Basically, the director emphasizes a "real" throughout the story. The weddings taken are real, the supermarket is real, and the military nursing home where John lives is real. Almost only Mike, Nick, Steve, and Stan have always appeared on the scene. Lee, Linda, and most of the other roles are ordinary people, not even grouped. The director’s idea is probably to put the characters into reality, let them react chemically, and create a new round of reality.
Among them, the scene where Steve lives in a veterans nursing home, except Steve, everyone else is real, they don't even know that this is filming. When Steve said to Mike, "Mike, bring Nick back." (this sentence was deleted from the movie), a disabled soldier behind him shouted: "Go back! Bring Nick back!" "This scene left a very shocking impression on the director.
As you can see from the movie, some of these veterans are very old, and they may be soldiers from World War II or the Korean War. The director said that they take a lot of medicine every day, some of them can only lie in bed all day, and the nurses give them medicine on time, day after day, year after year, so more than 20 years have passed.
There is also a story in which the director said he went to see a young soldier who was paralyzed on a bed. He had very beautiful blue eyes and a gentle and amiable voice. Like the director, he was also called Mike. They chatted happily for five minutes and found this soldier company. The eyes are also blind.
In the film, when Mike returned to Vietnam, there was a scene like a documentary, which was indeed a news video that was thrown away in the London Archives at the time. At that time, the director asked a group of war correspondents who had been hit by the war and were addicted to drugs and alcohol to show this film. When these news videos appeared, someone suddenly cheered, "I made this!" A reporter rushed to the screen and pointed to the screen. Me! This is me!" The reporters on the field found their own videos appearing on the screen one after another. They cheered and were happy like a child.
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