Military Times talks to 'My Dead Friend Zoe' writer/director and Army veteran Kyle Hausmann-Stokes

What I want to talk about is not an incident. It's a person

I made the film for everybody. I like to say it's a film about people and they happen to be

veterans, but obviously I care intensely how my tribe receives it. So I can never hear enough of

the, you know, mission accomplished or thumbs up from Battle Buddies. What parts of your story particularly did you feel most compelled to put on the screen

or, you know, use in this movie? Almost everything is true, man

I mean, my grandpa played by Ed Harris, some VA counselors in Vietnam, played by Morgan

Freeman, you know, people in my circles, literally, no pun intended, you know, talk group therapy stuff

It's all, it's all real, all true stuff. And I think what I wanted to do was show what it's like to live pre-talking about it and what it's like to live post-talking about it

Whatever that thing is, however you talk about it, like for me, there literally was this paradigm shift where this Vietnam vet kind of put his hand on my shoulder in a lobby of a VA and just kind of shook some sense into me and told me something that really shifted my whole way I thought about it

It literally shifted my paradigm. And I feel like my life was different after that

And yeah, I wanted to make a movie about it. And movies are a great way to do that right Because protagonists they spend seven eights of the movie being stubborn and then they figure it out and then they go and succeed And that what I wanted to do The therapy scenes are really unscripted

You allowed those guys to kind of talk off the cuff. Did you pull anything out of those

like after filming that maybe previously you didn't know before? You kind of talked about like

hey, I have this whole new perspective, you know, after bumping into a Vietnam vet

is hearing, was hearing some of their experiences, you know, did that inform any of your directing

you know, as you're, you know, on set, or what did you take away from some of those unscripted

moments? If you just kind of create the circumstances and say, you know what, just talk

there's no question or answer. There's no, oh, we're going to work on this today. Just like

share something. It's pretty amazing the stuff that comes out. So yes, one of the female members

of the group shared something about her, just like a targeting mission she had when she was

downrange and it's so nuanced it's so specific and it's never something I could have written

and it it actually just feed me into like the female soldier experience in a way that I had

never I never would have thought to know or ask about before so yeah it was pretty cool we were

making a movie and we were doing therapy at the same time someone who's you know relatively new

you know as a director what was that experience like for you and you know what did they bring you

know, both from a veteran and non-veteran perspective, you know, these generational talents

It was totally surreal. Um, it was totally pinch me stuff. Um, once they say yes, then it's like

oh my God you know but then once we got there they these guys work they fricking pros man And when you on a movie set similar to a mission in the military you got a thing to do You got X amount of time to do it There no take backs

And so at that point, I kind of got to put their celebrity and their reputations away and and just work with them

The other thing about people like that, though, is like, you know what you do? You just get out of the way

You all right? not a specialty no because paper goes in goddamn six metal compost plastic burn trash paper

is that hard is that impossible no you come here you eat my food you use my water

fine have at it but it defies imagination that you and i were in the same branch of the service

If you learned anything in the army, you'd have learned respect. Another big theme that came to me, you know, as it relates to the movie is this

And I think you've talked about it before in your own journey is post-traumatic growth

Right. Like instead of labeling as a disorder. But how do we grow out of that or how do we grow with it and learn to deal with it

I want us as a country or just as a species to talk about that more

how the hard things that we live through, that we survive, like we're not weaker because of them

We're not victims to them. We're freaking stronger because of them. And I think we know that in the

military, maybe we don't put a name on it, but inherently like you go to bootcamp to suffer

to realize that you can persevere and that you stronger for it And I think the same Everything applies to whether you in war or you lose somebody not in a military situation Like I very keen to also say that you know as Merritt

says in the movie, like we veterans don't own PTSD. We just, we may happen to be the best at it

We have a lot of practice at it. I'm curious to know, you know, working with those actors

what their kind of dedication was knowing that, you know, most of them were not military

you know their approach that they took to playing you know veterans and soldiers um you know was

did they go through any kind of boot camp or like what was kind of their spin-up like um you know

as you guys are kind of getting ready to shoot i don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say like

you're not going to find action in this film that's not what it's about there are there are

scenes in afghanistan a good amount of them but that's not what this is about so i didn't feel

that they needed to go through. I didn't think that doing pushups

and rolling around with the dirt for some kind of performative couple days

was going to necessarily make them one way or the other. I wanted to make a film about people

that just happened to wear camouflage. And I think that's how a lot of us want to be treated, I think

Let's not put this out there as a military movie and they're like, oh, maybe I'll never see it

but I'll tell this guy I know who served or someone's aunt, she was in the..

No, this is a movie. It's got some of the best actors of our time in there

And that's how I think our experience gets more normalized and misunderstood

People just see something that's entertaining. And I hope people laugh in this movie

I think people laugh, they cry. And I really do think it's universal, or at least I hope