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"  How did you get involved in Battle: Los Angeles? It was actually a phone call from Neal Moritz, an old friend of mine, who had done the Fast and Furious series and SWAT with me. He just called me up and said, &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve got the need for a tech sergeant in this project that I&amp;#039;m working on, would you be interested?&amp;quot; And I said, what&amp;#039;s it about? And he told me, &amp;quot;Los Angeles is invaded by aliens!&amp;quot; (Laughs) It&amp;#039;s based on this sighting over the waters of Los Angeles in 1950-something, I think. The horizon had some serious light in the sky, and it was prominent for about half an hourso prominent that the military decided to shoot at it. Neal said the movie was based on that, but in contemporary times. It inspired Neal, and eventually he found this guy who was willing to write the project, and the next thing you know you&amp;#039;re in it.  Can you tell me a little bit about your character? My character&amp;#039;s name is Santos. She&amp;#039;s a tech sergeant who works for the Air Force. She was actually tracking enemy transmissions at the time of the attacks. The humvee that she was in with all of her equipment got blown up, and she&amp;#039;s the only one that survived the attack. So she comes across a couple of National Guard guys, and that&amp;#039;s how she&amp;#039;s able to meet up with the Marines, and that&amp;#039;s when you see her in the filmyou see her after that catastrophe for the first time. How much research did you do to prepare? I went over to the Air Force base out in Louisiana, and I met up with a lot of really cool techies working in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. They work for national security, like the NSA, but they&amp;#039;re Air Force reps. They&amp;#039;re awesome. They stare at computer screens all day, and they look for anything from hackers trying to hack the Pentagon to unidentified flying objects in the air that shouldn&amp;#039;t be there. (Laughs) I think they&amp;#039;re the most important component of our defense mechanism here in the States, because their job is just crucial to prevention.  Did you actually sit there with them while they were doing their thing? No, all the computers were shut down when I cameit&amp;#039;s American national security! They&amp;#039;re not going to deviate from that priority there. I was basically briefed in a room with a picture of the president hanging on the wall. What were some of the things they told you that were integral to bringing your character to life? They told me a bunch of complicated stuff. Eventually, when I came down to director Jonathan Liebesman, he was trying to kind of lameify everything, so that it could be used in the film. Because the information I came back to him with was modulating frequencies and atmospheric interference and EMP and electromagnetic radiation and how it could be used to take away communication and the Fourier transformI was just going crazy! I was like, &amp;quot;And then, if they send a pulse out, and we don&amp;#039;t have any protection, like no Fourier cages, then all of a sudden all of our information and technology is useless, and we can use that, and that&amp;#039;s what could have happened to us, and that could be technology that they have!&amp;quot; He was so overwhelmed at one point he was just like, &amp;quot;Stop. Stop it, Michelle.&amp;quot; Those guys were very generous with the information.   I&amp;#039;m just bugged out, because I read my Popular Mechanics since I was a kidit&amp;#039;s just something that I&amp;#039;ve always lovedand I&amp;#039;m amazed that the stuff that we find out about is ten years behind. Things like the HAARP programI mean, are you kidding me? We have that capabilityit&amp;#039;s just gnarly to me, even just to imagine that; what&amp;#039;s beyond that. It sounds like you really got into the research. How important was it for you to make sure you got the details right?  I really want to get the details right. I can become pretty tedious when it comes to specific details about things. But you&amp;#039;ll see a couple of inconsistenciesbut only a techie and Popular Mechanics will note all the inconsistencies. Your regular audience member won&amp;#039;t.   My whole thing is, with today&amp;#039;s kind of access to informationproducers think that people don&amp;#039;t get it, but kids who play video games know what EMPs are. They know it&amp;#039;s electromagnetic pulse, they know it takes out your information mechanisms, like all of your electronics. So a lot of the technological stuff was deviated from because it seemed too complex to explain in a sentence while you&amp;#039;re running from aliens or shooting at them.   There&amp;#039;s this one moment where another character asks me, &amp;quot;Can extraordinary radio frequency signals take out the electronics?&amp;quot; And I say yeah, because that&amp;#039;s what I&amp;#039;m supposed to say. But that&amp;#039;s not rightEMPS are what do that! But, you know, I get itI&amp;#039;m aware that it&amp;#039;s a film, so I have to say &amp;quot;Let it go, Michelle.&amp;quot; Did you have do any training for this? Because obviously you&amp;#039;ve done training for a lot of the other movies you&amp;#039;ve been in. Yeah, it was pretty gnarly. It was military training by the Marines. And they kept laughing at me, because they&amp;#039;re like, &amp;quot;Well, you&amp;#039;re Air Force, we don&amp;#039;t have to train you that hard.&amp;quot; But they did anyway. Wake up 5 in the morning, 100 sit ups, 50 push ups, jumping jacks, run 2 mileswell for me, mile and a half, because I&amp;#039;d be aired out by the time I even attempted to finishfor two weeks. Lots of gun training. I know how to take apart an MP4 and put her back together using a pen, but I never got to use that in the flick, because when you&amp;#039;re running from aliens, you have to have your gun in full throttle, ready to go.  