Spartan, Mamet’s ninth film as a writer-director, is a political thriller in the tradition of Three Days of the Condor and Seven Days in May that explores the inner workings of a highly secretive governmental task force and the people who serve its win-at-all-costs agenda. “I’ve always been interested in political things,” says Mamet, who anchors Spartan around the character of Robert Scott, a highly skilled and remarkably efficient soldier who has long prevailed by following his belief that the end justifies the means. He leaves the thinking to others and carries out his assignments without question, because he believes – no matter how brutal his mission – that he is working for the benefit of the country.

Scott: I ain’t a planner. I ain’t a thinker. I never wanted to be.

“Scott has been told ‘If you stop thinking and simply follow these tasks, you will be rewarded, and you will be accepted into this elite warrior class, but you must never question the rectitude of your superiors or the worth of the tasks,’” Mamet explains. “Then he’s put in a position where he has to question his assignment and redefine himself as a warrior.”

To play the role of Robert Scott, whose quest to find a missing girl evolves into a quest to find the truth and, ultimately, to find himself, Mamet turned to multi-faceted actor Val Kilmer. ”I love Val and adore his work,” says the director. “I’ve always been fortunate enough to work with good actors. When I write for good actors, I always leave something out so they can bring something to it, and Val certainly does that.”

“Scott is a man of action,” Kilmer notes. “In the world of espionage, people like Scott have to do things that are sometimes illegal, but they don’t question the legality or efficiency or timing – they only think about whether it is or isn’t murder. If the government sanctions it, it isn’t murder. And that’s who my character is…at first.”

The character of Curtis, Scott’s naïve but talented protégé, provides further insight into the unconventional code of ethics that governs Scott’s world. But Curtis’ dogged pursuit of the truth could compromise their mission and cost lives in the process.

“Curtis represents the conscience of the hero, because he’s so new to this warrior class, he keeps asking the questions that have been eradicated from Scott’s conscience,” says Mamet, who offered Derek Luke the pivotal role after being impressed by his performance in Antwone Fisher. “Curtis makes Scott realize that he has become what he beheld.

That in his own quest for personal power, he has put his conscience on hold to serve those whom he’s elected to believe. In so doing, he has become just like them.”

“Curtis looks up to Scott, and as his father was in the same outfit, he tries to build a relationship, a camaraderie with him,” Luke explains. “But Scott sets Curtis straight right away. On a mission, a personal bond can get you killed.”

Curtis: Thank you, sir. My name is...

Scott: Do I need to know? If I want camaraderie, I’ll join the Masons.
There’s just the mission.

The covert investigation into Laura Newton’s abrupt disappearance is headed by Burch, a powerful political appointee portrayed by longtime Mamet compatriot Ed O’Neill. “Ed O’Neill is a great, great actor,” Mamet attests. “We go back to Chicago where he, Bill Macy and I founded a theatre company in 1971. Ed and I started working together in the mid-Seventies.”

As O’Neill describes Burch, “He’s the man behind the power, the guy who makes all the hard decisions. Burch is certainly manipulative and cold-blooded, which the audience has to determine may or may not be a necessary part of his job. It’s the old argument that Brutus was a good man, but Caesar was a better ruler. Because good men don’t often make good rulers.”

It’s Burch who sees potential in Scott, whose perceptive skills and willingness to commit to the mission make him the best man for a dirty job. “Scott says what Burch needs to hear,” O’Neill says, referring to a scene in which Burch asks the task force what will happen to Laura Newton. Scott is the only one to voice the harsh truth: “They’re going to kill her.”

Burch: I’m out of time. What about if we go off the meter? I need a man, a man who can unquestioningly follow orders.

Scott: The door’s closed, sir.

Just as Scott and Curtis are on the brink of targeting Laura’s location, the mission abruptly ends in the wake of media reports detailing Laura’s death. Cleaning up the loose ends falls to Burch’s right-hand man, Stoddard, played by Mamet’s fellow Atlantic Theatre Company founder, William H. Macy.

Like Scott, Stoddard put his conscience on ice long ago. “I’m playing a guy who really does not question the rights or wrongs of something,” Macy recalls. “When David called me to do this, he said ‘Stoddard is the guy that all the bad guys are afraid of.’ He’s the guy who cleans things up, or conversely, makes things go away. I’ve always wanted to play a character like this because to a certain extent, loyalty is a wonderful thing. Great organizations require complete and total loyalty, but when you get a guy like Stoddard, who is loyal to a fault even in a good cause, that loyalty can be used for evil purposes.”

“I cast Macy ‘cause he’s owed me $2,700 since 1970,” Mamet jokes. “I keep thinking if I employ him, as I’ve been fortunate enough to do for 30 years, that maybe he’ll come to his senses and pay me back.”

Macy pays nothing but compliments to his acclaimed colleague. “David is a rooting, tooting genius,” the actor enthuses. “He’ll come in at five a.m., say hello to twenty extras, and fourteen hours later, he’s calling them by name. He’ll stop the set on a regular basis and say, ‘Can we just marvel at this magnificent set? Can we have a round of applause for our wonderful set decorators?’ Which is not to say if you’re screwing up on a Mamet movie you don’t get your head handed to you, but he is just so generous that he makes everybody want to do their best. He inspires you to go beyond.”

