Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1911 - Mark Boal
Uploaded: 2022-12-15T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1911 - Mark Boal' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-12-15. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1911 - Mark Boal' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-12-15. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1911 - Mark Boal

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Tell me why, tell me.
I mean, I can give you some theories.
Okay, just keep this like a fist from your face and we're good to go.
What's your theory?
Okay, wow.
Do I need these?
Yeah, they're better.
Keeps us from talking over each other, locks you in.
Holy shit.
You get used to it.
Okay.
It's a little trippy.
Hearing your own voice.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I did so many radio shows back in the day.
It's normal to me.
I'll get into it.
But my theory is, has to do with authenticity and what you represent and how
rare that is.
And it's not that you're, what you're doing isn't, isn't like covered in other
ways in the culture, but you as an individual and what you bring feels, and I
think is, it's not like an illusion, very authentic.
And that's super rare.
And so...
It shouldn't be super rare though, right?
That's what's confusing.
Like, people should just be able to be themselves.
I mean, there's big commercial interests in it not being.
Yeah.
There's also people who read a lot of social media, and they read comments
about themselves, and they think about what people are saying, and then they
self-analyze too much and self-censor and self-correct.
And, you know, I do all that stuff on my own enough where I'm pretty introspective,
and I analyze myself, and I'm probably my harshest critics.
I don't need a lot of other people's input on that.
And when you do get a lot of people's input on that, I think people start
leaning in certain directions politically and socially, and they start saying
things because they think it'll gain them favor with certain groups.
Yeah, I mean, the temptation when you're doing media is to sell something.
Yeah.
So as soon as you're trying to sell something, you're going to get into
crafting it a certain way, crafting a persona.
Do you ever come across?
Do you have those considerations when you're putting together, like The Hurt
Locker, for instance, which is one of my all-time favorite movies?
Thank you.
It's such a good movie.
Thank you.
It's so good because it's so, like, you can see how he would be like that.
You could see how he would be drawn to go back there.
You could see how the pull of it and the chaos of it all.
And then there's a scene where he's, I believe he's in a supermarket, and it's
just fucking boring.
Life is just the mundane, normal life, and he just wants to go back to war.
Yeah.
And I'm like, I buy it all in, you know?
It's like, it's very rare that, you know, you see him, there's like no
suspension of disbelief.
You buy him, you're watching that film, and you're like, whoa.
Like, I could see.
Well, that was a big part of what we were trying to do was to, so I had been in
Baghdad as a reporter in 2004, I guess.
And I had seen some of what's depicted in the film.
And so I had witnessed the bomb squad going out and defusing bombs.
And then, and I wrote an article about it, and then the idea came along for a
screenplay.
I had the idea to write a screenplay, put it that way.
And my whole thing is, over the course of a year, I didn't know how to write a
screenplay, but my whole thing is I was learning how to do it and doing rewrites
was to try to replicate the experience that I had, that I felt when I was there.
Okay.
So to do that, there was a lot of craft and whatnot involved in how to, in
creating that, that I had to learn.
But it also meant breaking a lot of rules of narrative and storytelling that
you normally would do to make a movie effective, but that in this case would
have made it less authentic to the experience.
Like, one, for example, is that most war movies are organized around a mission.
It's like in the beginning of the movie, you're told, hey, this is what we got
to do.
And then the rest of the movie plays out, like Saving Private Ryan or what have
you.
When I was in Baghdad, one of the things I was struck by was this ceaseless,
like hamster wheel repetition of the war, that it wasn't organized around a
single mission.
It was this futile attempt to try to find all these bombs that had been
dispersed throughout the country by the counterinsurgency.
So I couldn't organize it around a mission, at least in my mind, to keep it
authentic.
I had to kind of make the story similar enough to the reality, which was like
everyday new mission, like a kind of, you know, episodic structure, they call
it.
So there were all these decisions along the way that get made to create that
feeling that you have where you go, oh, I can suspend, I can suspend my disbelief
because this feels, this feels real.
Then there's the point at which, like you do all this research, I did all that
research of actually going there, hanging out with these guys, talking to them,
witnessing what they were doing, trying to get deep inside of it, learning
about IEDs and how they work and really getting inside their mentality, hanging
out with them.
And then there's another point at which, and then there's another point at
which you kind of put yourself into the piece too.
And it's funny that you mentioned the scene at the end.
And it's been really instructive to me because when I was doing screenings for
the Hurt Locker, a lot of times at the end of the screening, like a vet would
come up.
And then that scene in the grocery store where Sergeant James, that's the
character name, was like kind of first time back from the war.
And he's, he's like overwhelmed by the commercialism of the supermarket and all
the choices of cereal.
And it's not just that it's boring, it's that it's like so meaningless compared
to what he'd just been doing.
And he can't, he can't function.
And you've seen this guy operate on such a high level for the past, whatever it
is, hour and a half.
Yeah, there's a scene right there.
Oh.
And he can't choose, you know, all this like consumer shit.
It was such a good representation of what these guys have to go through.
