TIME'S UP: KATHRYN BIGELOW'S THE HURT LOCKER | By Nick Dawson
Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Nick Dawson interviewed The Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow for our Spring 2009 issue. The Hurt Locker is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Bigelow), Best Actor (Jeremy Renner), Original Screenplay (Mark Boal), Best Cinematography (Barry Ackroyd), Best Editing (Bob Murawski and Chris Innis), Best Original Score (Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders), Best Sound Editing (Paul N.J. Ottosson) and Best Sound Mixing (Paul N.J. Ottosson and Ray Beckett).
Now that the end is in sight for the Iraq war, hopefully the whole cinematic idea of “Iraq War fatigue” will go along with it. The phrase has been thrown around by industry journalists as a catchall term to describe the average American’s ostensible lack of desire to watch films set against the Middle East conflict. But if there was ever a director who could turn the tide, it is Kathryn Bigelow, who has returned to features for the first time since 2002 with her new movie The Hurt Locker.
The film tells the story of army bomb disposal expert Sgt. Will James (the superb Jeremy Renner), who must survive the final 38 days of his detail in Iraq if he is to make it home to his wife and child. However, unlike the other two soldiers on his team, Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), James thrives on the intense risk and danger of having to diffuse roadside bombs and IEDs (improvised explosive devices) in the Baghdad war zone, day in and day out. His gonzo approach to his job makes him, for Sanborn and Eldridge, just as dangerous as the snipers on top of the surrounding rooftops.
Written by investigative journalist-turned-screenwriter Mark Boal, who embedded with a volunteer army bomb disposal squad in Iraq in 2004, The Hurt Locker is a riveting movie that vividly conveys what it’s like to be on the ground in Iraq. It concerns itself not with the politics of the war, but with the visceral experiences of the soldiers who fight. Bigelow’s film opens with a quote from writer Chris Hedges which reads, “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug,” and Renner’s James is the embodiment of that idea, a true thrill-seeking addict, a soldier who can only get his fix from his daily dance with death.
Instead of being about the Iraq war, then, The Hurt Locker is simply about war. It’s a drama that examines the psychological toll of war on its soldiers and a thriller that eschews fast-cutting and showy visuals for a far more unsettling depiction of combat that is palpably grounded in reality. The film also has the flashes of dark humor and kinetic immediacy of Bigelow’s very best work such as Near Dark (1987), Point Break (1991) and Strange Days (1995), and announces that the director has lost none of her sharpness or relevance.
The day after a New York City screening of The Hurt Locker that closed out the Film Comment Selects series, Filmmaker sat down with Bigelow to discuss her long-awaited return to the big screen.
The Hurt Locker will be released on June 26 by Summit Entertainment.
THE HURT LOCKER DIRECTOR KATHRYN BIGELOW. PHOTOS COURTESY OF SUMMIT ENTERTAINMENT.
Filmmaker: How did you first meet Mark Boal and how did you two decide to work together on The Hurt Locker?
Bigelow: I became familiar with his journalism probably in about 2002. There was an article of his that I developed into a television series for Fox and Imagine. We developed that, and then he went off to Iraq to do an embed. Perhaps like most people, I felt it was a pretty under-reported war, so I was extremely curious. He would send me e-mails in country, and it was phenomenally interesting: The psychology of the soldiers, the fact that it’s a conflict that’s very unique to this particular engagement. It’s not a ground war, it’s not air-to-ground, it’s basically a war of invisible, potentially catastrophic threats, 24/7. There is no place that is off-limits, there is no downtime for the soldiers, or for anybody, including Mark. When he went out with the bomb squad on a daily basis, the entire 360 degree environment was a potential threat, be it a human being, a water bottle, a rice bag filled with unidentified objects, a rubble pile with wires sticking out of the ground, etc. It’s just infinite permutations and that’s a very specific kind of warfare that has, again, been unexplored and unexamined. Given that it’s a volunteer army, these men arguably have the most dangerous job in the world. It became really fascinating to explore the psychology behind the type of soldier who volunteers for this particular conflict and then, because of his or her aptitude, is chosen and given the opportunity to go into bomb disarmament and goes toward what everybody else is running from. That became a really rich subject on which to do a film.
Filmmaker: So was it during Mark’s time in Iraq that you decided to turn his experiences into a film?
Bigelow: Yeah, the thought mutually occurred to us. He came back rich with firsthand observations, very incredible material: the day in the office of a bomb tech. Then we started developing.
