INDIE SPOTLIGHT: Interview with ‘Reveille’ Writer-Director Michael Akkerman

In late 1943, an American squad engages in a skirmish with German soldiers along the Winter Line in central Italy. As artillery shells begin to rain down, the Americans must honor the rules of war and protect their wounded prisoners. Huddled together in a cave and made to see the enemy as human, the soldiers wrestle with unimaginable moral questions that lie outside the boundaries of nationality and allegiance.

There seems to be a trend happening in the independent space where what seems like war epics at first glance are truly incredible character dramas, without the glorified battlefield pizzaz. 

First time filmmaker Michael Akkerman approached this film with finite detail, rigorous research, and humanity at the center of it all. It's a character piece, through and through, giving an inside glimpse of the emotional and physical turmoil of being a soldier in World War II. But Michael also finds a way to find a common moral and empathetic bond in these men's last moments - without spoiling too much, there's a scene that echoes the 1925 John Gilbert starring film The Big Parade between American and German soldiers, albeit that film being about "the great horrors of the Great War." 

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: How did this story land on your radar?

Michael Akkerman: Well, I had learned about the story, it is a true story, and I had learned about this event through various research I was doing at the time. I was looking into a lot of stuff involving the Italian campaign of World War II, because there's not a whole lot, I mean, there's a ton of research out there, but there's not a whole lot of spotlights on it, if that makes sense. Really, there are no movies about it. And I was just like, OK, I want to delve more because I'm into World War II history.

And I came across the story about these soldiers, captured these wounded Germans, and then they had to wait with them in this cave, and just this prolonged thing of them dying, and just basically having to sit there and watch it. I thought that was a very interesting, unusual story about humanity and how war is hell. I think people use that phrase a lot, "War is hell." But I don't think a lot of people really fully understand that. And I thought that this could show that a bit better. The bleakness of this and the just that there's no satisfaction to any of it. There's no satisfactory conclusion to it all. And that's what really intrigued me.

When I first heard about the story, it was solely from the ally perspective - the Americans - because that's how it was reported. And I thought it should be shown through both perspectives. So, I invented the German side of the whole thing. I tried to find out about the actual Germans who this happened to, and that is a whole cluster of information that has unfortunately been lost to history. So, I had to take my creative liberties with that, but I did it as accurately and I researched a lot as much as I could for it. So when I came across the story, I thought, I can't just show it from one perspective, it has to be from both perspectives, that's the best way to show this. And the language barrier in between is something that the characters have to run into; the audience has seen everything, but there's this barrier in between the German and American characters, with their languages, and their nationality and all that.

Sadie: Yeah, and what I really appreciate about this, it's even your logline, the humanity that you bring to both sides. There is a common language as soldiers, down to that running line, "My bullet, my prisoner."

Michael: Right.

Sadie: There was some great character development that you did here, making the characters dynamic and implementing additional conflicts while these confined in one location in this cave. What was your approach in character development, relationships, etc. while also making it not feel like we’re bored in this single location?

Michael: The plot is very minimal, obviously. But it had to be driven by characters that can be easily defined but are interesting. And a huge part of that is to the actors. The actors who you cast to play these characters, they have to bring it to life and make people believe it. And so that was a huge part of it. Every character had to be very clearly defined. And it was very challenging. But at the same time, I knew what I wanted to say with what was going on and I could assign every character to what I was specifically wanting to depict.

I don't want to give anything away, necessarily, but there are characters that have traits about them that are very relatable. There's someone who copes with things by joking about everything. There's a character who copes with everything by being very coarse, and very cruel about everything. And then there's the character who's - which is funny, because he's supposed to be leading these guys, but he's much younger than them, and he's much less experienced, the American sergeant - and his whole thing is that he has no idea what the answer is, he hasn't really faced this before. So, he's kind of torn between well, we should be doing the quote, right thing, but at the same time, where one of his soldiers, he's like, ‘No, what do you think we've been doing since we got here?’ And then, other ones were more tender-hearted.

