‘Battle: Los Angeles’: A Day on the Set With the Writer, Director, and the United States Marines

The Audition

Auditions for film and TV are undergoing a seismic change from the days of crowded waiting rooms packed with guys who all look exactly the same. We put ourselves on tape now. Actually, technology has hyper-warped past the tape, and it’s a digital file that gets emailed, but we still call it, “putting ourselves on tape.” 

Tom Hillman at work

I got the call from my agent to “put myself on tape” for “Battle: Los Angeles” back in August, 2009, and straightaway looked up all I could find on the director, Jonathan Liebesman. 

He likes using a loose, handheld camera technique. 

Perfect. The scene I was auditioning for was the reporter on the beach, so I grabbed a plastic microphone from my kid’s overflowing toy box and my digital camcorder and headed down to the ocean. Many casting directors today are still expecting us to “follow the rules” and stand in front of a blank blue wall and do our thing. 

I like to break the rules. 

I shot the scenes walking up and down the beach not caring what the shell hunters thought as I aimed my camera at myself and surely looked like I’d escaped from the nearby happy house. I came back home to edit on my Mac and because the initial breakdown said they were interested in hiring a  “real reporter” for this role, I grabbed some footage from a job I’d recently done playing a reporter and tagged that on to the end of my audition. I emailed it out on a Tuesday, and by Friday I heard I’d won the role. 

A Day on the Set

Information was sketchy. I was to play a reporter, but no script was available even up to the day I was to travel to Baton Rouge. No problem. One of the tricks of the trade is to be prepared for anything, and go with the flow. I arrived in Baton Rouge on a Sunday afternoon, got settled in to my hotel, and set the alarm on my iPhone for the scheduled 4 a.m. pickup. 

First stop for me was the wardrobe trailer where I was to be given something that Anderson Cooper might wear in the field. I asked the stylist if she knew if I was going to be on a beach somewhere and she said she thought they had done some green-screen beach stuff the other day. I love wardrobe and makeup people. Especially when they have that “we can handle anything that gets thrown at us” attitude. It fuels me with that same “can do” confidence. My basic skill set as an actor consists of one main ingredient. I remember how to make believe. Everything else takes a back seat to that one creative gift from childhood. 

I met director Jonathan Liebesman outside on the street as the special effects artists were covering the brand new “Anderson Cooper” clothes with dirt and soot. After a cordial greeting and a quick up and down look of approval, Jonathan said, “So you know what you’re doing?” 

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Now, that kind of a question from a director calls for lightning fast strategic mental decisions, because on the one hand you want to sound über confident, but on the other, you really want to know what you’re doing. Because having a 70 million dollar movie production come to a screeching halt while everyone including Aaron Eckhart and the 700 dirtied up extras stare at you in disbelief and vile contempt makes for a very bad day. 

“No… Yes… I mean… I know I’m playing a reporter, but I haven’t seen a script…” and with that as if on cue, up walks the writer, Chris Bertolini, who hands me a sheet of paper with no less than eight paragraphs of dialogue on it. Again with the lightning fast strategic mental decision as to what expression my face should have on it at that very moment. I don’t take Ginko Biloba and I really should. These two men are completely and utterly juggling trillions of tiny details in order to tell this gargantuan story and here I stand with eight paragraphs of dialogue that they completely and utterly expect me to memorize in the next few minutes so they can begin shooting this scene.

 I was able to say, “Got it,” as they disappeared into the sea of controlled chaos that is a Hollywood movie set. 

The Marines at Work

I looked up and saw hundreds and hundreds of extras, all covered in the same dirt and soot I was. I saw real Marines they had hired to man the real tanks they had set in various positions on the street. I saw my friend, Neil Brown, Jr. who got cast as LCpl. Guerrero. He told me they had hired real Marines as Technical Advisors and had given them authority to step in front of the cameras and ruin a take if they saw anything that didn’t ring true to how the Marines would really operate. He also said that he’d endured two weeks of authentic Boot Camp and that the gear they were wearing weighed at least 40 pounds and that they had to keep it on and stay in character between takes and everyone from Aaron Eckhart on down was completely into the whole experience. 

My eight paragraphs of dialogue was nothing. I surmised that they had given me way more than would actually end up in the final cut, and that I could pull this off with one more trick up my sleeve. 

I had packed my ear prompter. I quickly recorded my eight paragraphs into my iPod and plugged in the cord and heard “Stand by” echo through the streets of this war zone. Jonathan came up to me and said he would be zig zagging in and around me with his steady-cam operator and to just keep the dialogue going the entire time. “Action!” I hit play on my iPod and repeated what I heard in my ear, “I’m standing on the ground amid a full-scale war…” 

I’ll put the audition on my website if you like that sort of thing, then go see “Battle:LA” this weekend and see if you can find me.