Crenna.
In addition to some of these lines I couldn’t believe I was hearing in a Rambo film, I was rather startled at the end … when the crawl starts as he’s walking down to his father’s ranch, which was a really startling and beautiful scene — and my wife gasped when she saw this — the second item you see is “From the novel First Blood by David Morrell.” And I had the feeling that Sly was sort of nodding to the source material, and where it had led him to go.
One thing that was interesting in this movie was the length. It seemed so short, especially in an era of two-plus-hour blockbusters.
The two guys who ran Carolco, Andy Vajna and Mario Kassar … looked at a global market. So they said, “We don’t want Rambo to talk much because we have to pay for the translations, and more than that, too often the translations are wrong and they’re laughable.” So they wanted a pure film with very little dialogue. In addition, they said, “We want the movie to be in the range of 95 minutes so that the audience can be in and out of the theater within two hours, so you can get an extra showing per screen.” So the new company [for Rambo] was following the Carolco model in that. But like you, I agree that movie is too short.
One of the things Sly and I talked about a few years ago, was that he wanted to make his version of a Sam Peckinpah movie. Peckinpah happens to be the American filmmaker, along with Alfred Hitchcock, who had the most influence on me. Sly said he wanted to have the violence have this extreme quality to show the haunting impact it has on the character. When I saw the film and Sly is up there behind that huge machine gun and he gets wounded, and he is sort of hanging on by one arm, and he gets up and braces himself and starts shooting some more, that’s right from the climax of The Wild Bunch. … It’s a little long for my taste, but I can understand why the battle does go on so long — because we’re saying, “Enough already!” but he can’t get enough of it. And then he stands there and sees all this pain and suffering and it’s sort of washing over him and suddenly we cut and he’s in the United States. It indicates the catharsis he’s gone through. He’s come out the other side and he is now going to try to redeem his life. This is Sly again using metaphor rather than dialogue.
But we needed another five minutes or so to show the poor farmers being beaten in the poppy fields, and being beaten as they make the heroin and how the money is being exchanged.
So I give it three stars out of four … this maybe could have been a three-and-a-half-star movie with a little bit more finessing. They know my opinions, they read my interviews and they are very pleased with what I say about the film. Maybe on the DVD there will be something to correct it.
Can you envision another Rambo film?
There is one in the works.
When you saw “First Blood,” did Stallone meet the notion of what you thought Rambo would look like?
I thought he would be more of a hippie, with long hair and a long beard. But I don’t visualize characters; I let audiences fill that in. … But between ’72 when the novel was written and ’82 when the film came out, the world had changed in terms of styles. And when Brian Dennehy says, “We don’t like guys that look like you come into our town,” the audiences didn’t get it. They asked, “What’s the matter with how he looks?” So there was a danger that the movie was dated … but people got over that and went with the character.
What are you working on at present?
A six-part Captain America comic. Marvel had come to me and said it might be fun for the creator of Rambo to do Captain America. And I said I would do it but that I needed the freedom to approach the character in a realistic fashion, that is to say we will grant the superhero status of the character, but that aside, he will be a real human being. The story will take place in Afghanistan, and there were will be a lot of emotion in it as well as action. It will deal with the theme of the burden of being a superhero in today’s troubled world, especially if you are a superhero named after the United States. It’s a six-part version and will be out in hardback in July along with a portion of the film script [the film is slated to come out in 2009] and an essay on what it was like to work on this.
In the fall, I have a book coming out that I am just so pleased about. It’s called The Spy Who Came for Christmas. It’s my first spy novel since 1996 [and is] set in Santa Fe where I live. It takes place on Christmas Eve.
Rambo airs June 28 on Pay Per View and Pay Per View HD. The film has, not surprisingly, been banned in Myanmar, where it has become a rallying point for the Karen people. Stallone has challenged the military junta to let him come and tour the country, if they have nothing to hide.
For more information on David Morrell, visit his website davidmorrell.net