December 2009 By Philip Berk
Mark Boal, the author of The Hurt Locker, has been peddling the film for over a year
Handsome enough to be a movie star, he met with the Hollywood Foreign Press last July just before the film opened to rave reviews but public indifference.
(Summit, its distributor, are re-releasing the film in December hoping to pick up numerous year end awards.)
Mark was at the Venice Film Festival in September where he was given the Gucchi prize for the best script of the year.
Knowing my enthusiasm for the film, he invited me as his personal guest to the exclusive reception.
Here are the questions I asked him at his July press conference.
Q: When you wrote it, did you envision it as a movie?
A: I always say it helps if you’re a writer to have a great director, and then it also helps to have great actors. That’s half the battle. I really feel that they captured the potential for realism that was in the script. They really put you in the position of being inside the Humvee and seeing what the soldiers go through. That’s a very difficult cinematic thing to accomplish – to make something feel like a documentary, when in fact, it’s not. Make something feel true when it’s fiction, so I’m proud of that and I think they really got it right.
(He didn’t answer the question, or did he?)
Q: How did you come to write the screenplay?
A: I was in Baghdad as a journalist at the end of 2004. I was with a U.S. Army Bomb Squad, going out on missions with them for a couple of weeks, seeing what they did and that kind of thing, and I came back and wrote a story about it for Playboy Magazine – a long feature story. Then I sat down and started talking to (director) Kathryn Bigelow about doing a movie that would be very reportorial and realistic and intense and capture the natural tensions of the job without glossing over it too much. That was the beginning. It began as a lark, there was a mutual idea, conversations with Kathryn Bigelow, but no money changed hands. There was no contract. It was very informal and old fashioned, I guess, where we just both decided to give this a try.
Q: I was on the edge of my seat for the first hour. I couldn’t move. Obviously I have great respect for the film. But in the second hour I felt some of the characters were over-sentimentalized. The soldier in flashback has a tender relationship with his little baby. We don’t learn much about his relationship with his wife? We see him as a war machine, incapable of feeling; yet he develops a relationship with the Iraqi children. Were these something you brought into the script when you decided to turn it into a fiction?
(Not in the least uncomfortable with my assessment he offers a dispassionate response.)
A: Even though it’s fiction, it’s very much based on my first hand observations. I didn’t invent anything out of whole cloth. It was based on spending a lot of time with these soldiers both in Baghdad and when they came back to the United States. I went to their base and hung out with them in Wisconsin. You can’t generalize about something like the bomb squad, but there are certain types, and we tried to capture those different types of men that do this kind of work. What holds them all together, although they do have different personalities, is they’re all volunteers and they’ve all volunteered to do unquestionably the most dangerous job you can possibly do. The mortality rate for a bomb tech is five times higher than any other MOS, which is the military term for any job within the United States Military. From a psychological point of view, that presents an interesting fact about somebody. In the case of the character that Jeremy plays, the volunteerism is part of a larger psychological complex with includes the particularly unique and rare gratification that he gets from doing that job and from being close to death, testing his skills repeatedly. And in exchange for that is his ability to be able to take his own death in his own hands 10 or 12 times a day. I definitely noticed this among the troops. Of course there are some soldiers who do this begrudgingly, but those soldiers had a fairly normal spectrum of human interactions. They were the kind of guy you might want to sit down with and have a beer and invite over to dinner. But it was the soldiers who were able to perform most heroically, who put their own lives at risk, their heroism came at a certain price and it’s not actually a new idea. If you look at World War II and study the great heroes of any country in World War I or II, there’s this idea that the hero in order to achieve acts that normal men cannot achieve, he has to pay an internal price; so one of the things we were looking for with James’s character is what is the internal price he pays? Part of his ability to simultaneously be connected with his wife and intimate with her yet at the same time risk his own life every day. The truth is if you’re in a deeply loving, committed, connected relationship, that’s very hard for you to cut off. To be honest, lots of people have said different things about the film, I don’t really hone in on any one particular criticism. What’s really gratifying to me is when the audience comes up to me after the movie, and they tend to fall into two camps. One is people who have actually been in Iraq. That to me is the most important audience because they can tell whether I’m completely full of shit. It’s been very gratifying to have a soldier come up to me and say, “I was in Baghdad. Thanks for getting it right.” What’s also gratifying is when somebody comes and says, “I wasn’t there. I had no idea what it was. You’ve really transported me.” So to me that’s the main accomplishments of the movie. If there is some sort of criticism on the fringe about this or that character, honestly it doesn’t bother me. These characters are fairly honest and certainly not surprising to anyone who has spent time in the military.
Q: What does it take for a journalist to be there?
