They Did Their Homework

“The American Revolution was an economic conflict that turned into a political conflict,” says film director Roland Emmerich, his enthusiasm palpable, sounding a bit like a perpetual grad student who’s about to face his oral exams. “That’s very unusual. A lot of wars start for ideological reasons and then become more about economic power. But the American Revolution turned that around.”

“There are so many little details that people just don’t know,” interrupts his producer, Dean Devlin, as if their Centropolis Entertainment offices on the Sony Pictures lot has suddenly been taken over by a college cram session. “The war was won by an integrated army--7% to 8% of the army was black. It was the last time we had an integrated army until Korea. Isn’t it interesting that it was OK to form our country with an integrated army, but then it wasn’t OK to have an integrated army again for years?”

Emmerich, stubbing out a Camel, jumps back into the conversation. “And the French had to save the day. For the last two years of the war, Washington and everyone involved just had to have the strength to hold out. They were losing every major battle, but still they won the war.”

Back to Devlin: “Even at the height of the American Revolution, less than 25% of the people in America supported the revolution. In fact, the whole idea of liberty was much more popular in France at the time. When Benjamin Franklin went over to France to get support for the war, he was treated like a rock star.”

Hey . . . wait just one minute. How did a discussion of “The Patriot,” their upcoming $100-million movie starring Mel Gibson as a reluctant Johnny Reb, suddenly turn into a crash course in American History 101? After all, we’re talking Sony’s biggest summer roll-of-the-dice--not some modestly budgeted Merchant Ivory costume drama. “The Patriot” is set to march into about 3,000 theaters nationwide on June 30, where it expects to do bloody battle with Warners’ men-against-the-sea saga “The Perfect Storm” and Universal’s toon-time “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle,” hoping that once all the smoke clears, it will have planted its flag firmly on the lucrative Fourth of July weekend.

As a filmmaking team, Emmerich and Devlin have earned a reputation as canny popcorn purveyors: Their “Independence Day,” a glorified compendium of B-movie sci-fi riffs, dominated the Fourth back in 1996, eventually grossing $306 million domestically; their last movie, the roundly panned “Godzilla,” loomed over the 1998 Memorial Day weekend, opening to $56 million, although it quickly hit the wall, collecting a disappointing $136 million within the U.S. But even though “Patriot” is poised to storm the multiplex, this time out the two filmmakers aren’t talking merchandising (no Gen. Washington action-figure is planned) or music tie-ins (no power-ballad music video is contemplated).

“War is the setting, but this movie is really about an emotional journey that this very tortured man goes through to save his family during the American Revolution,” Devlin says. “It’s truly a love story between a father and his son.”

Wrapping themselves in the flag of American history, Emmerich and Devlin have already won a seal of approval from the august Smithsonian Institution. And though they’ve retained a number of key crew members from their previous projects--like production designer Kirk M. Petrucelli of last year’s cyber-thriller “The Thirteenth Floor,” which Emmerich produced--they’ve also brought in such quality ringers as cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, a three-time Oscar nominee, and five-time Oscar winner John Williams, who’s composing the score. Although no one’s yet whispering the O-word so as not to jinx the movie’s prospects, “Patriot” clearly has its sights trained on more than just box-office glory, and, if all the elements do fall into place, could hang around to wage a bonus campaign for year-end Academy Award consideration.

Written by “Saving Private Ryan’s” Robert Rodat, “Patriot” tells the story of Benjamin Martin (Gibson), a South Carolina farmer and widowed father of seven who initially resists the rebels’ call, even as his teenage son Gabriel enthusiastically heads off to battle. Haunted by his brutal memories of the French and Indian War, Martin enters the fray only after a sadistic British dragoon threatens his family and lays waste to his home.

Like “Ryan,” “Patriot” contains an intimate saga--in this case, a family one--in the middle of a big, bloody war story. And also like “Ryan,” “Patriot,” is about the pain and suffering caused by even a “good” war.

