Early on we made the decision that we would never keep any distance between our subjects and us. We would become friends with them, and we would let them become a part of our lives just as much as we became a part of theirs, and we would not desert them when the film was done. But we also made a decision early on that we wouldn't cut them any slack or give them any breaks. ... Even my mom would never get special treatment. It just felt like that was the only way to tell their story. We never wanted to be condescending to them and their struggles.
IF I REMEMBER CORRECTLY, YOU SPENT A FEW YEARS JUST SHOOTING THE FILM, COMMUTING FROM MICHIGAN. HOW DID YOU COORDINATE THE SHOOTS, AND HOW DID YOU KNOW WHEN THE FILM WAS DONE? We shot from December 2004 to January 2008, so just over three years. We were living in Michigan and working full-time jobs in television news for about the first year of production. We would basically save up our money for a trip to Maine, and then we would drive to Chicago, fly to Boston, and then drive to Bangor. Or if we couldn't afford the flight we would drive 19 hours from Michigan to Maine. That was not fun, and it was times like that when we would question what we were doing, but we would get to Bangor and we would spend a few days with Bill or Jerry or my mom and something powerful would happen and it was always just enough to make us feel like we had to keep going. They weren't quitting on the troops, so we couldn't quit on them.
When we finally moved to Boston in April of 2006, everything got easier. We were still working full-time jobs, but now we only had a four-hour drive to get to Bangor. Now my mom could call and say, "the 500,000th troop might be coming on a flight tomorrow" and we could call in sick or whatever we needed to do, jump in the car, and be there for it.
As far as knowing when we were done, I guess we thought we had a lot of interesting moments and possible scenes with Bill and Jerry and they had each gone through so much, that it really became trying to figure out what my mom's story was. She had always talked about how important family was to her, and how her favorite part of greeting troops was learning about their families, and she just couldn't get past how hard it must be for those families to watch their loved one go off to war. So as soon as she found out her granddaughter (my niece) Amy was being deployed to Iraq, it just made sense that this would become the heart of her story. How would she cope with saying goodbye to her own family? Following my mother and Amy through to deployment day became the last thing we knew we wanted to get, and then we decided to finally start editing and see what we had.
