I'd just say, 'This is what we're doing.' People would line up. The actors were cool with you bossing them around like that? It was very rare that people would complain. Even if we could drive up a mountain, I wouldn't let them I'd make them hike. We would hike like six, seven miles a day with the packs and saws in boot camp. Adversity obviously brings you together or completely tears you apart. Miles Teller said you were like the leader of the group. I would imagine there's a kind of camaraderie that forms when a big group of guys is doing stuff like that-filming in New Mexico in triple-digit temperatures in the summertime and all that. And there was a lot of wanting to be accepted not just as hotshots but as people who were willing to go as far as we needed to go for them to feel like they were being represented well.

But these hung out with a lot of real hotshots. We're talking about 19 guys who perished and it's such a massive subject. When I think about this movie, though, I don't think about the peril we were in. Except for the machine-cultivated fire that wasn't unsafe, but it was massive. That was the toughest and most dangerous.īut! I think the wild-land firefighting here wasn't so bad. And I had enough training at that time to know to go full fog-say you got a stream going, then once this backdraft hits, you give it this screen of water to diffuse it. What's the gnarliest fire you faced? The structural fire. But back then, it was just about manifesting as much as you could fucking feel at any given moment.

It wasn't one of those cliches where it's like, 'I'm not going to be here that long so let's do it all.' I'm happy to be here! I just love all that stuff! It manifests itself in different ways. This was concurrent with acting? Yeah, but they didn't know that. I went out to Phoenix where my buddy's brother-in-law was and did some ladder work. I did some wild-land firefighting in Mescal. But to be clear, you weren't a hotshot? No.

Only the brave movie times