“I’d been reading about the Revolution for a long time, and I knew as I was finishing writing ‘Ryan,’ the next thing I wanted to do was something about the American Revolution,” Rodat says. “I live in Cambridge, Mass., and I regularly go to the Patriots Day reenactment out at Concord Bridge. But when I really got serious about it, I felt the events of the northern theater--Paul Revere’s ride, the events at Lexington and Concord--were overly familiar.

“And it hit me, as it’s hit many historians, that the Revolution was really a Southern war. Eight of the key battles took place there.”

Rodat found inspiration in such guerrilla warriors as Francis Marion, the South Carolina Swamp Fox; Andrew Pickens; and Thomas Sumter. He chose, however, to create a fictional hero, since his focus was not the military campaign but the war as seen through the eyes of a father and his son.

“Most wars, like World War II, are fought by young men who are largely childless,” says the screenwriter, himself a father. “But with the Revolutionary War, the battleground was not overseas but right at home. That interaction between parental responsibilities and the responsibilities of principle, coupled with having your children in effect on the battlefield with you, struck me as dramatically fertile.”

So Rodat cherry-picked among the available historical facts: According to the writer, Marion had no children at the time of the war, but he did have a nephew named Gabriel, so Rodat chose that name for the fictional Martin’s oldest son.

Working with producer Mark Gordon and his partner, Gary Levinsohn--with whom he’d developed “Ryan”--Rodat turned out more than a dozen drafts of the screenplay. TriStar Pictures picked it up even before “Ryan” (for which Rodat was nominated for an Academy Award) was released and after Paramount, where Gordon’s Mutual Films has a first-look deal, rejected it because that company had a competing Revolutionary War project about Paul Revere in development.

But whether it was Paul Revere or the Swamp Fox or Washington crossing the Delaware, the Revolutionary War has had a less than illustrious history on screen. “We were aware,” admits Gordon, “there hadn’t been a successful Revolutionary War picture since the ‘40s and ‘50s--and I can’t even remember one from then.”

“But though our film is set against the backdrop of the American Revolution, it’s really about a man who realizes the only way he can keep his family safe is to go to war,” Gordon says.

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At the time the script started circulating, Emmerich and Devlin were still recovering from the rocky release of Godzilla.

“It was a bittersweet thing,” Devlin recalls. “It made $77 million its opening week. We should have been dancing, but the headlines called it a disappointment, so that became the story. It’s the second-highest-grossing movie in the history of the studio, and yet most people refer to it as a failure.”

Emmerich and Devlin may not have seemed the obvious choice to helm “Patriot,” but, recalls Sony executive Gareth Wigan, “Roland just had an immediate response to it. And I think the fact that he is not an American meant he brought a degree of objective clarity to it. It’s a fundamental story of freedom and that might have been easier for someone who had not been schooled in America to see.

“Plus, the screenplay had two massive battle sequences, and we knew that Dean and Roland had enormous experience in augmenting extras with CGI work.”

After taking a deep breath and considering the script’s logistic implications--”I was a little scared of its scope. It’s our most complicated shoot ever,” Emmerich says--the two filmmakers enlisted.

Gibson quickly came aboard, pulling down $25 million for signing on the dotted line. “His character has a wide range of emotions to play. Mel was the perfect match,” says Emmerich.

Having secured a major star, the filmmakers resisted the studio’s entreaties that they cast a familiar name to play his son, opting for 21-year-old Australian actor Heath Ledger, whose only previous U.S. credit is the high school romance “10 Things I Hate About You.”

“We looked at 300 boys between 17 and 21,” Emmerich says. “Heath is relatively unknown, but he doesn’t feel like a teenager. He feels like a man. He holds his own with Mel. He’s going to be a movie star.

Meanwhile, Rodat, who remained with the project throughout the production and a final total of 38 drafts, continued to turn out revisions. For budgetary reasons, a couple of set pieces--a prologue during the French and Indian War and the British surrender at Yorktown--were excised early on. Rodat hewed closely to the historical record: The villainous dragoon William Tavington (played by Jason Isaacs) is loosely based on Banastre Tarleton, for example. But the only actual historical figure who plays a major role in the final screenplay, a cameo appearance by George Washington notwithstanding, is the British commander Lord Charles Cornwallis (Tom Wilkinson of “The Full Monty”).

