One of the things that took me aside a little bit in the screenplay of Jarhead was that there was a scene in the screenplay and in the book, if I'm remembering correctly, where the soldiers watch Apocalypse Now to get them charged up. And I thought, 'Is this really something I should be doing?' Because it's... Taking a sequence that I edited in Apocalypse Now, and putting it into a film, and re-editing it in the context of: this is a film that the children are... that the soldiers are watching, and they're getting psyched up about it, whereas the original intention in Apocalypse Now was for you to be excited, but horrified at what you were looking... This is the attack... The Valkyries attack on the village. And the intention in Apocalypse was, yes, we want to stir you up, but we also want you to be horrified at what's going on.

And in the film, and in the intentions of the military people in the film, none of that mattered. It was simply, this is a visceral scene, it's going to get the soldiers stirred up so that they're going to go into battle. And it's a moral, ethical dilemma, in miniature. But I rationalised it the way many people rationalise these things by saying, 'Well, it is going to be done, so it's better that I do it than somebody else does it, because I know the material so well that I can figure out something that would be harder for other people to figure out.'

So, at a certain in the process of editing, I found myself editing this scene, where the Valkyries attack is on the screen, and then we cut to the reverse angle of Swofford [Jake Gyllenhaal] with veins in his neck, pumping up, getting really excited about what he's seeing on the screen. And I got into it, you know, you can convince yourself of anything. And it didn't take much to... For me to get into it. But it did give me that... A little of an extrasensory feeling. I felt like I was a little outside of myself as I was doing it, simply because it was very easy to imagine myself—whatever it was—25 years earlier, in an editing room, editing that very scene, and now here I am editing it on Final Cut Pro, digitally, for a film of a very different sensibility.