Filmmaker: Mark has the sole screenwriting credit, but I presume that you were heavily involved in shaping the script with him.
Bigelow: I would say that it was a collaboration, but he’s definitely the writer. I mean, he’s the person with the firsthand observations, and it’s from all those observations and reporting that every single sequence in the movie originated. I think as a filmmaker, you’re constantly shaping and seeing it in your mind’s eye through to its end, no matter how early and embryonic it is in its process. You’re constantly looking at it from the macrocosm to the microcosm, and you’re oscillating between the two. Whereas Mark, having been in theater, in country, is looking at it from such a granular position.
Filmmaker: Did you quickly formulate the style, look and feel of the film?
Bigelow: I think that comes always as a process, at least for me, as you begin to get inside the DNA of the material and it begins to reveal itself. Even when we were working on the script, I was beginning to do some preliminary, rough storyboards just to look at the physicality of it. It’s very specific to its geography, this particular movie, because bomb disarmament protocol requires a containment area of sometimes 100 meters to 300 meters. So understanding that geography and looking at it from a production standpoint, you’re like, “Okay, how will we convey that to an audience who obviously has not had an opportunity to go on the ground with a bomb squad?” You want to make it as real and as authentic as possible, to put the audience into the Humvee, into a boots-on-the-ground experience. How do you do that? You do it by finding a look, a feel and a texture that is very immediate, raw and vital, and yet also is not aestheticized. I wanted, as a filmmaker, to sort of step aside and let just the rawness and integrity of the subject be as pronounced as possible and not have it feel sort of “cinematic.”
Filmmaker: I believe you shot with four discrete camera units. Was that throughout the whole film, or simply for certain sequences?
Bigelow: All the time, unless we were in a contained space that you simply couldn’t get that many people in. We shot for 44 days, and I would say that 40 days of that we had four discrete units, sometimes even a couple more. We shot on 16mm, and Barry Ackroyd — who’s really profoundly brilliant — was my cinematographer. We were constantly creating a fluid set that was alive and active in 360 degrees from a camera standpoint, a production design standpoint and a performance standpoint, so we were basically reenacting with each take, from beginning to end, a bomb disarmament. You are looking at it from different perspectives, but it all is cut as a continuous linear whole. It’s not broken into different stories from different points of view. You’re recreating that entire bomb disarmament from the point they arrive to the containment to the decision: Are they going to blow it in place, are they going to use the robot or are they actually going to go down and pull out the blasting cap? [The first step] is you’ve got to figure out what the potential IED or roadside bomb is. Is that a pile of rubble, or is it a 155 round that’s going to spread your DNA into the next county?
CLICK HERE to listen to Filmmaker/Apple "Meet the Filmmaker" Podcast with Kathryn Bigelow (6/26/09) on iTunes. It's free!
Filmmaker: Presumably having four different camera units gave you great options in the editing room, but it must have been problematic from a logistical point of view because you don’t want crew or other cameramen in the shot.
Bigelow: I never worry about messy or dirty dailies, although actually they were not too bad. There’s kind of a choreography [to shooting]. As a filmmaker, you always wonder how other filmmakers work and I have no idea, but for me it’s very instinctual. I come from a visual arts background so to take the three-dimensional world and turn it into two dimensions is a process I find I can do automatically and instinctually and instantly. It actually comes very easily. You say, “If the actor’s here, one unit’s here…,” and then you create a sort of movement that is fairly rational and logical and doesn’t get you into trouble. Especially if you’ve been doing it for a little while.
Filmmaker: Why did you choose to shoot in Jordan, and what was the experience of shooting in there like?
