Is the My Lai massacre movie you were making before W. dead?
Pinkville? It can probably only come back if UA would give us the movie without paying them the money they've already spent. We started to make the movie. I mean, we built a whole village in Thailand! We have tons of stuff sitting in crates! There's $6 million against the movie. And I don't have that kind of money. They didn't even pay all the bills. They stuck us with a bunch of them.

Is your sense that they got cold feet on the project and used the writers' strike as the excuse?
Yes, of course that's what happened. First they kept cutting our budget. We had our locations, we had our actors, we had everything picked out, and it was a very reasonable plan. Then Bruce Willis walked, and they were thrilled, because that gave them the final excuse to call it, even though we got Nicholas Cage. That was three weeks before shooting and right before Christmas. Let me remind you, that's 120 Americans and 500 Thais put out of work right before Christmas. It was a cruel, heartless decision, and it was probably made because [UA's] Lions for Lambs was perceived as a mess, a failure, and we were linked to these Iraq movies that weren't working. The irony, of course, is that Pinkville is only about Iraq in a Holy Ghost–type way. It's about the roots of Iraq, without being too close to it. It's not a war movie. It's JFK meets Platoon. It was about an investigation into the past and how the nature or man covers up evil. And I have UA going on and on about "Do the bad guys have to be Americans?"

In a movie about the My Lai massacre?
I mean, GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK! American soldiers, I mean, American soldiers are sacred? Come on! I'm saying this as a veteran. I've been to war. There are a lot of bad guys in the army.