Where there is peace the warlike man attacks himself. - Friedrich Nietsche

From the moment they met, Australian director Gregor Jordan knew that Specialist Ray Elwood, of the 317th Supply Battalion, was a person he could spend some time with. "I  was fascinated by how this essentially amoral character could take on the role of an essentially moral - and truthful - critique," he says. "Elwood, in his happy-go-lucky way, exposes the hypocrisy of the myths we tell ourselves about the glories of war and power. Thankfully, he does so in a very funny way."

As it happens, Gregor Jordan was not the first person to succumb to the peculiar charms of Ray Elwood. German born producer Rainer Grupe had already acquired the rights in 1996 to Robert O' Connor's novel about an American army fighting nothing but boredom in 1989, Germany - the year the Berlin Wall came down - and had been much taken by the book's unique milieu. "If you grew up in South West Germany in the 70s and 80s, you grew up with the images of American tanks and trucks and Hummers going past you constantly," Grupe explains. "There were 350,000 American soldiers stationed here on 64 bases scattered throughout South West Germany. That was a strong image which really burned into my mind and Buffalo Soldiers is the only book I know that captured that scene in such a realistic and dramatic fashion."

An indelible impression perhaps, but finding the right person to bring O'Connor's acclaimed novel to the screen had presented Grupe with a perplexing problem until the day he was handed a tape of a new Australian film called Two Hands, a gangster comedy starring a young Heath Ledger and directed by a fresh talent named Gregor Jordan. "It was so good, that we got twenty minutes in, rewound it and watched it three times," Grupe recalls, "just because we liked the beginning so much. The next day we were on the phone to Gregor and that's how it all got started."

For Jordan, Buffalo Soldiers seemed to present exactly the right kind of international opportunity after his directorial debut had played in his native Australia to universal acclaim, winning five Australian Film Institute Awards. "After I did Two Hands I really wanted to move onto something that was bigger. I think it's a mistake to just go and make the same movie again so Buffalo Soldiers was good for me."

However, before Jordan could begin work in earnest he was keen to gain a better understanding of the book, and the character of Elwood in particular. Over the years Grupe had collected a number of different Buffalo Soldiers screenplays culminating in a fine shooting script by Eric Axel Weiss and Nora Maccoby, but Jordan was anxious to bring his own vision to the project.

"I said to Rainer, I'd like to come on board but I'd like to do my own adaptation of it. So I basically sat down with the novel, and I began by trying to get into the character of Elwood, trying to understand what makes him tick. And as I was putting it together I was very aware that I was telling the story of an anti-hero and that is always difficult."

After completing an original screenplay for Two Hands, Jordan found the experience of adaptation an altogether different beast. "The tricky thing about Buffalo Soldiers was that it was someone else's dream that I had to carefully realise."  Nevertheless, Jordan did at least find tangible benefits in drawing from such an inspiring source. "A lot of the best lines in the script are just taken straight out of the book."

casting
With Jordan's draft almost complete, both producer and director could see that the casting of Ray Elwood would be a critical factor in a successful movie adaptation. "When you start really thinking about this character of Elwood, there's very few people I thought who had the actual acting chops and were actually right for the role," Jordan argues. "So Joaquin was someone who we actually thought of immediately. He was someone who really stood out."

"Elwood is the kind of character I've been wanting to play for a long time," says Phoenix. "He just has an attitude, a certain way of standing, a certain movement that I like." Phoenix describes Elwood as a survivor and believes that he is a product of his environment. "The world of this story is a world where the rules we normally accept are broken down, it's hard to understand who Elwood would be if he was working in a restaurant and not on this army base. This is a bleak and brutal world where drugs and violence rule."

Because of the nature of army life as depicted in Buffalo Soldiers, Phoenix found himself empathising with Elwood, even when the character is not always a positive role model. "He's pretty awful," jokes the young actor, "some of the things he does are pretty questionable but it never comes out of malice, so much as necessity. Partly to survive and partly to stave off utter boredom. Some of our extras are soldiers and I asked them what it was like being on an army base in peace time and 99% of them said it was unbelievably boring. I think that's the centre for a lot of Elwood's issues, he is really bored."

