2012 saw the release of Rubicon from Archaia, a graphic novel adaptation of the legendary Akira Kurosawa film Seven Samurai, with the titular Japanese warriors replaced with Navy SEALs in modern-day Afghanistan. Illustrated by Mario Stilla and written by Hawken scribe Mark Long with input from Dan Capel, one of the founders of SEAL Team Six, and Christopher McQuarrie, Academy Award-winning screenwriter of The Usual Suspects, Rubicon takes an unvarnished look at the realities of life as a career soldier, the bleak nature of true heroism, and the damage war inflicts on everyone it touches, including the warriors themselves.
Now, thanks to Machinima, Christian Johnson has directed a live-action prequel called Rubicon: The Beginning, with designs on trying to make it a full-fledged web series. The beginning of the graphic novel shows Fire Team Leader Hector Carver getting the news of the unexpected death by suicide bomber of one of his brothers in arms, a man they called Big Mike. Johnson’s story fills us in on just who that man was, as he’s portrayed by Matt Bushell.
Check out Rubicon: The Beginning, which premiered online just today.
In an interview today with Crave Online, Long explained how Rubicon initially came together, putting together a disparate group of people.
“Chris [McQuarrie] has a brother who is a SEAL, and he commanded a unit that Dan [Capel] was in,” he said. “Chris lived up here for a number of years in Seattle. The three of us knew each other separately. About three and a half, four years ago, we got together in LA, and we were talking about stuff that we were never going to do – passion projects that no one was ever going to allow us to do. You kinda forget this now, but prior to SEAL Team Six finding and killing Bin Laden, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were box office posion. Chris said ‘I would really love to do something with SEAL Team Ten in Afghanistan, something like the movie Zulu.’ It just took my breath away. It was such a great idea. We all laughed, because there was no way that was ever going to happen. But I couldn’t get it out of my mind, and about three weeks later, I talked to Chris and said ‘do you know what’s better than Zulu? Seven Samurai,’ and he said ‘you’re right.'”
From there, Long crafted the story of selfless warriors defending helpless opium poppy farmers from the Taliban out of a sense of honor, with Capel giving an incredible amount of personal insight into how to make Long’s depictions of a SEAL team more accurate, with McQuarrie giving notes, serving essentially as their editor. Long cops to feeling some pressure with that arrangement. “Giving pages to an Academy Award-winning screenwriter is intimidating,” he admits, “but he was very predictably like a Jedi, giving very zen-like notes which were super-useful… for the core, fundamental character issues.” As an example, as a method of getting around exposition, McQuarrie noted that “you need to give each one of them something they care about more than anything in the world, and would be willing to die for.” That’s what you see with Bolton, the stand-in for Mifune of Seven Samurai, who wants nothing more than to impress the real-deal SEALs.
They eventually brought on Italian artist Stilla, who spoke no English and presented some interesting challenges. “After I had the manuscript professionally translated, we resorted to Google Translate for all our notes, so it was kind of like two 4-year-olds talking to each other,” Long says with a laugh. Eventually, through familiarizing Stilla with shorthand lingo and doing things like actually taking photos of himself illustrating the proper way weapons should be handled for each specific character, the communication worked out enough to finish Rubicon. Long’s experience as a game designer allowed him to even build a crude model of the Afghan village with the Unreal Game Engine to help Stilla visualize the action from various perspectives.
Now that the project they were all convinced would never see the light of day is now getting a live-action translation, what’s Long’s reaction? “Thank God we killed Bin Laden, because now, everything’s different,” he says. “We’re in an era when general audiences are very interested in hearing the story of the soldier. If you remember the Vietnam War, there really wasn’t a contemporary film about the war – except for Apocalypse Now, which is not realistic almost in any sense – until several years after the war. The same thing is going on. Except for Lone Survivor and a couple of other biographies that really narrowly talk about the experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq, you haven’t really seen much come out – certainly nothing that has captured the milieu of the experience there. So we’re one of the first fictional stories being told, and that’s kind of exciting.”
Long is also quick to praise Capel’s contributions to that sense of reality, given his own experiences in SEAL Team Six. “I have a brilliant creative partner in Dan Capel, who provides all this visual insight and these anecdotes. I think the opening 30 pages are all real things that Dan experienced that we fictionalized.”
Even the dysfunctional family life of Hector Carver comes from Capel’s dislike of military movie cliches. “As a Tier 1 dude, he really does not like these SEAL biographies in particular where they say ‘I grew up in Texas, I went to BUD/S [Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training] – one third of the book is about BUD/S – and then I went on one operation and that’s my book and I’m famous for it.’ Dan’s been on hundreds of operations, so he thinks that’s ridiculous,” Long explains. “He wanted to tell a different kind of story. He wanted to talk about what it’s really like – the op tempo is so high, unlike any other special warfare dudes in the past. They’ve done so many operations that they don’t even name them anymore, they just number them. They’re expected to go on a 30 or 90 day rotation, come back, and two days later, be driving your kid to elementary school. A lot of these guys will see some trash in the road and will have to turn around and go a completely different way. They understand that they’re back in Seattle in a car and not an armored humvee, but they’re so wired to survive that they cannot drive by that bag of trash, which would’ve signaled death in Iraq. That brings all this stress into their families – often, guys at this level in their career are older than your average operator, with families and kids of a certain age, and that marriage is falling apart, and now they have a hot mess of a young girlfriend like Hector does.”
Also, the character of Big Mike, the central role in Rubicon: The Beginning, is based on a man Capel knew very well who was killed by a suicide bomber. Long does note that the efforts here are for the graphic novel and the live-action series to stand alone without each other, but if you do see them both, you’ll see why the loss of Big Mike has such an impact on Hector’s crew – which also includes Smash, another key role in the film, played by Ken Lally, a veteran of Call of Duty video games whose father was actually a spy who had groomed him to be a Navy SEAL throughout his childhood.