Mamet cast relative newcomer Kristen Bell in the gritty role of high profile abductee Laura Newton. “Laura has a great toughness about her,” says Mamet. “We spend a good deal of the film hearing that she is this perfect Harvard student, always pictured in a twin set and pearls. But when you finally see her, she’s been imprisoned, she been vastly abused and she’s cursing like a banshee.

“I had auditioned several women who were spectacular,” he continues, “but then Kristen read for the role and she just demanded the part, because in addition to being very talented and a lovely young woman, she was tough.”

Curtis’ insistence that Laura is still alive incites Scott to question his mission and the motives of the men behind it. But his decision to defy his orders and attempt to discern the truth puts him, along with Curtis and Laura, in even graver danger.

Meanwhile, “Laura has to deal with the fact that, because her father is so powerful, she should’ve been found by now,” Bell says. “Somebody meant to leave her where she is.”

Ultimately, Scott must face the consequences of following his conscience after a career spent evading it in order to successfully execute his assignments. “The issues this film deals with are quite current,” Macy believes. “We have to weigh our personal liberties against the defense of the republic. At what point is it not worth it?

The cautionary tale here is that we have to have these government agencies, the CIA, the FBI, Special Forces, but in so doing, we’re creating a monster within our midst. How do we keep them in check? Who’s in charge of them? They can go awry so easily.”

About The Production

It was imperative to Mamet that Spartan represent the world of military espionage as authentically as possible. To this end, he asked former Delta Force operative Eric Haney to serve as the film’s technical advisor. “Eric served in Delta Force for about fifteen years from its inception, and I read his wonderful book Inside Delta Force,” Mamet says. “When I asked him to be an advisor, he said ‘Absolutely,’ to my great delight and the inestimable impact on the film.”

Along with consulting on the reality of how certain scenarios might play out and offering an insider’s eye to proper protocol, Haney worked with the actors in conventional and not-so-conventional manners. “We spent a good deal of time training together,” Haney reports. “We did room clearing, building assaults, close-quarter combat drills. It put the actors in the right mind frame. I was pleased and surprised at how quickly they picked everything up.”

The cast was further indoctrinated to the rigors of high-level military operations when Mamet asked Haney to take the group on an overnight excursion in the California desert. “The camping trip was Dave’s idea of Camp Misery, but I called it Camp Fun,” Haney explains. “I made sure everybody was cold. There were no sleeping bags, no tents, no comfort items, just a poncho liner to roll up in and a poncho to keep off the rain. We dug shelters in the ground and built a small fire and for food it was MREs.” (“Meals Ready to Eat,” or standard military rations.)

“I’ve been sworn to secrecy, so I really can’t get into what happened during our campout, but I can tell you that we went out with some gourmet military food,” Derek Luke wisecracks. “We ate like kings and queens and sang old spirituals around the campfire.”

Haney also trained the actors in military shooting; specifically, learning to fire in a deadly confrontation, which is much different than ordinary target shooting. “In fact, the techniques are very dissimilar,” Haney emphasizes. “I teach killing.”

Additionally, Haney helped Bell and Kilmer realistically play the physical aspect of Laura Newton’s plight and her confrontation with Scott. As Bell recounts, “There’s a scene when I first wake up and see Scott, and I don’t know if he’s a good guy or a bad guy, so I begin to scream. We talked to Eric about what would happen if a hostage began to get frantic in that situation. Eric said, ‘I would break her ribs. I would punch her in the stomach, because the job is not to pamper her. The job is to get her back to America safely. And by safe, that means alive.’ So Val and I played a fight scene where he smashes me in the solar plexus and knocks the wind out of me to keep me quiet.”

As for working with Kilmer, Bell says, “Val was like a big brother. We were constantly rough-housing, which was good, because Laura is supposed to have bruises everywhere. But he made me feel very safe in the process.”

Principal photography on Spartan was accomplished over nine weeks in and around Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Boston. Except for a single day on a soundstage, the film was shot exclusively at practical locations.

A week of production was spent at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, which served as the investigation headquarters. Production designer Gemma Jackson removed existing walls and configured the entire fieldhouse set from scratch in the basement area of the hotel. Upstairs, a suite of rooms was used as the brothel set. The Grand Avenue Club served as The Regency, where Scott’s investigation begins to gain momentum.

The Brandeis Bardin Institute, located near Ventura County, filled in for both the training facility where Scott first meets Curtis and the tack room where the characters meet after the investigation is terminated. Another educational facility, The Mayfield School, served as the sanatorium to which Laura Newton’s mother retires after the announcement of her daughter’s death. Once a private residence, The Mayfield, located in Pasadena, was built in 1922 by renowned architect William Marshall.

The Santa Monica and Mojave Desert Airports were also used for several scenes. A fully functional C123 built in the 1960s was used as a government transport. Also utilized in these scenes were three operational Huey Helicopters, which toured in Vietnam, and a Lear jet.

A private residence situated in the Hollywood Hills that features Moroccan-influenced architecture (and was once owned by music legend Chuck Berry) doubled as the Dubai house where Laura Newton is held captive.

The production moved to Boston for the final week of photography, where shooting took place in and around the Harvard campus, utilizing the famous Harvard Yard and the Lampoon area, and the central area known as Copley Square.