at Dye’s San Fernando Valley
bungalow expecting a similar sensation. Due at 11-hundred-hours precisely,
it had ticked past 11-hundred-and-a-bit by the time the thick LA traffic
had been negotiated. Anxiety prickled at what might await at Fort Dye.
A chewing out? A yomp up a neighbouring canyon? Infinity press-ups?
Dye, after all, hasn’t burnished his military and filmmaking reputation by
letting ill-discipline go unattended. He’s stripped the bark off Hollywood’s
great and good, had dozens of movie stars digging foxholes, and reduced
the cast of Saving Private Ryan to near mutiny. Heck, even his website
wants to kick your ass.
Happily, he waves us in with a smile. “Coffee?” he asks, introducing
his wife, Warriors, Inc.’s CFO, Julia. Their giant golden Pyrenees, Bear,
bounds in. “He’s a 45kg lapdog,” reassures Dye, ushering us into a living
room decorated with military memorabilia. It’s an Aladdin’s cave, if
Aladdin had done three tours in ’Nam. A row of bayonets lines the wall,
a piece of Nazi crockery, gifted by a friendly local when he was in
Normandy for Saving Private Ryan, sits in a glass-fronted shelf next to
sand collected from Saipan’s invasion beaches. On a shelf sits another
grenade, this one thrown at him by an NVA soldier during the battle for
Khe Sanh. “Ours went off, theirs didn’t,” Dye notes dryly. As he runs
through the spoils of several wars, it’s hard not to wonder how you’d
explain all this on an Airbnb listing.
In his study sits the most intriguing item of all. A modified North
Vietnamese Army respirator, it’s a piece of wartime kit that’s definitely
not standard issue. “That’s the grass mask,” explains Dye. “You’d put
the dope in there and light it, and you could see the smoke filling the
eye pieces.” Part Cheech and Chong, part Goya-esque nightmare, this
terrifying-looking contraption cameoed in the dope-hazed bunker scene
in Oliver Stone’s Platoon. “This is the original one that gave rise to it
all,” he says. “It wasn’t in the script, but I showed it to Oliver. He loves
those little details.”
For Stone — another Vietnam veteran — Platoon had been the
culmination of a story that he’d been waiting 18 years to tell. For Dye,
it’s where it all got started.
got started at a humble LA barbecue.
Dye, who’d read about Stone’s plans for a grunt’s-eye movie about the
Vietnam War in Variety, wanted to pitch his idea for a pre-shoot boot camp
that would make proper soldiers of his cast and deliver the verisimilitude he
felt war films so often lacked. But he didn’t know Stone, and had no way to
get in front of him. Cue a chance meeting over burgers and hot dogs with a
writer who’d worked with the director. “He was reluctant to give me Oliver’s
number, so I fed him beer all night and became his best buddy,” says Dye.
Number finally secured, he called Stone. “I said, ‘I really want to help you
with this film, and if you give me 10 minutes I think I can convince you.’”
After meeting with a sceptical producer, he got those 10 minutes. “We
sniffed at each other like a couple of strange dogs from the block,” he
remembers, “and I explained to him what I thought was wrong with the
performances in most war movies. He said, ‘Well, how would you fix that?’
and I told him I’d train them like we’d been trained.”
Dye’s idea — and his company’s USP ever since — was to take the
actors outside their comfort zone. Far, far outside it. There could, he
reasoned, be no faking the fatigue, stress and unique bonds of combat
service, even with actors of the calibre of Willem Dafoe, Charlie Sheen,
Johnny Depp and Forest Whitaker. “It’s so far outside their own experience,
you need to give them something they can reach for as a reference point,”
he notes. “I said, ‘My plan is to give those bastards that reference point.’
Oliver liked that.”
He liked it enough to hand him 33 actors and three weeks in the
Philippines jungle to make their existence a living hell. After compulsory
buzz cuts, they were marched into the hills above Manila. Each was given
an entrenching tool and told to dig in. There followed marches, ambushes
and endless instruction on infantry tactics. At night, explosions and small
arms fire erupted nearby as Hollywood’s finest tried to catch much-craved
Zs. The torments came in many shapes and sizes. One evening, Dye drove
a herd of goats pell-mell through their position,
causing the startled actors to expend all their
remaining blanks in one exhausted pyrotechnic
splurge. It was the ultimate edition of I’m
A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!. Tom
Berenger lost 12kg; Dafoe picked up jungle fever;
all of them were tired, bedraggled and snappy,
but slowly they became one with their characters.
“The minute we got them down from the hills,
Oliver knew that’s what he wanted.”
Dye’s idea had worked — he’d got “a tiger by
the tail” — and now he just needed the rest of
Hollywood to pick up on it. That was when Oscars
night offered a PR coup beyond his wildest dreams.
Collecting his Best Director gong, Stone thanked
Dye for giving “his heart and soul” to the movie.Above, from top: Dye
rejoins Oliver Stone for
Alexander; With ‘Turd
Number One’, aka Tom
Hanks, on Saving Private
Ryan; Guiding Tommy
Lee Jones for Heaven &
Earth. Main: Spielberg:
“Dale put all my actors
through their paces.
They came out
humbled and
honoured to portray
these characters.”