Long and Capel have gotten to work with Rubicon: The Beginning director Christian Johnson very closely. “It was a small budget production – Machinima gave us enough money to do everything right, but it meant everybody did everything. I was there on every day of the shoot, and Chris is super-collaborative, but you also kinda have to let go of these things. For him to find the best version of the story that he wants to tell, I can’t be leaning over his shoulder as the creator of the project saying ‘no, don’t to this.’ There are things that I wouldn’t have done that way, but I’m glad he did, because it came out better than I would have done myself. I got to be an extra in the shoot, I got to drive the bad guy car, I got to fool around with the drone we put the camera on. All that stuff was fun.”
Johnson made some time to talk to Crave Online as well about Rubicon: The Beginning, explaining that he was brought in due to his unique background. “I have a fair amount of experience shooting in and being in the world of Afghanistan – I shot my first movie in 2002 [Septem8er Tapes] outside of Kabul near Khost, and it was an interesting opportunity to blend some knowledge I had about Tier 1 operators and operating in areas of conflict. I’ve also shot in Sierra Leone and Lebanon and other places like that. I’ve been in and around these situations with these guys, and using a lot of real people is also something that I do. The graphic novel had a good world to set up, but we want to have this prequel stand on its own and give introduction to what these guys do with joint operations and how messy it can get. Also, with seven protagonists in the graphic novel, having something like this be a prelude to it allows for folks to get to know the personalities and the world that these guys live in before they land in Afghanistan in the novel.”
“A lot of people know Iraq and Afghanistan, but they don’t know that a lot of these SEAL Team guys will ship off and do two week stints in remote parts of the world,” Johnson says, “So Rubicon: The Beginning deals with the Mexican cartel and how it’s potentially working with the Yakuza, setting up lesser known organized crime threats that face Special Forces and SEAL teams. We wanted to establish the world that these guys operate in that does feather into joint command FBI-CIA operations, showing their abilities and technology, how they have to get approvals in some ways, which is often a sticky business. You get three chefs in the kitchen, who’s in charge? That’s the fun part we wanted to establish, setting this up with small two-man teams. They sometimes are the tip of the spear – judge, jury, and executioner – and they have to make quick decisions. The repercussions of their actions can become national news.”
All this attention to accuracy about the SEAL experience leads one to wonder where exactly the line is between telling the truth and keeping SEAL operations under wraps, since they are a black ops organization after all. Is Capel in anger of becoming like the author of No Easy Day, whose firsthand account of the Bin Laden op prompted the spec-ops community to shun him? “I don’t think you’ll see any more of that. This is my own opinion, but I think it’ll be done in our context, where we’re fictionalizing events and anecdotes and stories,” Long insists.
Johnson adds “Retelling events like Lone Survivor did are usually a long process and based off of actual published works. Usually, there are events and very particular strategies that they do that are confidential and they don’t like to advertise – what we did with Rubicon was base it off of the ways they handle certain situations and certain threats and a bit more non-specific as to who the bad guys were or what the actual situation was. It’s the personalities from what these guys have to deal with that we wanted to explore.”
However, given the hook of the novel being the Seven Samurai riff, Johnson says there is potential for name actors playing the main characters in the book if this pilot episode does well enough to get the rest of the series going, to where Long’s characters will brush shoulders with Big Mike’s group on screen. “I wish we could tell you who we’re talking to, but I’m afraid as soon as we’d do that, they’d back out and we’d look like idiots,” Long says about the casting.
If you doubt who Johnson might be able to get, keep in mind that he’s done some incredible things here with a shoestring budget. “We wanted to put together something that wasn’t just a two-location shoot, even though the budget’s a challenge,” he notes. “We wanted to create something that had a full world and numerous locations. We kind of went overboard as much as we could to create the world that would set the table up down the road for higher production values and what might come out of it to find the other pieces of the puzzle we would need to do it longform.”
Long adds “We shot this thing in the very aptly named Valley of Fire outside Vegas, and it was so fuckin’ hot and windy – trying to fly that drone in high winds, that was the most challenging. I’m amazed at what Christian got for the budget we had. Shoot-outs, guns, car chases, special effects, drones, helicopters…!”
Johnston adds “Shooting at an airport the day before the LAX shootout? Doing a shootout scene at a TSA-controlled part of Long Beach airport and the permissions and all that – it’s a pretty complicated issue. There are a lot of reasons why productions don’t shoot in LA – it’s very complicated and very expensive. For every location, we had 50 that we tried. A lot of that is just trying to get it cheap enough and secure enough to get approvals. A lot of the support came from the 30 or so people who donated and helped out and the 100 or so visual effects. Traditionally, it would be a million dollar budget to pull off what we were able to, but we wanted to create something you don’t often see in smaller-budget web series and bring something that feels more akin to a cable series or something like that.”
Long insists that Johnston’s being modest. “One of the reasons we really liked him as a choice for director was his guerilla-style of filmmaking where he can roll with any kind of punches. He could handle anything. I saw on set that he was completely unflappable even when the local airport police were giving us a hard time. We just drove on and shot somewhere else.”
As far as a more direct translation of the Rubicon graphic novel to live action, that right is still reserved for McQuarrie, since it all sprung from his idea. “Chris certainly wants to write and direct, but it’s going to be his own version,” Long says. “We cleaved very closely to Seven Samurai in the graphic novel, with the idea that whatever Chris did wouldn’t be a straight adaptation. It would be some kind of reimagining or probably using the concept as a jumping off point and he would write something completely original.”