A: I was there for a brief period of time, and there were reporters who spend years in Baghdad. I don’t frankly know how they did it because I was scared out of my mind the second I got there for every day I was there. I grew up in New York City. I had never covered the military prior to 9/11. I had been a political reporter and a crime reporter and done long form investigative non-fiction, and 9/11 really affected me in a fairly deep way. After that I started covering Muslim communities in the US and military responses and looking closely at foreign policy; so that’s really why I went over there. I had never been in the military although my father was. It was an incredible experience. It’s one of those things you don’t quite know what you’re getting into until you’re in it.
Q: How different is the experience of covering an actual event as opposed to writing a screenplay?
A: I became a werewolf. I was one of those sort of old school journalists who watch the encroachment of entertainment into journalism with some horror. I hoped to bring some journalistic values back into entertainment, into Hollywood. The idea that movies as a cinematic experience can have some substance and some meaning to them. That’s very exciting to me; so that’s really why I got into it. I’ve been very lucky to have Paul Haggis as my first teacher and Kathryn Bigelow as my second. You couldn’t buy that kind of instruction so I’ve been pretty lucky in my mentors.
(He are Kathryn are romantically involved. When on our boat ride in Venice I innocently asked him if it were true, he blushed and was speechless.)
Q: While in Baghdad were you able to detach yourself from what you were observing?
A: As a journalist, you always talk about objectively, but I think objectively is kind of a myth. it’s sort of impossible. You can try but you’re still going to influence your stories. But I feel, I’ve been fairly objective. I try to write the best movie I could with the most humanity without letting someone’s ideological position define the human beings that are in the conflict. Human beings both on the American side – not to glorify them or exonerate or excuse them – but they’re people, and also the human beings on the Iraqi side – not to glorify them or demonize them, or make them into Jihadist or bombers because that’s not the case. There are plenty of people there caught in the middle, but there’s so much propaganda that accompanies any war.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: One of things is a story about Afghanistan and the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, and the other is a kind of genre heist movie that hopefully will make some money.
Q: In the time frame of the movie the prevailing attitude among the soldiers there was everyone is a potential enemy. Yet in the film the soldiers have compassion for the Iraqis. Was that a true depiction?
A: The war changes year to year. The time period we’re looking at was the most intense of the war. Also, one of the periods of the greatest gap between the US Military and local population. So were there lots if soldiers sympathetic to the Iraqis at the end of 2004? Maybe. I didn’t see many of them. They were mostly trying to get home and avoid getting shot. The difference in this war of insurgence or counter insurgency, whatever you want to call it, there’s no clear distinction in the soldier’s mind between civilian and a combatant. You never know which is which. The enemy is not standing up and wearing a grey uniform with a swastika on their head, saying, “I’m the bad guy” so you know to shoot the bad guy but not their housemate over here in the farmhouse. That kind of distinction is not possible, so when you’re faced with ambiguity it creates enormous amount of anxiety. But that said, I think there’s less, clearly less violence now, and that’s due to a lot of things, not just the surge but the fact that we’re paying off a lot of people over there. There’s more interaction now. I was reading McNamara’s obit today. He said the great lesson of the Vietnam War is that we never understood our enemy and we never saw the world from their eyes. I don’t know how much we see the world through the eyes of the Iraqis.
Jeremy Renner who plays the soldier is largely unknown remembered only for playing the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.
In this he’s monumental.
Q: How did you get the part? I ask him
A: I got the script while I was in London shooting 28 Weeks Later, and I couldn’t stop reading it. I put the script down and started writing 30 pages of answers, questions, thoughts. I was so excited about it. Then I got to speak with Kathryn (Bigelow) on the phone for a couple of hours. Then I flew to L.A. from London for dinner and flew right back because I had to get back to work. It was a year from that point ’til we started principal photography; so I had the luxury of hanging with Mark and Kathryn. I really got into it. It was a really phenomenal, wonderful experience.
Q: Working with these soldiers, what insight did you gain?
A: I was most surprised by their not being afraid. To any of us it seems like you’d cry out, ‘You’re out of your mind.’ To them they know exactly what’s going to happen. yet they’re afraid of walking down range and squatting over. They worry about the guy shooting at them. They do not like getting shot at. But while dismantling these bombs they are fearless — for a simple reason. For most of their training they build bombs all day long. They become master bomb makers, masterful at rendering safeties out of these. The squad leader I was talking with told me a story. He was just back in the barracks, and he was laying down, having a little nap, went out to use the restroom, came back and shrapnel had gone through the cot he was sleeping on through his bed right where his head was and he’s like, it wasn’t ’til that moment he ever thought, “I could have been dead if I would have fallen asleep.” He’s laying in the barracks back in the green zone, and it wasn’t until then he realized, “Wow, I should have been scared about that, shouldn’t I?” But there’s no room for that.
