It was early October, 1969.
The humidity hung over the island, as they made their pre production arragements.
Duke stood on the edge of the escarpment, a massive, man-made cliff face constructed of timber, plaster, and chicken wire, jutting out from a natural ridge to simulate the Maeda Escarpment of Okinawa.
Below him, the Pacific Ocean churned.
Next to him stood Gary Kurtz.
Kurtz held a clipboard in his hands as he keep fixing things around set.
"The cargo nets are double-reinforced," Kurtz said.
"Stunt coordinator checked the anchor points this morning. We can hold twenty men on the face at once, but the insurance guys are screaming about the wind."
"Let them scream," Duke said, looking down the fifty-foot drop to the mud pit below.
"If the net doesn't sway, it looks fake, It needs to be able to move."
"It's moving, alright," Kurtz noted, tapping the paper with a pen.
"It's moving about five thousand dollars a day in weather delays. The rain last week washed out the lower access road and we had to fix it."
"What's the damage?"
"We're hovering at Five point four," Kurtz said. "If the pyrotechnics go over budget, we hit the 6 million ceiling before we even get to the barracks sequences."
Ten million dollars was the budget they had arranged with Paramount.
In 1969, it was a staggering sum.
Butch Cassidy had cost six.
Midnight Cowboy had cost them peanuts.
But Duke was effectively betting his entire newfound reputation and a significant backing from Paramount, for a movie about a man who wouldn't fight.
"We'll save on the interiors," Duke said, turning away from the cliff. "Keep the lighting setups simple. I want it dark."
"I can cut the generator rental by twenty percent if we shoot the night scenes day-for-night," Kurtz suggested, eyes scanning his columns of figures.
"No," Duke said firmly. "No day-for-night. It looks like cheap TV."
Kurtz nodded, making a note. He didn't argue. That was the best part of Gary Kurtz.
"The Japanese extras are arriving tomorrow," Kurtz said.
"Three hundred of them. We're housing them in the old sugar plantation barracks. It's... rustic."
"Make sure they're fed well, Gary. Better than the leads. If they're grumpy, the charges don't go off right. I need them running into those explosions like they mean it."
Duke looked back at the massive set. It was a beast.
"We're ready," Duke said, more to himself than to his line producer.
"Mechanically, yes," Kurtz said, closing the clipboard with a snap.
That evening, the production team had taken over the lounge of a Hawaii hotel.
Robert Shaw sat with his back to the wall, a glass of scotch in his hand.
Across from him sat Harrison Ford.
Harrison was still wearing his work boots.
He looked uncomfortable in the resort setting, his eyes darting around the room as if looking for an exit, but he was also leaning in, listening to Shaw with interest.
Duke watched them from the bar. It was a pairing that shouldn't have worked.
The classically trained British man and the carpenter from the Valley.
"The problem with the American acting," Shaw was booming, his voice carrying over
"is that you all think acting is about feeling, But acting It's not about feeling. It's about doing. You guys need to do theaters for a time."
Harrison took a sip of his beer. "So you don't use... memories? Substitution?"
"Bollocks," Shaw spat, grinning. "If I'm playing a murderer, do I need to go murder someone?"
"No. I look at the other fellow, I listen to his line, and I react."
Harrison nodded slowly, processing this. "I need to train my acting skills foundation otherwise people will notice."
"Precisely!" Shaw slammed his hand on the table, rattling the ashtray.
Duke smiled. It was perfect.
Shaw was inadvertently mentoring Ford, giving him the confidence to stand tall.
And in doing so, he was building the exact dynamic Duke needed for the film, the veteran shaping the young Captain.
But the harmony of that booth was defined by who was missing.
Robert De Niro was not in the bar.
De Niro was rarely seen. He had refused the hotel room Duke had offered.
Instead, he had rented a small, dilapidated shack near the north shore, miles away from the cast and crew.
Rumor had it he was eating only army supplies provided by Kurtz and reading the Bible by candlelight.
"He's a looney," Shaw muttered, catching Duke's eye and gesturing with his glass.
"Your boy Doss. I saw him on the lot today. He walked right past me. Didn't even said hello."
Duke walked over to the booth. "He's focusing, Robert. It's his process."
"It's rude," Shaw countered. "He's wandering around in those clothes like he's actually in the infantry."
Harrison looked up at Duke. "That De Niro guy... he's intense, Duke."
"That's party of the point, Harry," Duke said, resting a hand on Ford's shoulder.
"Remembers Doss isn't like you. He isn't like the Sergeant. That's why you hate him. That's why you want him gone."
"I don't hate him," Harrison said quietly. "I'm scared for him."
"Good," Duke said. "Put those feelings in the scene."
He left them to their drinks. The chemistry was brewing. Shaw's aggression, Ford's concern, De Niro's isolation.
He walked back to his private bungalow, the path lit by tiki torches that flickered in the trade winds.
He unlocked the door and slipped inside.