Bigelow: If you want to shoot a movie about the Middle East, you go to the Middle East. I mean, I scouted Morocco, but it just did not look like Baghdad. And also, the extras would have been North African, and not Arabic, and that became extremely important to me. Again [I wanted] to keep it as accurate and authentic as possible. I was very trusting and open and eager to embrace the Middle East as a location for a movie that takes place in the Middle East, and my desire was to get as close to the war zone as possible. I would have shot in Baghdad if I could, and in fact at one point we were five kilometres from the border and Barry and I wanted very much [to go there]. It would have been half an hour’s drive to get across the border and go in and at least shoot in Iraq. But our security couldn’t guarantee our safety — there were too many snipers. But anyway, shooting in Jordan was a great experience. It’s very cosmopolitan, they have a very rich film school, and in fact I created a trainee program because the film infrastructure there is young. We shot in a Palestinian refugee camp at 2 in the morning for the alleyway sequence, and the elder of the camp brought me tea, which gives you a sense of the warmth and hospitality of the Jordanians. Even though our art department came in and worked with the locations, you could look 360 degrees on any given day of the shoot and it would be perfect. And the other great gift was the Iraqi extras, 2 million of them in Jordan, in Amman. Before the invasion, there was a thriving theatrical community in Baghdad so in those refugees were tremendous actors, for instance Suhail [Aldabbach], who plays the suicide bomber. I think it’s a devastatingly wonderful performance that he gives in a small but poignant moment of the film. He’s apparently a very well-known actor in Iraq who we had the benefit of working with, sadly, because he had to leave the country for political reasons.
Filmmaker: I want to briefly touch on the issue of so-called “Iraq War fatigue” which resulted, supposedly, in the under-performance of Iraq war movies. Did that issue impact you during the fundraising process?
Bigelow: We actually raised our money independently through foreign finance and didn’t feel the pulse of the marketplace until we had completed it, so we were able to work with virtually zero compromise or zero hesitation. And then, luckily enough, when we premiered it, we sold it immediately. It’s a combat movie and there hasn’t been one about this particular conflict, so I see it having more in common with Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan or Full Metal Jacket. It’s a war film, it’s in theater.
Filmmaker: My personal perspective is that it’s a psychological drama set against the backdrop of a war, which happens to be in Iraq. I feel like this is the only Iraq-themed movie not to offer judgment or commentary on the conflict but to simply portray it.
Bigelow: Just like you’d look at Full Metal Jacket or Platoon, certainly you could argue that that commentary is innate within the very fact of its existence. However it isn’t there necessarily to judge but to provide information and give you as honest, accurate and authentic a portrait of the boots-on-the-ground [experience of] this particular conflict. One of the great comments that has come back to me, again and again and again — and I take it as just an extraordinary compliment — is somebody saying, “I had no idea what it was like, and now I have an awareness of it.” You’ve opened a door, but without judging or taking a pedagogical position. You say, “Here it is.” I really look at it as a character study and also as an observation of the day in the life of a bomb squad — what that’s like, what the psychology of heroism, courage and bravery, making instantaneous decisions under extreme, extreme pressure and stress on a daily basis, and what the price of that heroism is. In the case of Sergeant James, it’s a flight from intimacy.
Filmmaker: I think you use actors very smartly in the film: The performances of Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes make a big impact, and the rest of the cast is made up of relatively unfamiliar faces. Jeremy Renner, in particular, is a revelation.
Bigelow: I just think he’s a profound talent. You know, when you’re working on a script, you not only shoot it, cut it and mix it and do the sound design in your head before you’ve found the locations, but you also know [characters like] James. You know him like he’s sitting in front of you — you can see him, you can see his mannerisms, you can see the way he turns his head — so there’s an incredible familiarity with the character, and this is always my process. I know the person the minute I see them, so you just begin to canvas all [the potential actors]. I also was determined to use emerging talent. I really feel there’s a point where I personally don’t want to see a movie with the same four actors; as brilliant as they may be, it’s just nice to widen that pool. How else do you make the opportunity for a breakout actor than forcing the hand? So I made it a mission parameter to find breakout actors and emerging talent, and also I think it underscored the tension because with the lack of familiarity also comes a sense of unpredictability, as we find from the beginning: “Wait a minute, now anything can happen… I thought it was one thing, now it’s something else.” Every day is a game changer, and I also felt that lack of stability is what the soldier feels in the field. There is no safe zone, not even back at the base, because a mortar round can hit you while you’re sleeping. The soldiers that Mark went out with, the bomb techs, they sleep in flak vests. You never know what’s going to happen.
Filmmaker: Your films are known for the energy and immediacy of their action. I’d be interested to hear about methods that you use to construct that feeling when building your scenes, either in shooting or in post.
