Coming Home (1978)

"Another one’s Coming Home, by Hal Ashby. I mean, I love all of his films — if there’s any filmmaker I would love to be, it would be him. It’s just an amazing film. You think about something like Harold and Maude, which is to me one of the most flawless films there is. There’s always the great films, like Harold and Maude, sure; but then there’s ones that people kind of forget about, you know, or they sort of get swept to the side a little — and I think Coming Home is one of those films. Even The Last Detail is one of those films. But Coming Home: amazing performances, it’s about something, amazing emotional stuff, and it’s just about people — people trying to connect. There’s a simplicity to it, but it’s really engaging the entire time. Waldo Salt wrote the script. I saw a documentary on him. I think just knowing how a film’s made makes me love it as well. He wrote a 200-, 300-page script for this thing, and went and talked to vets and recorded them for like a year. Jon Voight went and lived with paraplegics and war vets who had been injured and stayed in his wheelchair the entire time. It was just a good commitment to making a film, you know, whereas these days it’s like, “I’ll get my double to do it.” I feel like that was made at a time when people still had passion."