But my, and Renner is so good there too.
He's amazing.
But that, that actual thing had happened to me coming back.
I felt this sense of dislocation and I was only there for like a couple of
weeks, but I felt this sense of like how surreally grotesque, like certain
parts of our wealth are.
After you're in, after you see this poverty and you see the hardship of the war.
So that was like my thing.
That wasn't like a research thing.
And it's just interesting.
It was like totally from my heart.
And I remember putting it in and thinking, this is one of the rare things in
the movie that like I didn't get from reporting.
And it actually turned out to be one of the things that translated the most to
other people.
And it kind of taught me about like, well, sometimes if you just dig deep
enough, probably there's a chance anyway that like your experiences or my
experiences, if you're really being honest about them.
And this goes back to where we started this conversation will translate to
other people, even if you don't, even if you think they're super hyper fucking
specific to you.
Yeah.
Does that make sense?
Yes.
It might be hyper.
So that's what I'm so relatable.
It's relatable because it is in retrospect, but at the time I was like, this is
just a weird thing that happened to me.
No, but you nailed it because you, because in the context of the movie, you
know, you see that this guy is, I mean, every time he's defusing a bomb, this
could be it.
And he's over there in this, this chaos ridden war zone.
And then he comes back and he's wandering through a supermarket aisle.
It was perfect.
It was the perfect juxtaposition.
And it really does in you, you, you do relate to it because I think all of us
are aware that you kind of get accustomed to whatever you're around.
You know, you get accustomed to a chaotic home life or a peaceful home life.
You get a very busy workplace where things, people are yelling at each other
and everything's constantly moving fast or boring droning cubicle life.
Like people understand that there's like certain ways of living and existing
that you can get accustomed to and they kind of make sense when you've adjusted
and adapted to them.
But then to have such a clear difference between being in a war zone and being
in a supermarket, it was, it was perfect.
Well, thanks.
I'll take that.
Yeah, no, it was really good, man.
It's like, what, what does it feel like to have the responsibility of trying to
relay one of the most complex aspects of human life, which is war?
It's funny when you said perfect, I just flashed on, not to not answer your
question, but I remember there was some reviewer at the time that called it a
near perfect movie.
Oh.
And I remember calling him up and being like, near perfect.
Why?
What the fuck?
Like, is that near really necessary?
Well, it's.
Because I want to put it on the, I wanted to put it on the DVD.
Anyway, we did, we left it on there.
It's still, I mean, you know, but it's hard for someone to say something's
absolutely perfect.
No, of course.
And it's, it's stupid.
Yeah.
Nothing's perfect.
But it's funny when you said perfect.
What the fuck, bro?
Near perfect?
What's near?
Yeah.
What more do you want?
Yeah.
No, I do feel the sense of responsibility.
I mean, I think that, uh, I think we're all responsible.
I think whether you're doing a topic like that, where I tend to do real life
stuff, although the, this most recent thing is fictional.
I think that anybody in the media has a huge sense of responsibility that comes
with the territory, whether they feel it or not, or take it on.
I don't know.
I think it would be nice if we lived in a world where people felt more
responsible.
Because I think a lot of what is put out there is very irresponsible.
And I'm not even talking about like with true stories of like history where you're
distorting history.
That's obviously irresponsible.
But there's so much of our cultural production, the corporate production that
is, in my view, irresponsible.
I take the responsibility seriously just because I know in that case, there,
there are people, um, there were people that were still downrange and in harm's
way.
So there were all kinds of things that I did.
I was careful to not depict because I didn't want to put anybody like, that's
the most basic level of responsibility, right?
Nobody should get hurt because you burn some classified thing.
So like in terms of like tactics that are used?
Tactics or like there was, um, at the time in the war, there was, there was a,
um, there, there was this like jamming system.
That was, that was, um, used to help, um, prevent like remote detonation of, of
these IEDs, electronic jamming systems.
And I didn't depict that at all.
And then after the movie came out, a bunch of army guys were like, that wasn't
realistic.
I'm like, yeah, I mean, it, it is super realistic, but yes, I left some things
out.
Cause yeah, that makes sense.
Because people called me and they were like, dude, you can't put that in.
That would, that would be bad.
Yeah.
So there's that level of responsibility, but then there's another
responsibility to, to more like mystical things like truth and history.
Um, which I also feel pretty acutely.
What, when you talk about irresponsible depictions, like what, what do you mean
by that?
I, I mean, I think that like, I think that media is really important, like to
our culture, to our, to our civilization.
And one way to think about it is like, there's more responsibility now around,
let's say, portraying diversity.
We've, we've, we've gotten a lot better at, at least trying to make movies and
television shows that are more reflective of like what the country really looks
like.
But there's other areas where I don't see that same level of responsibility.
One is like the obvious one that, that the right talks about all the time is
like depiction of guns and violence where there's just so much.
And I, I mean, I have violence in this show.
I'm not, I'm not like saying like, and I, and I, I'm not like anti firearm or
anythin