Some of the extras were actual soldiers and Marines. Did you get a chance to work with any of them? For the most part, we worked with these retired sergeants. These guys were so supportivethey&amp;#039;d sit there and tell us stories about what it&amp;#039;s like being on the front line, what they could tell us. These guys are gnarly. The stories that they have are no joke.  Your dad was in the army. Did you feel an extra responsibility to be as respectful as possible in your portrayal of these things? Yeah, of course. That&amp;#039;s why I met with the intelligence reps, and that&amp;#039;s why I felt it was really important for me to at least approach the situation appropriately. You know, a lot of things are exaggerated. For instance, my capabilities with a weapon are unusual for an Air Force Tech Sergeant. And I tried to be as geeky as possible, but sometimes I just can&amp;#039;t fake knowing what I&amp;#039;m doing. Because of the training I&amp;#039;ve received in the past, I&amp;#039;m wired to do it appropriately. I had to try to deviate from that training so that I could look realistic as an Air Force rep.   Not to saybecause a lot of Air Force guys would be like, some of us go the range on our free time, you know, we don&amp;#039;t all depend on our training. But it&amp;#039;s notoriousthe Marines train harder physically. Their work is out in the field more so than in air-conditioned bins, where a lot of the Air Force guys are said to be the grand majority of the time they&amp;#039;re in [the military]. Because you&amp;#039;ve got the guys who control the UAVsthey&amp;#039;re sitting in an air conditioned tractor trailer, controlling a UAV with a joystick, and [the Marines are] pissed off that they&amp;#039;re out there with their guns, hustling, eating rations and stuff.  Have you seen any of the movie yet? Yeah, I saw the whole thing.  I haven&amp;#039;t seen anything beyond the trailers, but I can&amp;#039;t wait to see what they do with the aliens and the visual effects. What was your reaction? They really took it home with the visual effects. I saw the complete film, but some of the visual effects still hadn&amp;#039;t been placed. But the way it&amp;#039;s shot, it&amp;#039;s so intimate that it&amp;#039;s really about that person-to-person reaction to things. Like in the 50s, when they used to shoot in such close quarters that you could feel the essence of what was going on just because of what was occurring in the frame. The magnanimous occasions are cut down to maybe four or five in the whole film; you get a macrocosmic perspective of the catastrophe that you&amp;#039;re in. But the grand majority of the time, it&amp;#039;s those intimate, kind of seedy, what&amp;#039;s-going-to-happen-around-the-corner shots that really take you home. And that&amp;#039;s where I relate it to a first-man shooter, like in Modern Warfare, because all your perspectives are likeyou are one of the shooters. Even when you have close-ups of people, everybody&amp;#039;s in such close quarters while they&amp;#039;re hiding from aliens or trying to get from Point A to Point B that you can&amp;#039;t help but to feel that tension. So I think that will definitely be an original thing that hasn&amp;#039;t been done in a sci-fi movie before.  How much do you see of the aliens? It&amp;#039;s not like Signs, where it&amp;#039;s that vague. It&amp;#039;s more like District 9 meets Black Hawk Down meets Modern Warfarethat&amp;#039;s my best way of explaining it. You have some good perspective of these aliens, but they pop in and out, and they&amp;#039;re still these elusive creatures that you really want to get a better look at but you can&amp;#039;t, because you&amp;#039;re too busy getting shot at.  In the trailer they have sort of one out-of-focus, blurry shot, and you assume it&amp;#039;s an alien coming up behind somebody, and you&amp;#039;re like &amp;quot;Oh my god!&amp;quot; But it&amp;#039;s not enough to really see what they are.  You know, that first moment, to me, is reminiscent of watching a YouTube video where my heart drops at the possibility. Just before your mind connects the dots and says, &amp;quot;Oh, we have the technology today where I can manufacture anything if I really want to&amp;quot;that moment when you&amp;#039;re still using the instinctive part of the brain, and you actually believe what you&amp;#039;re seeing, and this shadow that&amp;#039;s 6 feet tall walks past the surveillance camera, you&amp;#039;re just like (gasps). You know what I mean? You&amp;#039;ll get thatand then you&amp;#039;ll remember, oh, it&amp;#039;s a movie.  What did you learn from being in this movie that you are going to use when aliens eventually do come here and wage war on our planet? I&amp;#039;m not worried about it. If anything, you probably would need to be at a higher frequency than humans in order to even have that intellectual capability of traveling at light speeds. So I would think that anything at a higher frequency than humans wouldn&amp;#039;t be as violentI&amp;#039;m just assumingthat&amp;#039;s that brute kind of animalistic human thing.  But if they&amp;#039;re coming for water, like the aliens are in Battle: LA, maybe they&amp;#039;re willing to do whatever they have to do to get the water. I agree with you there, but I just can&amp;#039;t imagine something at a higher frequency being violent. And I&amp;#039;m assuming that you would need to be at that higher frequency in order to travel at light speeds and in order to have the capability of not being detected as a living creature out in the universe and penetrate our realm like that, violently. I just think that, to have that capability in the first place would just keep you from being that type of entity, one would hope. I just feel like if they&amp;#039;re going to be animalistic, we would have detected them by now, because we&amp;#039;re on the same plane; we&amp;#039;re on the same frequency. Because humans are violent, so we have the eyes out for violent frequencies.     Battle: LA&amp;#039;s Real Marines &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;     "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/a6688/questions-for-battle-los-angeles-michelle-rodriguez/>