Meet Filmmaker Dan Gagliasso
April 18, 2025
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In this next edition of “Meet the Filmmaker,” we hear from Dan Gagliasso about his film, “Filming Under Fire: John Ford’s OSS Field Photo Branch.” He shares insight into the history around Hollywood’s role in World War II, how service impacted the films in that era, and why good writing matters.
A. How did you get involved with filmmaking?
Q. Writing is what first guided me towards filmmaking. I graduated from college with a degree in political science. I thought I was going to be a lawyer, but I just lived in fear of taking the LSAT. Still, I stuck around and took a few undeclared graduate courses in film and journalism. I noticed that the older films on late night TV that I really liked. They were almost always directed by working class, up-by-their-boot-strap types like John Ford, George Stevens, William Wellman, Howard Hawks, William Wyler — and later Sam Peckinpah and John Milius. Those films almost always starred John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, Henry Fonda or Charlton Heston. The other common thread was that they were usually historical films about American history. Even if they were fictional stories the plots and characters were often grounded in history. In a used bookstore one day I discovered a dog-eared copy of William Goldmans Butch Cassidy & the Sun Dance Kid script and then Syd Field’s Screenplay book came out. These materials inspired me to take the only TV/film writing class offered at my university. I’d spent two summers as a bull rider on the amateur rodeo circuit, with a lot of bumps, bruises, and a couple of broken bones, but not much success. That was the subject for my final script project in class and my professor loved it. He took me aside and told me, “Don’t worry about taking any other film classes. You already write in a very dynamic, visual style. Go read a lot of good books and the screenplays for those films that you really like.” That’s how I taught myself to write.
Q. What do you want audiences to know about your film?
A. I’ll be happy if the audience comes away with an appreciation for John Ford and the men who walked away from very successful careers in Hollywood to serve in his unit. They saw as much combat as regular grunt infantry men, right up on the front lines. Ford was wounded at Midway where his position came under heavy Japanese fire. Wounded or not, he still kept on filming. Ford had unofficially organized his unit over a year before Pearl Harbor. His camera crews were finally tested under fire in 1943 on the beaches of North Africa recording those early hard-fought battles for posterity. They weren’t just being chroniclers of history but had become participants in some of the most important battles in the history of the free world. Thirteen of his men never made it back home. Others — including Ford himself — came back, but were never quite the same. You can see it in his post war films that had darker themes and lacked optimism. By the time Ford made They Were Expendable in 1945, he’d already been under fire himself a dozen times, including at Normandy. They Were Expendable — possibly the best World War II film ever made — wouldn’t have been the same film if he hadn’t experienced the war so up close and personal.
Q. What is your connection to service?
A. My Dad was a sailor in World War II. I gather he was trained as a small craft pilot to drop off and pick up underwater demolition teams. He wound up in Australia on hold just before the end of the war when everyone thought the land invasion of Japan was about to take place. Then Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened. So, he never saw any combat. My Uncle Verne was with Patton’s Third Army in Europe. Uncle Frank on my mom’s side was a Marine Corps Korean War Era veteran.
After college I talked to the Navy recruiters about Officer’s Candidate school. As a four-year old, I had three operations on my feet and legs and had to wear orthopedic shoes on the wrong feet as therapy until I was thirteen. That eliminated me from military service and becoming a police officer. But I’ve always had close military and police friends. And that connection has guided my work in film.
Q. Why do you think films are important?
A. Even though the means of recording and delivering moving images and the spoken word have drastically changed with the times, the means of communication with images and sound are still basically the same. As creatives, artificial Intelligence is the dangerous game changer that we all must watch out for now. Back story and context seem to be story-telling tools that AI doesn’t handle well…yet. Scenes thought up by writers and realized on film by directors will only be as good or as bad as the original origin material that they come from. Basically the “Garbage in—Garbage out syndrome” applies here. During the most recent round of Writers Guild of America vs. Producers and Studios negotiations, both sides agreed to recognize the first human writer to convert AI information into an outline, story, or script as the story creator, and compensated as such. Casablanca, Dances with Wolves, The Quiet Man, Ben Hur, Jaws, Citizen Kane, Braveheart, The Searchers, Star Wars, North by Northwest, Lawrence of Arabia all films that created indelible film memories in us – films also written, directed and produced without benefit of Artificial Intelligence. Message to studios and producers: Let human writers control AI, not the other way around. Message to writers: Beware of machines bearing gifts.
Q. Where do you find community?
A. I’ve always been lucky meeting other writers and industry types at good independent coffee houses.People are usually curious “So what are you reading and why are you reading an actual hard bound book?” I’ve even gotten a couple of jobs in the past from contacts made at a good coffee house. For several years, a converted old house on a quaint retail block in the San Fernando Valley that was rumored to have belonged to legendary crime novelist Dashiell Hammett was my evening hangout. The usual suspects there included a group of other produced writers including a well-known comedy show runner, an Academy Award nominated screenwriter, a film distribution executive and a USC screenwriting professor. If you’re ever lucky enough to find a writer’s community like we had, enjoy it while you can. I hate to see writers disrespected and treated like they don’t matter. Taylor Sheridan is the writer who has brought much, much more respect to writers by becoming way too successful to screw around with. He writes what he wants to write and writes in the way he wants. He doesn’t care if his shows are not nominated for awards or criticized by the critics. Like Frank Sinatra “he did it his way. “
About ‘Filming Under Fire: John Ford’s OSS Field Photo Branch’, directed by Dan Gagliasso
World War II was fought on many fronts. One of them was on film. “Filming Under Fire” tells the story of how six-time Academy Award-winning director John Ford and many of Hollywood’s leading filmmakers contributed to America’s victory through their heroic service in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Field Photographic Branch.
San Diego premiere screens with “Rohna Classified” on Friday, May 9 at 5 p.m.
