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Peaceful Warrior is Definitely Not Just a Film About Gymnastics: Mechlowitz said, ?It?s so much deeper than that. ?It?s all about you know finding that happiness in the moment of life and enjoying every second of your life and not getting bogged down with thoughts of tomorrow or yesterday, and trying to focus on the present.?

Summarizing Peaceful Warrior isn?t easy, even for author Millman. ?Let me just relate back to the book and some of the letters I?ve gotten.

One woman said to me, ?I love your book,? and I said, ?Thank you very much.? And she said, ?I especially liked that it had so much about cooking.? I went, ?Cooking?? She said, ?Yeah. The old man was always chopping vegetables and cutting fruit up and the herb tea and different herbs?? I went, ?Cooking?I never thought of it like that.? So the point I?m making here is that there is no one point people will get out of it. They?ll get their own points because there are so many issues and different bits of wisdom that come up in the course of the movie, the subtext and in the actual guy?s teachings that there is no one point.

I hate to just say, ?Oh, it?s all about living in the present moment,? because it?s a lot of other things too. The sense of there?s more to life than going for the gold. It?s the journey. Someday someone will make a commentary on the movie and say, ?These are the points from the movie?? but everybody will get different points. I will also predict, and I think safely, just like what happened with the book, people will see the movie and maybe they?ll see it again 6 months or maybe a year later on DVD, they?ll see it a second time and they?ll see a different movie because that?s my experience.?

The star of the film has his own take on what the movie?s all about. Mechlowitz said he?s seen the film quite a few times and always gets something different out of the experience. ?How I like to say it is that I believe every person at one point or another has been as happy as any other person has been, even if it?s just for one moment. I think sort of the message is that you should be that happy every moment of your life, underneath everything, for the simple fact that you?re life is unfolding. You?re living and should appreciate it and enjoy it and not worry too much about the future or the past, but try and live in the now and see the bigger picture.?

According to Mechlowitz, the film?s message is universal. ?You could be a pilot, you could be a chair weaver. It just doesn?t matter. The objectives are the same with every person. We all want the same thing ? happiness.?

Life Lessons and Peaceful Warrior: Starring in this film has had a positive impact on Mechlowitz. ?You know what it does? It just brings out what you already have inside of you but maybe haven?t looked at in a while. It mirrors the truth of how you must have found that sort of sense of clarity at some point in your life but, you know, it slips away and you don?t really know how to train yourself to maintain that. And it?s not too difficult? It?s sort of becomes muscle memory if you?re pretty persistent with it. It?s a great muscle memory to have.?

And Speaking of Muscle Memory: Mechlowitz brought up muscle memory which was a natural segue into my next question: how did he train for the gymnastics scenes? ?You know, we did a lot of work in that. There was a lot of physical activity involved,? explained Mechlowitz. ?They got us a great trainer. We were doing two hours of just working out in the morning and then we were working with a gymnastics coach for about four hours in the evening, six days a week. Jim Foody was our trainer. He was phenomenal. He spent a lot of time with us ? very dedicated. Steve McCain and Marshall Nelson were some of my doubles and they would come in and also help out. It was pretty great.

There were these top athletes from across the country and they?d all be in this gym that we were training in. They were so interested in the story, because so many of them had heard of it, that they wanted to help so bad. So I had these great, great athletes from across the nation that just trained with me. It was incredible.?

As for how much of what we see in the film is Scott showing off his new skills, the physically fit actor said he did as many of the scenes as he possibly could. ?I wanted to do as much as I could, as much as my body would allow me to. I wanted to truly keep it authentic. I did what I could. Some of it was with wires and it was inter-cut between doubles so I don?t know. You could tell if you looked really hard when it?s me and when it?s not, a handful of times. I couldn?t presume to say that the majority of it was me because by far it was not. These guys work their whole lives to be able to do what they do, so I give them the utmost respect and credit where it?s due.?

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