With Phoenix in place and anxious to begin shooting as soon as possible it was now a race against time to cast the other significant parts. Ed Harris was sent the script and while some people had thought his brooding intensity might be perfect for the fearsome Sergeant Lee, the actor himself had other ideas. "I was sent the script to read and Colonel Berman was just the one character that jumped out. He's a little different from some of the other characters I've played in my acting career and Sergeant Lee was somewhat recognisable to me, although I think it is also a good part, with some good humour in it. But I just thought Berman might be more fun."

Scott Glenn was cast as Sergeant Lee, with Anna Paquin as Lee's feisty and independent daughter and Elizabeth McGovern as the ambitious wife of Colonel Berman.

McGovern is full of praise for the screenplay, arguing that even nominally secondary characters like Mrs. Berman are fully rounded creations. "She's a complete person, even though she's not in that many scenes, there are all sorts of colours, and moods and variations."

shooting buffalo soldiers
With a cast and sufficient funds in place the only critical element left to find was a creative team to provide Jordan with the means to realise his vision. As befits a movie incorporating Anglo-German finance, an Australian director, American actors and German locations the crew included talent from all four countries.

British cinematographer Oliver Stapleton, who has enjoyed a celebrated creative collaboration with Stephen Frears over eight films including My Beautiful Laundrette and The Grifters, was selected as Director of Photography. "It was very important to get someone of real experience,"  explains Grupe, "so that Gregor could concentrate on the actors and getting his vision across. And Oliver has a very elegant style which really suited the story."

DJ, remixer and acclaimed recording artist David Holmes was asked to compose the original score of the film. "Gregor always felt we needed an electronic soundingscore, to provide some edge," Grupe explains, "and Holmes was the perfect choice." The Northern Ireland native had in fact composed his first movie score for the Irish movie Resurrection Man in 1998 before going on to workwith Steven Soderburgh for Out Of Sight.  "I have always been a massive fan of Good Machine and FilmFour and jumped at the chance to work with them.  1989 was a very important year to me musically that helped to define me as an artist. I think music is a huge part of this film also.," says Holmes. He is currently scoring Soderburgh's newest film, Ocean's Eleven.

Elsewhere, BBC veteran Odile Dicks-Mireaux, who began her professional life in the 1960s making exotic costumes for sci-fi series Doctor Who, was brought in as Costume Designer. Alongside dressing the principals, Dicks-Mireaux was charged with clothing the dozens of extras in authentic uniform and period costume from late eighties Germany where, amongst other things, punk had exerted a surprisingly lasting influence.

And Australian Production Designer Stephen Jones-Evans, who had previously worked on Two Hands, journeyed with Jordan to Europe to re-team on a very different project. "He has a really modern, colourful approach," Grupe enthuses of Jones-Evans, "which is typical of Australian movies, but he's also capable of real subtlety which was also important."

Jones-Evans' job was made a little easier by the authentic locations which the production team had already secured. After the Americans demobilised from Germany in the mid-nineties they handed dozens of bases back to the German government. The production team  selected barracks in Sudentenstr 93-95, near Karlsruhe, to be both the base camp for the 317th and home to the production itself. "They are mostly unused now," Grupe explains, "and we managed to find one that was more or less intact because it is partially protected by German heritage. Stephen then did some 'enhancement'. There was a lot of gardening and painting to make the place look inhabited. I think we ended up with somewhere very close to Elwood's playground in Mannheim."

"It was surreal," adds the director, "we took over an abandoned army base in Germany and then for two months staged our own invasion of the neighbourhood. Luckily, the German locals and our crew were phenomenally welcoming and giving."

As for the actors, Joaquin Phoenix found spending several months on location in isolated German towns actually played a crucial role in helping the young cast understand their characters. "It's life imitating art," Phoenix explains, "in that you get 20 young guys in a little town all staying in the same hotel, so that everything in the script, all that wonderful tension of base life we were living. It was very much connected with the script."