Bigelow: Well, it all starts from character. It’s not like I work from the set piece in; it’s from the character out. Every shot, every action, every staging or blocking has to be a credible and logical move and physical response for that character. One of my pet peeves in action is when you lose a sense of geography and there’s just frenetic cutting to give you an illusion of freneticism. But it doesn’t work that way. It really has to be built, piece by piece, from the inside out. I think it’s really important to never let the audience lose a sense of geography, so I’m very geography-centric in my photography. Probably that’s why [I use] the multiple cameras, which I’ve been doing since Point Break. They allow me to look at any particular set piece from every possible perspective. Even though the camera’s moving, even though the shot might be very short, if there’s a lack of orientation, it’s instantaneous and you recover from it, or you never lose it. I don’t want to ask the audience to recover their footing and reorient themselves. I want to never lose them. In fact, I want to draw them further and further into this vortex of information. Then I feel like I’ve succeeded in at least presenting an event in as experiential a way as possible. I love it when photography and cinema can be experiential. I think that’s its great gift. I think literature can be reflective, but film can be experiential. It’s the gift of traveling you from [here] to… wherever. That’s the great gift we can offer, so I never want to lose that opportunity.
Filmmaker: You’ve established a strong reputation for yourself as well as a distinctive style, but nevertheless it’s been a long time since your last film. How do you view your place in today’s Hollywood?
Bigelow: I’d certainly like to be a lot more prolific, but because the types of projects that I choose tend to be somewhat uncompromising therefore, out of necessity, I kind of tend to work “off the reservation.” I mean, had a movie like The Hurt Locker been done in a studio context, you would never have been able to shoot in the Middle East, for instance. And because of the necessity of [shooting there] you’re backed into taking a truly uncompromised approach. I don’t know, it’s hard to step back and take a look at an overview of one’s position, but that’s where you come in. [laughs]
Filmmaker: From a personal perspective, I’m just very glad that you have a new movie out.
Bigelow: Oh, thank you, and I am too, but you know it’s definitely a process that can require a certain amount of time. I mean, perhaps not this much time, but then I did do a television series as well. My hope would be to, without sacrificing content and substance, be a little more prolific. But then, at the same time, wanting to be topical and relevant, the bar that I’ve set for myself is at such a place that very little satisfies those parameters that I place on myself. So that’s what makes it difficult to be as prolific as I’d like to be. That’s where it’s tricky. If I can somehow figure that one out... [laughs]
Filmmaker: At the end of the day, what you’ll be judged on are your films, so I think you have to be like that.
Bigelow: Yeah, that’s kind of the bottom line, which is what makes them potentially timeless and matter. And if they don’t, then it’s back to that art precept and the necessity to push the medium a bit. And if they’re not doing that, then it’s another process, and that’s one I guess I’m less interested in. [laughs]
PUSHING AWAY: LEE DANIELS'S PRECIOUS | By Jason Guerrasio
Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Jason Guerrasio interviewed Precious director Lee Daniels for our Fall 2009 issue. Precious is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Daniels), Best Actress (Gabourey Sidibe), Best Adapted Screenplay (Geoffrey Fletcher) and Best Editing (Joe Klotz).
It’s November 2007 and manager-turned-producer-turned director Lee Daniels is shooting a film in New York City for the first time. Having already been shut down by the NYPD for going over his permit time in Harlem, he’s now in a cramped apartment in the Chelsea section of Manhattan working with a crew he’s not clicking with and horrible reviews of his previous film hang over his head. But none of this seemed to be bothering him when I meet him on the Precious set. With his infectious laugh and signature unkempt hair, Daniels walks around the set like a mad scientist. Discussing the previous shot with his d.p., he then heads to the makeup trailer to look over Mo’Nique’s physical transformation into Mary, his film’s grotesque vision of motherhood. Finally he returns to his trailer and sinks into his couch. Unseen by the rest of the cast and crew, he seems exhausted. “I find myself weaker each time I do a movie,” Daniels sighs. “It takes a bit of my soul.”
Before Daniels made his mark as a producer with the Oscar-winning Monster’s Ball, he was on a mission to make Precious, an adaptation of poet and novelist Sapphire’s acclaimed novel Push. It’s the story of Claireece “Precious” Jones, an overweight 16-year-old who battles illiteracy and has given birth to one child by her father with another of his on the way. She has also learned that he has transmitted HIV to her. Made fun of at school and abused at home by her mother, Precious is given the opportunity to change her life by enrolling in an alternative school, and Sapphire tells her story in a harrowing stream-of-consciousness that has a distinctive cadence and rhythm that’s married to the vernacular and dialect of Harlem in the ’80s.
Daniels says he immediately found similarities to his childhood in Philadelphia in the book’s depiction of uptown New York City. But Sapphire (whose real name is Ramona Lofton) steadily refused to give Daniels — or anyone else, for that matter — film rights.
