As the Navy reached out to the media community, the Bandito Brothers entered the mix.  In August 2007, the Navy Recruiting Command engaged Bandito Brothers to produce a recruiting film for the Special Warfare Combatant-craft Crewmen (SWCC) community.  The SWCCs, while not Navy SEALs, work closely with SEALs in combat missions, providing their surface mobility support. For Navy SEALs, the SWCCs are their closest brothers-in-arms. The Bandito Brothers-produced video was an important element in enhancing SWCC recruiting and overcoming a long-standing SWCC manning shortfall.

With the successful SWCC project behind them, the Navy and the Naval Special Warfare community decided an optimal way to enhance SEAL recruiting was to create a new SEAL production to tell the SEAL story and invited media companies to submit proposals to create this product. The production was designed to inspire young men, primarily in the 19- to 24-year-old age group, to consider service in Naval Special Warfare and to demonstrate to taxpayers the capabilities of Naval Special Warfare.

Several respected production companies expressed interest in the project and submitted proposals. As the Navy evaluated the merits of each production company, the Bandito Brothers’ outstanding sports cinematography and previous award-winning sports documentaries made their production company a consensus first to undertake this project. As Bandito Brothers’ director Mike “Mouse” McCoy explained it to The New York Times:

I think they were fans of our previous films, “Step into Liquid” and “Dust to Glory,” and by the fact that Scott [Bandito Brothers director Scott Waugh] and myself were former stuntmen.

The project was given the green light by the Navy in April 2009, and a production agreement was drafted to define roles and responsibilities between the Navy and Bandito Brothers. While the Navy and the Naval Special Warfare community would provide unprecedented access to SEAL training sites, there were constraints to the project.

It is important to note that no taxpayer money could be used in the production of this film, so Bandito Brothers’ film crews were simply granted access during already scheduled Navy training evolutions as the Navy did not get under way or airborne just to support the filming. As a result, the filming took several years, due to the timing and coordination of SEAL training. As explained by Ward Carroll and Jim Barber on Military.com:

[Act of Valor] was shot outside the system. All of the money was raised independently and Relativity Studios didn’t get involved until after the May 2011 Osama bin Laden mission in Pakistan, which allowed the directors to focus on Navy input far more than they would have if they’d been working in a more traditional Hollywood setting.

“We really started to connect with the community and say they can have a hand in everything in the film,” said McCoy. “All the operational planning was done by the teams on a day-to-day basis. We [wrote] dialog together. We really set course on making it truly authentic and legit and accurately representing the brotherhood.”

Part of the success of this project stemmed from the unique synergy between the Bandito Brothers directors, who were champion athletes in their own right, and the Naval Special Warfare community. Additionally, Bandito Brothers had a strong background in military films, having made nine films for the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marine Corps. Filming took place in a variety of land sites where SEAL and other special operations training is conducted, as well as aboard U.S. Navy ships and submarines, including USS Florida (SSGN 728) and USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD 6).

But the making of Act of Valor involved more than just gathering riveting film footage during these SEAL and SWCC training missions. The Navy and Bandito Brothers had to create and agree upon a story line, a believable plot, some background and a family story line for the SEAL characters, and all the other elements that comprise a feature film.  However, the film stayed absolutely true to actual SEAL missions. As Navy SEAL Lt. Cmdr. Rorke Denver explained it to John Anderson of The New York Times:

Any SEAL who sees it [the missions and SEALs depicted in Act of Valor] will recognize that this was that person and that was this person. [Lt. Cmdr. Rorke Denver was also featured on ABC’s Nightline in a Martha Raddatz piece earlier this month].

The cooperation between the Naval Special Warfare Command and Bandito Brothers was truly unprecedented. While the directors were given control over all aspects of the film, with the exception of final cut (which the Navy reserved for themselves), it was the SEALs themselves who made this movie so real. As Mike “Mouse” McCoy and Scott Waugh explained to Reed Tucker of the New York Post:

Much of the SEALs’ dialogue was rewritten by the men themselves so that it sounded the way they actually talk. The stars also provided a blueprint for the action scenes. We’d tell them, “We have a bad guy; he’s on a yacht in the middle of the ocean. He’s got two counter-piracy boats protecting him.” They’d bring out the whiteboards and design the entire ops plans. We would develop the camera plan around that.

In order to undertake a substantial project of this nature, Bandito Brothers secured funding from a number of private equity investors including Legendary Pictures. By early 2010, more than 1,800 hours of film footage had been shot and the Navy undertook a detailed “tactics, techniques, and procedures” scrub of this footage to ensure that nothing would be seen that compromised security in any way.

By early 2011, Bandito Brothers had Act of Valor essentially complete and the company was in the process of editing the film footage. In June 2011, Relativity Media secured worldwide rights to the film. After viewing a pre-release version of the movie and being impressed by both the action and the message of the film, Tom Clancy became attached to the movie.

Like many movies, there is a novelization attached to Act of Valor.  The book, Tom Clancy Presents: Act of Valor written by Dick Couch and this writer, was published in January and is in its third week on the New York Times best-seller list. While some novelizations bear little resemblance to the movies they purport to “novelize,” due to our close coordination with Act of Valor directors McCoy and Waugh, as well as our first-person association with members of the Navy Special Warfare community, Tom Clancy Presents: Act of Valor is truly aligned with the movie Act of Valor and the two are virtually inseparable.

How the novelization of Act of Valor came to be made will be covered in the next, and final, post of this series.

Part 1 – Act of Valor: How the Movie Was Made

Part 3 – Act of Valor: How the Novelization Was Done