And then when it came to the German perspective, I kind of wanted to encapsulate what the German military was, within these characters, specifically these three there is an old man who was a soldier in the First World War, who is completely dried up, he's completely demoralized, he hates what he's been through, but he is continuing to be used by the military, and he's just at his wit's end. Then you have someone who is younger, tough, and completely in his prime who has been through the hardest of hardships in the war. He was on the Eastern Front; he was basically what you would expect for the typical German soldier at the beginning of the war. And then towards the end, you have teenagers. Someone who's very young. People who are being brought out of the Hitler Youth, and they're like 14 15, 16 years old to be put into the war. So that was when it came to the German perspective, what I was really trying to show was what the population would have been like for the German people who were thrown into the war.

Sadie: Yeah. And then you have the guy who's Polish, who had two choices: you either go to camp, or you have to fight with us.

Michael: That is also a very common thing is that, and this is a thing that people don't really realize, but the Germans, they used a lot of foreign soldiers, people from Poland, Czechoslovakia, places they had conquered, and also French as well. Some of them would volunteer, other ones, like Polish people, who fought them in '39, they would say, 'OK, well, you have this option, you can be a prisoner, or you can fight in our military, what do you want to do?' And so that was the case. That's what I wanted to show here. And that was, again, not an uncommon thing, in the German military to have people from all different parts of Europe being thrown into the German army.

Sadie: Yeah. And there's that questioning of what do you do that's morally right, in these scenarios, and it's a very gray line.

Michael: Absolutely.

Sadie: In terms of dialogue, you have this stellar cast who have completely embodied these characters and this world, how much did you find yourself as a director just kind of letting them do their thing, such as improving, feeling out their characters in specific moments of tension, etc.?

Michael: Well, I definitely encourage that. There are some filmmakers who they have this tunnel vision, they see things through a lens that it's their vision, they want to see what's in their brain. And it's like, the greatest thing, though, is that you're not the only artist involved, you're not the only creative person ever. This is a collaborative medium, everyone involved has their own thoughts and feelings about it. So, I encourage any filmmaker to hear their actors out, hear what they want to say. I mean, even if you don't agree with it, it doesn't hurt to try it. And that was the case for a lot of things.

There was a lot of things that we came up with on set. A great example is again, I'm not trying to give anything away, but the actor Jake Powers, he plays the character Rowe in the film, the very tough-as-nails, cruel guy. There's a scene where he's supposed to be outside the cave, and he's drunk, he's drinking a wine bottle that he stole. And I had originally written the script that he was kind of sloppy. But Jake came up to me and he said, ‘I think I want to do this differently.’ And I'm like, ‘Differently how?’ He goes, ‘Just let me do something. If you don't like it, that's fine.’ Instead, what he did was he's out there singing and he's welling up, he's crying, everything that's going on, none of his combat buddies are around him and he's trying to get out of this mindset of where this emotion is hitting him that what he's doing is terrible. And he's trying to sing through it, and he's drinking, and tears are running down his face. And then finally the Sarge comes out, says, ‘Will you stop?!’ And then shakes it off. 

And there were people on set that were crying when he was doing that scene, because it was just so powerful. And it was like, ‘That's it.’ That wasn't my direction at all. He came up with that completely. And it was brilliant. And it's in the movie. I can't really think of anything where it was like, we didn't benefit from their creativity or their ideas.

Sadie: I am so curious, how many shoot days did you have on this? And where did you find this cave and battlefield location?

Michael: This was a first-time film - very independent. We shot it in, I think it was either 12 or 13 days. It was pretty insane. At the time, we didn't really think about it. But looking back, you're like, that was the fastest thing ever. I wish, if I had months to do this, we could have done crazy things. But I think with the time that we had, we got what we needed.

And we shot it around the Ozarks of Missouri. We needed some location that resembled more of central Italy because I had studied a lot of what it looked like and such and my producer Myra Miller, knows that area very well. And she's like, ‘Well, there's places around Sparta and the Ozarks, why don't we location scout around there?’ And then I was like, ‘Eh, maybe.’ But she eventually found this great location owned by these very nice people who just wanted to support us. The entire movie, we shot on this property. And they had this cave. And the cave was insane, as you've seen in the movie, and it was like this is where it has to be. So, it was very serendipitous.