Daniels moved on, producing Monster’s Ball and The Woodsman. Then he decided to direct the Helen Mirren/Cuba Gooding Jr. assassin pic Shadowboxer in 2006. Daniels received the worst reviews of his career; New York Post film critic Lou Lumenick called it “the worst movie of the century.” For Daniels it was a humbling experience, but he later discovered the film had an unlikely fan: Sapphire. She contacted Daniels and agreed to let him adapt her book. After being unimpressed with drafts done by Hollywood screenwriters, Daniels approached recent NYU Film School graduate Geoffrey Fletcher, whose short film Magic Markers impressed him, to write the script. “I’d heard that a couple of other people had tried [writing the script],” Fletcher says. “I gave [Daniels] the first 15 pages I did, and he just said, ‘Yeah, you’re the one to do this.’ I said, ‘Are you sure?’ and he said, ‘Yes, you can just tell.’ I’m just finding out now how odd that is.” Daniels was not only taken by Fletcher’s approach to scene structure but with the new fantasy scenes Fletcher created of Precious veering off to red carpet premieres, photo shoots and even imagining herself as a white girl when she’s abused.
To play Precious, Daniels cast unknown Gabourey “Gabby” Sadibe, who outside of a high school play, has never acted before; for smaller bit parts he went to his friends in the music world like Lenny Kravitz, who plays a male nurse who befriends Precious, and Mariah Carey, who appears as a social worker. (Hands-down it’s her best acting performance to date). But choosing Mo’Nique to play the despicable Mary could be the most rewarding gamble. Since screening the film at Sundance earlier this year, where the film won the Grand Jury and Audience awards and Mo’Nique received a special jury prize for her acting, the Oscar buzz for her continues to build.
The film’s Sundance success has also brought out some of the most important African-American figures in Hollywood to come on board, as Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry will both be presenting the film when it opens in November. But it hasn’t all been good for the film since Sundance. The title had to be abruptly changed (originally titled Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire, but due to the release of Summit Entertainment’s Push in February, the film was changed to Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire), and The Weinstein Company and Lionsgate filed lawsuits against each other over domestic rights to the film. (Daniels and Lionsgate, who is releasing the film, have no comment on the matter and The Weinstein Company would not return our calls as of press time.)
Daniels once again is in an exhausted state when we meet for this interview at his home a few months before the film’s release. But it’s different this time, as Daniels believes the worst is behind him. (That could be partly why he drastically cut his trademark mane shortly after this interview — to start anew.) As he explains here, bad press, arguments with crew members and the rigors of a New York City shoot were not going to stop him from making the film he wanted to make.
PRECIOUS DIRECTOR LEE DANIELS. PHOTO BY HENNY GARFUNKEL/RETNA LTD.
Filmmaker: When we last interviewed you it was for Shadowboxer. You said at the end of that interview that you were excited to direct again.
Daniels: I did? I must have been crazy. [laughs] Well, you guys interviewed me prior to the reviews coming in so I think I was naive. I just assumed people would like it. Up to that point I had no other experience — they liked my other two films [I produced]. To be at the complete opposite of what I’d experienced in the past made me [better] appreciate what I was doing and to understand the struggle of other filmmakers that suffer from people not liking or understanding their work. So it was a great experience now. Back then I didn’t like it. I came back from Toronto and my doorman showed me the front page of the New York Post. It said “Shadowboxer, the worse film of the century.” I was like, “What?” I literally went to my bed, put the covers over my head and stayed there for two days in the fetal position. But that inspired me to go out and direct again.
Filmmaker: Did reading Push bring back any memories of what you went through growing up in Philly?
Daniels: I had not experienced the things that Precious had experienced. Maybe a little bit, but I knew so many Preciouses in my life. I didn’t have to deal with obesity but I knew all those nuances. I brought my world, the world that I grew up in, to Mary’s home. The living room in Mary’s home — from the wallpaper to the portraits on the wall to the couch, they’re all memories of my childhood.
Filmmaker: Did Sapphire ever visit the set?
Daniels: She has a small part. She takes Precious’s child at the end when she’s about to walk up the stairs to the office. She was also on set one day, and I was really nervous. It was when Mary tells Precious that her father is dead. I just remember [Sapphire] laughing because I was laughing. It’s a very serious scene and Mo’Nique was laughing, so we all were. I asked Sapphire recently, “Why were we laughing in the most politically incorrect places,” and [she said that] it’s because we understand it on another level.