The room was cool, the air conditioning humming softly.
Liselotte Pulver was sitting on the edge of the bamboo sofa, reading a copy of Variety.
She looked up as he entered.
She was forty years old, but she possessed a timeless, effervescent beauty that the camera worshipped.
Her dark hair was pinned up loosely, strands falling around her neck.
She was wearing a silk robe that was modest yet undeniably inviting.
"The trades say you are crazy," she said, her voice a rich, German-accented tone.
She tossed the magazine onto the coffee table. "They think you are going to bankrupt Paramount."
"Paramount isn't going bankrupt, You know how the press is," Duke said, loosening his tie and pouring himself a glass of water.
"Gulf+western sctually heavily supports this movie."
"Then they are the crazy ones?" she smiled. It was the smile that had captivated Billy Wilder, a mix of intelligence, mischief, and profound warmth.
Liselotte stood up and walked over to him.
She didn't touch him immediately.
She stopped a foot away.
"How is the mud?" she asked.
"Red," Duke said. "And everywhere."
"And Mr. Shaw? Has he bothered anyone yet?"
"Only the bartender."
She laughed, a low, throaty sound. She reached out then, her fingers brushing the lapel of his jacket. "You are too streesed Duke."
"It's the wait," Duke admitted, looking down at her.
"The waiting is the hardest part. Once the cameras roll, I know what to do. But right now... it's just money burning."
Liselotte was playing Bertha Doss, Desmond's mother.
It was a small role, but crucial.
She was the source of his faith, the gentle counterweight to his violent, alcoholic father.
On set, during the table reads, she had been the picture of maternal grace and one of the few getting along with De Niro.
"You need to stop being a producer," she whispered. "Just for an hour. You can go back to work tomorrow."
She turned and walked toward the bedroom, looking back over her shoulder with a look that was both flirtatious and oddly proper.
"I have lines to memorize," she said, pausing at the door. "Bertha has a monologue that i need to learn."
"I know," Duke said, following her. "I wrote it."
"Then you can help me rehearse," she said, a playful light in her eyes.
They have been keeping their thing a secret.
Later, long after Liselotte had fallen asleep, her breathing a rhythmic counterpoint to the distant sound of waves, Duke sat at the small desk in the living area.
He couldn't sleep.
He pulled the cover off his portable typewriter. Beside it sat a stack of paper, the manuscript of Big Fish.
He had been chipping away at it, stealing hours in hotel rooms and on planes.
He had initially tried to mimic the style of the original Daniel Wallace novel, fragmented, mythic, a series of tall tales with a somewhat cynical edge.
Duke had been considering and finally accepts that he didn't want to write the book he remembered reading.
He wanted the Tim Burton version, the version where the lies weren't evasions, but gifts.
He thought about Edward Bloom, the dying father. He thought about William, the estranged son.
In the original book, William was cold, judgmental. He wanted the facts.
But in the film, William isn't angry because his father lies. He's angry because he thinks the lies keep him from knowing the man.
He doesn't realize the lies are the man.
Duke began to type. The keys clacked softly in the humid night.
He reworked the ending. He scrapped the ambiguous, literary fade-out he had planned.
instead, he wrote the river scene.
He wrote about William carrying his father out of the hospital.
Not sneaking him out, but carrying him with a frantic, desperate joy.
He wrote about the run to the river.
He wrote about the guests. The 12 football giant. The glass eyed witch. The siamese twins. The circus werewolf.
All the characters from Edward's stories, standing by the riverbank, waving goodbye.
Whether they were real or they were fake. It didn't matter.
They were there because Edward had willed them into existence through the sheer power of storytelling.
Duke found himself typing faster.
"A man tells his stories so many times that he becomes the stories. They live on after him, and in that way he becomes immortal."
He wrote the transformation.
The father didn't die, he became the fish. He slipped into the water, big and slippery and free.
Duke stopped. He stared at the page.
He typed the final sentence.
"And that was how it happened."
Duke pulled the page from the roller. He placed it face down on the stack.
It was done. Big Fish was finished.
He sat there for a moment in the silence.
Now he could go back to the mud.
The sun rose over Kauai at six am.
He remembered that in his past life, Hacksaw Ridge was recorded in Australia, but he felt that Kauai, an island in Hawaii was way better as a location.
Duke stood on the porch of the bungalow, coffee in hand.
He watched the production trucks rumbling down the dirt road toward the base camp.
The people were moving.
Liselotte appeared in the doorway, wrapped in a sheet. She looked sleepy and soft.
"Is it finished?" she asked, nodding at the manuscript on the desk.
"Yeah," Duke said. "It's done."
"Is it a happy ending?"
Duke thought about it. "It's a good ending to me."
She came out and kissed him on the cheek.
Duke got on and drove the jeep to the set. The mud was already churning under the tires.
When he arrived at the base camp, the atmosphere was already set.
Today marked the first day of Hacksaw Ridge production.