To be sure, some liberties were taken: For his final, climactic battle Rodat combined elements from the Battle of Cowpens and the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, which took place two months apart in 1781. But he did so in consultation with, and ultimately with the benediction of, the Smithsonian Institution. Early in the production, the filmmakers were introduced to the Smithsonian by Creative Artists agent Jon Levin, who represents Smithsonian Entertainment, a new division of the for-profit Smithsonian Business Ventures, which signed on to the project as a paid advisor.

“We’re interested in creating alliances to get our resources and experiences out to wider audiences beyond Washington’s museum walls,” says Lee Woodman, executive producer of Smithsonian Entertainment. Realizing that there was also the risk that the Smithsonian might be used simply to provide cover for a historically dubious Hollywood fiction, Woodman distributed an early draft of the script to Smithsonian curators.

“We were astonished how good it was,” she says. “There were some things missing, but Dean, Emmerich and Robert Rodat were all extraordinary in their concern for the integrity of the history. Just about every change we suggested was made. It was not just a question of the accuracy of the uniforms, we wanted to make sure the film captured the spirit of the times, the true feeling of the period. We advised on all sorts of things--the flags, the vegetation, the street lamps, what Charleston [S.C.] looked like.”

One of the Smithsonian curators even introduced the filmmakers to the Gullah-speaking free blacks who lived on the Carolina Sea Islands, and it became the setting for an extended sequence in the final screenplay--which Emmerich treated so deferentially that he began jokingly referring to it as the Book of Rodat.

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By the time the four-month shoot began filming last September on location in South Carolina, Emmerich, a German citizen who resides in L.A., had become a veritable American history buff himself. He drafted Revolutionary War reenactors as extras, and, says Devlin, “they trained the other actors in how to march correctly, how to hold their weapons. And they didn’t even stay in hotels, but pitched their tents right on the fields despite the freezing weather.

“They have such a passion for the Revolution, it became infectious throughout the crew. It felt like more than just a movie; it felt like an opportunity to put a window into a part of American history.”

The production was forced to deal first with drought, forcing it to install irrigation systems to keep the fields green, and then mud, as a series of hurricanes that pummeled the coast left downpours in their wake. But to keep costs from getting out of hand, the filmmakers used no more than 600 extras in the battle scenes, figuring they would later augment their numbers digitally in post-production.

“It was the smartest decision we made,” says Emmerich. “If you have to deal with 1,500 extras, you can only shoot three or four hours a day. It takes so long to move the troops around, you lose half the day. With 600, we were able to shoot six or seven hours.”

The digital trickery also allows the movie to vividly demonstrate just how brutal the war was--especially when those cannonballs begin mowing down the troops, ripping heads from bodies and tearing limb from limb. That, in turn, has set the stage for the final skirmish “The Patriot” must fight before reaching theaters. After its first review, the Motion Picture Assn. of America’s ratings board warned the filmmakers they were facing an R rating. Although the behind-the-scenes haggling about what might have to be trimmed to secure a PG-13 has yet to be resolved, Devlin says, “We’d like the largest possible audience to see the movie, and a PG-13 would be fantastic, but at the same time, if we felt we have to hurt the integrity of the movie to get a PG-13, we won’t [make the cuts].

“I think teenagers should see this film and, frankly, I think they should see it in its current form. It’s important to show violence that has consequences--where it’s ugly and not fun.”

How’s that again? Can a summer blockbuster wannabe like “The Patriot” actually serve as both a history lesson and a cautionary tale? Will it be both edifying and entertaining? Have Emmerich and Devlin morphed into popcorn pedagogues?

“We’re not trying to make a blockbuster,” Devlin demurs. “We’re just trying to make a really beautiful movie. *