Kathryn Bigelow, who incidentally is the most beautiful director working in film, had recognized me at ShoWest strolling along the “streets” of the Paris Hotel.
She implored me to see her new film, which I had missed. Two months later we renewed our acquaintance in Hollywood.
Q: You are the anomaly of Hollywood, the most gorgeous, feminine woman making the most masculine hard hitting movies possible. When did you decide, “This is the movie I want to do.”
A: I knew of Mark’s writing before he went on his embed, and I knew he was on an embed. He actually sent me some e-mails while he was there. They’re pretty harrowing stories; so I had a sense that this would be pretty interesting. I also felt that this was a conflict that’s fairly underreported, and as a member of the general public, it seemed very abstract. Just these small communiqués from the front which carried with it so much more information and made me incredibly curious; so when he came back, we started talking about it and immediately I thought that these characters were extremely provocative. The paradox of individuals who have the most dangerous job in the world and yet are volunteering for this job would make a very interesting film. We pretty much began talking about it as a film immediately. Not only were the stories extraordinary, harrowing, and riveting, the characters were astounding individuals; so then the idea of compositing some of these individuals just became very, very rich for any film maker who decides to take on a film. But it takes years of your life. That was in 2005, and now it’s 2009.
Q: It’s almost as if the subject chose you?
A: Well, it’s a little bit of that. Kind of inevitability about it. I knew immediately that we would find a source of financing, and that it would be made. The story was too rich and also the desire and need. I don’t see this as a combat movie. It bears a closer resemblance to kind of classic war films that speak to particular conflicts, like Saving Private Ryan speaks to a particular conflict. Apocalypse Now speaks to another conflict. I see it more in that kind of lineage.
Q: The skill of bomb defusion, what type of technical advice did you need? Is what we see an accurate depiction of what it takes? Are these actual scenarios?
A: Mark’s reporting was extraordinary. We also had technical advisors on the set. We went to Kuwait and spent time with Explosive Ordnance Disposal techs there. If you’re going to direct a film, you have to be as versed in that particular subject as possible in order to recreate and block and choreograph. But at the same time, if there’s a roadside bomb in this room, I’d probably ask Mark to look at it before me.
Q: The first hour of the movie is miraculously put together. We are not told where it is, you are suddenly thrust into these situations. Characters come in and out; it’s classic film making. Talk about James Renner. He is one of the great characters in the history of film. How did you cast him?
A: Making this film independently was an opportunity to have complete creative control, final cut, and the ability to cast those individuals that are right for the movie. I’ve been aware of Jeremy’s work for a while. He has such a flexible intelligence. I met with him right when the script was finished. We sent it to him, and we were interested in what he had to say. He immediately understood the character. He had an uncanny ability to understand who he was.
Q: There is a risk when you choose somebody like Ralph Fiennes to play a minor character who shows up at the end of the film. Did that concern you?
A: I trusted the script so much that I felt that if handled correctly we would be fine. It was a bit of a gamble but I think virtually every film one makes is a bit of a gamble, and you don’t know ’til you’re sitting here if that gamble paid off, so…
Q: Is Ralph Fiennes (he starred in Bigelow’s Strange Days fifteen years ago) still a good friend of yours?
A: A very good friend. I basically said, ‘Can you come of the desert where they shot Lawrence of Arabia?’ because we were right near Wadi Rum. It was wonderful that he came and graced us with his presence.
Q: How did you achieve that tension of the first hour?
A: I can’t take complete credit for it. A day in the life of a bomb tech is so inherently dramatic, and Mark and I shared the sensibility of wanting to keep the piece very reportorial. I wanted to let the story unfold, stand aside, not embellish it, not give it a cinematic flourish. It doesn’t need it. These are men who are walking along a rubble pile. There’s nothing there, maybe just two wires sticking out of the ground that could have a catastrophic result or not. There is no margin for error. The tension that you’re speaking of was inherent in the profession that we were covering. At the same time, I do tend to storyboard, but I think what’s important in this particular piece is the geography, making sure the audience within any particular location knows where the bomb tech is, where you are in relation to the bomb, at all times. I had four cameras working all the time, and it’s constantly cutting back and forth from the wide shot. But what contributes to the tension is knowing where you are.
Q: The stress level of these soldiers was unbearable. How do they get through to the next day?
A: There’s a quote at the beginning that speaks about the allure of combat and the addictive nature of combat. It’s by Chris Hedges, who wrote a book called “War is A Force That Gives Us Meaning.” He talks about the allure of combat, and that it creates an appetite in some. Chris Hedges speaks about the effects of war, as well as the price of heroism. It’s different from individual to individual. I can’t imagine that degree of risk, the pure adrenaline that it would take to sustain yourself on any given day, let along for a tour of duty of 365 days, so I think each human being does it differently.