Principal photography began on Monday, November 6, 2000; the first day's shooting taking place on a dirt road where Elwood discovers an abandoned truck containing stolen weapons. Day one also saw the introduction of one of the film's biggest stars, the tank, and the beginning of a scene which on the daily call sheet was noted down as simply 'Tank Madness.'

The scene, in which some intoxicated soldiers cause havoc in a crowded German market square, ultimately called for the small village of Konisbach to be overrun by tanks. Before that however, another casting call was needed to find the vintage tanks, most of which were borrowed from private collectors. "That was logistically the most difficult project," Grupe explains, "just getting those tanks together. Because the American presence was so big here, there are a lot of local military collectors, but a lot of them are rivals and so to get several tanks together meant asking these rivals to co-operate. It was really tough."

Nevertheless, the local collectors, who also provided many of the productions' four hundred period military costumes, came through and the complicated sequence was completed in dramatic fashion with a huge fireball on the 27th of November on location at Jockgrim. "The tank was terrific," recalls Jordan. "It was quite funny, I was dreading the tank, but I was very sad to see it go. Tanks by nature are very manoeuvrable, they're very fast, they can stop on a dime, and they are able to be very precise about what they are running over and where. So it was actually really easy working with them."

From the barracks in Karlsruhe the production made use of several local locations including the Bar Rodeo Drive in Pforzheim - standing in for CC's Bar, Elwood's favourite haunt - an old hunting lodge in the Black Forest near Baden-Baden, which stood in for Colonel Berman's  decorative home, and the Turkish district of Mannheim itself. A former US depot in Siegelsbach was requisitioned for the part of a nuclear base, while some interiors were shot in local studios in Baden-Baden and nearby Worth.

After breaking for Christmas, photography began again in earnest on the parade ground of the Karlsruhe barracks on 9th January with principal photography finishing on the 27th of that month, the 50th day of shooting. A final day of blue screen effects was completed in Britain, at Pinewood's L stage on January 30th, 2001.

co-writer/director gregor jordan
Australian director first announced his singular talent at the 1995 Cannes film festival after his short film Swinger took the Jury Prize for Best Short Film. A second short, Stitched, followed that same year. After successful work for Australian television, Jordan's debut feature Two Hands was released in 1999. Boasting a screenplay by Jordan himself, Two Hands was a fast paced gangster comedy set in Sydney's Kings Cross district, that was smash hit in Australia, and swept the Australian Film Institute Awards, taking five prizes including Best Feature,  Best Director and Best Screenplay. Buffalo Soldiers is Jordan's second film.

co-writer eric axel weiss
Eric Axel Weiss received his Masters of Film Arts from the American Film Institute. His first filmed screenplay was for the comedy Wicked and he followed this with the script for Bongwater, a Portland set comedy that was co-written with Nora Maccoby. Buffalo Soldiers  marks their second collaboration.

co-writer nora maccoby
A graduate of the American Film Institute, Maccoby's thesis film, Dropping The Bomb On My Street, was sold to Italian, French and German television. Television and theatre credits followed but it was the screenplay for the indie comedy Bongwater, co-written with Eric Axel Weiss, which brought Maccoby to a wider audience. Buffalo Soldiers is the second screenplay from the Maccoby-Axel Weiss team. Maccoby has published her first novel next year and has an animation series Chase Chance in pre-production.

novelist rovert o'connor
Born in Manhattan in 1959, Robert O'Connor studied Philology under Raymond Carver and graduated with a Master of Arts in English as well as a Bachelor in Writing Arts. Following a teaching spell at Syracuse University, O'Connor has been working since 1995 as Assistant Professor for Creative Writing and Literature at the Oswego State University of New York. Buffalo Soldiers, written over four years from 1989 to 1993, was O'Connor's first novel. In 2001 he published his second novel, Lifesaving.