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SANTA FE — William Broyles Jr. hasn’t just written more than seven major feature films — in one way or another, he’s often lived them before they ever made it from page to screen.

Speaking before an audience at Sky Cinemas Midtown last month for a showing of his 2005 film, “Jarhead,” the longtime Santa Fe resident and Academy Award-nominated screenwriter recalled marooning himself on a beach in Mexico, where he came up with the idea for Tom Hanks’ iconic inanimate sidekick for 2000’s “Cast Away.”

“I was getting ready to leave and was really lonely when a volleyball washed up on the beach,” Broyles said. “I picked it up and looked at it, put some shells on it, started talking to it. I thought, ‘This is kind of nice.’ As I was getting ready to go, I tossed it aside, and then I thought, ‘Oh, you idiot — that’s the movie.”

As if on cue, an audience member at the recent film talk shouted “Wilson” from somewhere in the theater, echoing one of the most famous movie references from the early aughts.

An infantry platoon commander in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War, Broyles also brought lived experience to “Jarhead,” for which Broyles adapted fellow Marine Anthony Swofford’s memoir about serving in the Gulf War.

Speaking with the Journal while on a sojourn to Taos last month, Broyles discussed his background as a founding editor of Texas Monthly and how the best films should cause viewers to look inwardly — both as individuals and as part of a collective.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Before you enlisted in the Marine Corps, you started a career as a journalist. Tell us about that.

Yes, I started a magazine called Texas Monthly about three years after I got out of Vietnam in the Marines. I thought it would be a fun thing to do for six months or a year and then get a real job, but I did it for 10 years and it’s still going and still doing well. It’s rare among magazines of any kind, really.

When did you develop an interest in film?

I fell in love with movies in a movie theater when I was a kid in a refinery town in (Baytown,) Texas. I saw “Robin Hood” with Errol Flynn. And ever since then, I just felt that there’s nothing like the magic of the lights going down and when the movie begins — that you're in a sacred experience. It’s no different than Homer telling stories of Odysseus around a fire in the Greek theaters.

There’s something about doing something as a collective, where you really are in a communal experience. It connects film to all kinds of communal, sacred experiences that people share. And you don’t share those things, those experiences, when you’re watching in your own home, when you’re streaming and when you’re watching it on your phone. There’s something about the life size, the verisimilitude of film that makes you feel you’re in the presence of something larger than yourself. It fixes these experiences in time, so that every time you see a film in the theater with others it feels completely present — that it’s happening now.

I’m a total sucker. I’ve written films forever, but I most enjoy seeing them as part of the audience.

Why do you think some cinemas have been struggling to sell tickets in recent years?

I think it’s something that is part of a larger trend. There’s a wonderful book called “Bowling Alone,” which is about the communal experiences of being on bowling teams or playing with bridge clubs or any of those things that previous generations used to do that people today are doing less and less of. They’re on their screens and they’re on their TV or on their streaming. The more convenient those things have become, the less connected to the experience we’ve become, and the more isolated we are.

One of the points of my film, “Cast Away,” was that we are not meant to be alone. Even Chuck in “Cast Away” invented a companion out of a volleyball, because we are us, and a lot of the ways we experience film now is that it is “I — I am watching a movie. I am streaming it on my TV.” It’s an isolation, and there’s a profound angst, I think, in all of these parts of our lives that just going to a movie theater and sitting in with perfect strangers, where you feel the energy of community, like you feel in a church, like you feel when you’re meditating, like you feel when you’re at a baseball game.

What gives you hope that film will continue to thrive in the face of major media acquisitions, such as Paramount’s bid to acquire Warner Bros.?

I’m hoping that Hollywood figures out how to make the kinds of films people will actually want to leave their homes and go see. The problem now is that when I came up in this and made all my films, the movie studios were owned and run by people who made movies, by people who loved movies. Now they’re run by MBAs, business grads, people who are most concerned about the bottom line. That’s partly an indictment of American capitalism in general right now, but it’s all done for the short-term profit of the shareholders and the people who run these companies. The film studios were different. They were run by men and women who loved making movies and were willing to take chances. Obviously, they wanted to make money and they wanted to reach an audience, but they wanted to do it by making films that they themselves loved.

The screening of your 2005 film “Jarhead,” starring Jake Gyllenhaal, seems well-timed in light of the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran. What can that film teach us about our relationship to the Middle East?

 There’s a scene I really love in it where all of these Marines in training are watching “Apocalypse Now” — that scene where “Ride of the Valkyries” is playing as they’re flying over the village. I remember being in the editing room at the time with Walter Murch, who also edited “Apocalypse Now,” and there was this very strange lineage, where every generation’s anti-war movie becomes the next generation’s recruiting film, and basically we learn nothing.

When my son went off to Iraq and Afghanistan, and I had to wait at home to find out what was happening to him, I was thinking that we learned nothing — in the same kind of war, without an ending, without a purpose, like in Vietnam. Now we’re seeing the same thing again. It’s happening right now.

I think that’s one of the reasons the timing of showing “Jarhead” is so good. I think it’s a good movie for any time, but I think that final line, “We are still in the desert,” is true now.

Are you still involved in the film business, and are you working on anything currently?

They say that the arc of a career is, first, you do something, people like it, and then they say, “Get me Bill Broyles.” And then later they say, “Get me a Bill Broyles type.” Then they’ll say, “Is Bill Broyles still alive?” Then finally they’ll say, “Who was Bill Broyles?” Sometimes you’re in fashion or not, and sometimes you’re in movie jail, or out, and then you come back. So much luck goes into it. So many people are great actors, but they never get the luck and chance to do things, and so many really great scripts don’t ever get made.

Sometimes you’ll like a story first as a script, and then it’s filmed, and that story comes out a whole other way. The act of filming it changes the story in lots of ways. I learned more about writing structure from sitting with editors in the editing room or with composers in picking out the emotional moments of the story. In all those arts – music, visuals, set design — they all have to work together, and you can get something beautiful. If any of them are not pulling their weight, it can take it down.

To answer your question, I’m always working on something, but nothing that’s about to happen. I did do a very interesting project for Texas Monthly, where a partner and I wrote There’s some interest in adapting that, and I’ve got a couple other screenplays that I’m working on, but nothing is imminent.

There are a number of things that are not dead, and if they’re not dead, they’re still possible.

John Miller is the ����������ϼ�’s northern New Mexico correspondent. He can be reached at jmiller@abqjournal.com.