Sadie: As for your collaboration with your DP Cooper Shine, what were you guys doing for pre-production in terms of prep to inspiration for tone?

Michael: We both went to film school together. That's how I know him. We know each other really well. And it was kind of an open a no-brainer when it came to this because Cooper is very talented. And he's worked a ton. He has a lot of experience. And he likes a lot of the stuff that I like. I'm like, ‘Dude, you know what I want. You're the guy to make it happen.’ And of course, he was like, ‘Absolutely, I love this kind of material and this kind of subject matter.’ What I wanted to do, I and I talked to him about it, I said, I don't want to replicate the Saving Private Ryan look which so many war films have done - that muted blueish green kind of high contrast stuff. And I said what I want to do, this is supposed to be the Mediterranean and I want to replicate Kodachrome film and photographs that you would have seen at the time. Not black and white. The Kodachrome, actually real color photographs and film. And that was what we were trying to replicate. It has this specific tone to it that he, I think, replicated very nicely. I showed him a lot of Kodachrome photos from the Italian campaign of 1943. So that was what we were looking at as our overall look of the film.

Sadie: What inspired you to become a filmmaker?

Michael: It's something I've always wanted to do. Ever since I was a little kid, I made little movies with my camera and my GI Joes and army men and such, and it's just something I've always wanted to do. I can't remember a time growing up watching movies, making movies, when I was a little kid, I don't remember a time where I didn't want to do it. I was maybe nine or 10 when I said that was what I wanted to do in life was be a filmmaker. Growing up, just getting into history and war history, I watched war movies as a kid and then I started studying war history, World War II history. I hate to admit it, but I grew up in the Call of Duty, Medal of Honor era. [laughs]

But it always made me want to learn more. I never saw it as just movies or just video games, I always knew it was real. And I wanted to learn more. I always knew that there were important things to learn when it came to war history. And so, I always wanted to, as a creative person, someone who's creative and wants to film I want to translate that to film because it is the two things I'm passionate about: war history, filmmaking. And that's why those two have melded together. I don't just want to make war movies, but if you're gonna call me an auteur, which I do not have the status to be called that yet, but I would say I am a war auteur as of right now. [laughs]

Sadie: [laughs] As of right now, and it works. But I love your approach to it. It's not about ‘let's blow everything up and isn't that awesome,’ it's getting down to the core of these characters and the humanity and the emotion and what's happening, and just humanizing people.

Michael: No, I don't want to make war porn. That's what I call it. Whenever I see something, I'm not going to name any movies because I don't want to make it seem like ‘Oh, I'm better than them’ but where it's like action schlock that's what I want to move away from when it comes to the war movie genre. There are so many stories and so much profound things that we can say and learn from when it comes to the subject matter. Other than just blowing up and guts flying everywhere and tanks and airplanes flying around. Yeah, get rid of the war porn. That's what I want to do. [laughs]

Sadie: [laughs] After making your first indie feature, and advice for first-time filmmakers?

Michael: There's no easy way to do it. But when you're just getting started, you just have to start from the ground up. You have to start it yourself. No one is going to give you a job. And then as you start, then you get people who want to come in and help you do it. But that's just my advice. It's just that don't expect anything to come your way you just have to start no matter what. That's how I made this. That's how so many other people who have become successful have started, they start from the ground up. Treat it like it's do or die, you know? Because if you quit, then that's it.

Sadie: Yeah, absolutely. Are you the type of filmmaker that sets deadlines, like this the production date?

Michael: Oh, yeah, absolutely. You cannot live like that. You cannot treat it as ‘Oh, we'll see if it can be done.’ No, we have to set times. So, then you're driven to get all the stuff that's required to be there on this specific date. So that's how you make things happen. You set a time when this needs to be done. And then if it's not done by that time, treat it as though you're a dead man by that time. [laughs]

Reveille is now available to watch on Amazon, Vudu, and Charter Spectrum.