LOS ANGELES — Based on the Jake Tapper book, Rod Lurie’s new film, "The Outpost," immerses us into the conflict in Afghanistan where a small group of American soldiers faced seemingly insurmountable odds against the Taliban at a military outpost near the Pakistan border.
Director Lurie said he was attracted to the “everyman” quality of the story’s real-life heroes.
“One of the things that really drew me in was that these were regular Joe’s,” Lurie said. “It was not the Navy SEALs. It was not the superheroes that we normally make movies about. They were these grunts, you know, young kids.”
Cinema is rich with powerful war dramas, but Lurie said he was particularly inspired by films like Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory, wherein the lower echelons of the military pay for the mistakes of those above.
“I’m a big supporter of the American military,” he said. “They're generally speaking very, very good men and very smart guys. Sometimes they make mistakes. Putting this unit at the bottom of the base of the mountains was a mistake.”
Lurie said the war film can show us the frailty of human life, that a person can be here one moment, and gone the next. But he didn't expect the subject to hit so close to home while making the film.
“I experienced the worst day of my life while making this film,” Lurie said. “I got a call from my mom telling me that my son Hunter was in the hospital in Michigan. He was going to a music festival and he had a cardiac arrest.”
Doctors didn't expect Hunter to pull through, so a difficult decision had to be made.
“We made that decision,” Lurie said. “We pulled the plug. And my daughter said to me, ‘Dad, I know you don’t want to make this film, that you think it’s small, but you have to make this film because if Hunter knew that the film was dead, he would never have recovered.’”
"The Outpost" will be one of the films in the first wave of movies set for theatrical releases since the pandemic shut down theaters. It will also be released on demand, but Lurie said the film was made for the theatrical experience, which he said can still be the best way to see a film.
“Up you go, and then you hear people talking about it after the movie,” Lurie said. “And it’s something you've been through together and that's the thing that you're missing when you're watching it from home.”