The Marine Corps taught me how to kill, but it didn't teach me how to deal with killing.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
So the Marine Corps really did teach me to conquer fear, and then to go for higher causes, higher purposes.
The Marines gave me a really strong sense of discipline and a work ethic that kicks in at my job.
My old man taught me a lot of stuff in his death that I don't even know if he would have been able to teach me had he been alive. And that was to never do stuff that can jeopardize the people you love and hurt them.
A lot of the qualities in 'Killing and Dying' is sort of a response to work I'd done previously. I wanted to push myself in some different directions.
When I first went to school, I was fighting all the time. The soldier mentality was still in me. I kept getting expelled. I found it hard to take instructions from anyone who wasn't a military commander.
I wanted to work on this central problem of killing. How you go about killing. Now, in the film I had to kill my children - well, I didn't want to get that far.
When I was doing 'Generation Kill' in Africa I worked with five really super-trained Navy SEALs who taught us all these moves like how to disarm people: if there's a bar fight and someone's got a chair or there's someone with a gun behind our head, how to disable them and take them down in a swift move.
If it's natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?
The things I learned from the army - and I think it was a lesson for life - was how to work in unison with other people. How to take responsibility.
All my life I've been taught how to die, but no one ever taught me how to grow old.