Fighting the good fight
> Jack Huston speaks up against wars ahead of the world premiere of The Yellow Birds, a movie about the trauma soldiers in Iraq suffer
BRITISH actor Jack Huston’s grandfather, the legendary filmmaker John Huston, once had a movie about psychological trauma among soldiers banned because of its anti-war message.
The double-Oscar winner reacted furiously when Let There Be Light was confiscated by US military police, saying he’d expect “someone to take me outside and shoot me” if he ever made a pro-war film, according to his 34-year-old grandson.
“That sentiment stands today,” the younger Huston says. “I never really had any interest in making a war movie because I found a lot of instances where they glorified war.”
The actor, nevertheless, finds himself this year as one of the stars alongside Jennifer Aniston, Alden Ehrenreich and Tye Sheridan in The Yellow Birds, a movie about the terrors of fighting in Iraq.
“This movie doesn’t glorify war. It’s very honest,” Huston tells AFP ahead of its recent world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.
“It shows what it’s like as best as we possibly can for these kids who go over to a foreign land, fighting for something that a lot of the time they don’t really know about, what they bring back with them, and what it’s like for the families.”
French director Alexandre Moor’s movie is a rarity at Sundance, an independent festival whose entries are usually made on budgets which can barely cover explosions, let alone tanks and helicopters.
Preparation for the shoot in Morocco involved a military boot camp and cramming of numerous documentaries such as the Oscar-nominated 2010 Afghan war film, Restrepo.
“The most important thing about any war that’s fought is how those guys who go over there and fight for us, how those troops are heroes,” he says.
“What they do is just brutal, and awful, and I found a whole new respect for that.”
The Yellow Birds is Huston’s 24th movie since studying at Hurtwood House, a prestigious drama institute set in an Edwardian mansion in the rolling countryside of southern England.
The phrase, ‘Hollywood royalty’, is overused but in Hudson’s case, it is both figuratively and literally correct.
He is the scion of a filmmaking dynasty of Hustons that include – as well as John ( The Maltese Falcon, and The Man Who Would Be King) – such luminaries as Oscarnominated aunt Anjelica ( The Addams Family, and The Royal Tenenbaums) and uncle Danny ( The Aviator, and The Constant Gardener).
It is his mother’s side of the family that fills the pages of nobility register Burke’s Peerage.
Lady Margot Lavinia is the daughter of Hugh Cholmondeley, 6th Marquess of Cholmondeley and the Lord Great Chamberlain of England until his death in 1990.
This makes Huston the nephew of the 7th Marquess, who was born Viscount Malpas but is better known as filmmaker and actor David Rocksavage.
For those for whom British nobility means little, Huston also happens to be a descendant of Mayer Rothschild, the founder of the international banking dynasty, and Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister.
Huston, it ought to be admitted, has been in some poor movies, but he is usually part of the “things to admire” paragraph reviewers feel honour-bound to include before sharpening the knives.
His titular role as the Jewish prince-turned-slave in Timur Bekmambetov’s plodding remake of Ben-Hur (2016), a film dubbed ‘Chariots of Misfire’, is the latest example.
Early reviews for The Yellow Birds have been mixed, with Variety’s Owen Gleiberman describing it as “a flat and listless piece of moviemaking”.
He makes a point of singling out Huston for praise, however, noting that “the movie snaps to life whenever he’s on screen”.
Minor and starring roles in critically-acclaimed movies such as American Hustle, Hail, Caesar! and Kill Your Darlings have helped balance the ledger.
But Huston will always be remembered by his legion of Boardwalk Empire fans as badlydisfigured war hero-turned-coldhearted hitman Richard Harrow.
“It was probably the best character that I’d ever read,” he once told the Daily Beast, which credited the actor with stealing every scene in the long-running HBO series.
“I never really look at the size of the movie, it’s the character itself, and this one, I have to say, was a special one,” he says of his role as a no-nonsense Texan sergeant in The Yellow Birds.
“You can have the hardest, worst time on an apparently luxurious big-budget movie and have an absolutely magical time making a small-budget indie.
“This was brutal but I learnt a lot about myself and I’m as happy with this movie as anything I’ve done before.” – AFP