Story – Robert McKee's Creative Storytelling Magazine Issue 005 – Drew Carey | Page 56

MCKEE
INTERVIEWS
STEVEN PRESSFIELD
in the North African desert, World
War II, trying to kill Rommel, the
head general of the African Corps.
It’s told from the point of view of a
young British lieutenant who will
turn out to be an editor and publisher—a very literate, literary guide.
The story seems to be a war story
all the way through, and then in the
end, there’s an epilogue that’s his funeral as an older man. He died in his
80s. In the end you see how these
events in wartime changed him
and made him fall in love with the
novel and with the idea of sharing
human experience. He had killed
some people in this thing that he
felt terrible about, and he felt that
the war really impressed upon him
the fact that the enemy was human
beings just like we are. They could
have been friends, so why were they
trying to kill us? Why were we killing
them? And so his afterlife was sort
of a penance for that in a way.
When the book is all done, what’s
written seems to be a war story, but
it’s really about a literary man. It’s
really about a man who was trying,
through art, to ameliorate some of
the pain of the world and to bring
people together in a way. It’s really
sort of a peon to literature.
And I didn’t know that until the
whole thing was over.
RM: Looking back on all of it, if I
could suggest a grand theme, is
would be that the virtue of war

forces men—human beings—to
act under pressure to either become a better person or a worse
person. That somehow there is
a moral relationship between
the choices that a person has to
make in life and death, and their
destiny as a human being. Is that
right?
SP: Yes. In fact, I think that you could
even do a parallel to private eyes,
as again, you’ve talked about, like a
Philip Marlowe or somebody will
have evolv