Filmmaker: I think what people will be surprised about when watching the film is that it’s okay to laugh.
Daniels: When I introduce the film I always say it’s okay to laugh. Embrace it. And I think we laugh because we’re not supposed to. Nervous laughter.
Filmmaker: Were there things you learned from doing Shadowboxer that helped you direct this film?
Daniels: I guess subliminally. I brought the same energy, the same person, the same everything. I didn’t do anything different. Even as a producer I had the same spirit. But my boyfriend says I was much more serious for this one. I think what happens is you get older. And I was a little smarter, I knew what I wanted in a take faster so I could get in and out quicker. And this was my second time working with Mariah and Mo’Nique so there was a shorthand. There were just grunts, literally. I would just grunt or use my eyes or hands and they would get what I meant.
Filmmaker: Then you have Gabby. She’s in every scene and she’s never acted.
Daniels: She was a godsend. I mean, you can’t call up an agency and say, “Give me a 300-pound woman.” So we did an open call, and it was really hard. I had over 500 girls audition across the country. We did a “Precious camp” where girls worked with my acting coach. They came from Philly, Baltimore, Chicago, New York and L.A. But the thing was, they were very true, they were Precious, and Gabby is not Precious. What you see in the fantasy scenes, the way she talks — that’s her. Gabby wasn’t even in the boot camp. She came out of nowhere, just showed up in an audition one day. But she plays the role so convincingly that people will meet Gabby and think she should be talking the way she does in the film. I even did. When she would snap out of it, I would go, “Oh, that’s right.”
Filmmaker: Was it hard to teach her the dialect Precious speaks in the film?
Daniels: Yes, that was hard. I used to be a manager for talent, and I remember that when I had African-American talent during the ’80s and they would go in for auditions, the casting director would say, “Great, but can you do that a little more ghetto?” [laughs] And here I was telling Gabby to do the same thing! But we worked on deepening her voice, working from the gut, because in real life she speaks from the head, and slowing down her speech. Often I’d just think about how my cousins spoke. I mean the guy who wrote the script, Geoffrey Fletcher, is an incredible writer, Ivy League school, teacher at Columbia, so it was written how you and I speak. We’d have to go back and remember how certain words were said or phrased at that time.
Filmmaker: Did you ever consider setting the book in the present day?
Daniels: We went back and forth, but it was the general consensus that we had to do it in the ’80s because I don’t think it would have the impact if we set it in the present. Especially with the AIDS issue because back then if you got it you were going to die. No questions.
Filmmaker: I remember visiting you on the set. Did you underestimate how hard the shoot would be?
Daniels: Yes. In the back of my head I believe that I can get anything [for my film], but when I had so many obstacles in front of me I started to question myself. It was a very hard experience.
Filmmaker: How so?
Daniels: I just think I am who I am and oftentimes I’m misunderstood. You can take my laughter and wanting everyone to get along as me being passive, but a good portion [of the crew] didn’t understand the vision or what I wanted to execute.
Filmmaker: I’ve read that you fired a lot of key crew. Daniels: People think that once that train leaves the station they cannot get fired, that they are going to do what they want to do and ignore what you want. When you see that your vision isn’t being executed to exactly how you see it in your head, yes, you have to stop. I think filmmakers have to know that. You should never work in fear, nor should you work with people who don’t get you. The problem was that the people who I’ve grown close to were unavailable because we got the money so last minute. Everyone I wanted was working. So I had these new people, all from New York, and I was forced to work with this person or that person. It was painful. The actors were great — you’ll never hear about me firing an actor — but this was a very difficult shoot. Ultimately I fell in love with my editor, d.p., production designer and costume person. I mean, it takes a minute to understand who I am too. I’m not easy. [laughs] But let me tell you, people will compromise your vision, they will compromise your work and that’s when you have to stand up for it. The minute you stand your ground and say, “No, this is not what I want,” and they say, “This is the way it should be,” that’s when they have to leave.
Filmmaker: Was Mo’Nique your first choice for Mary?
Daniels: She was the first one cast. After Shadowboxer we became good friends. I was looking at a lot of women for the part and I thought of her. But I told her, “Mo’Nique, you shouldn’t do this because you are the queen of BET and Showtime at the Apollo. They love you in the projects. This isn’t that kind of party — you are going to lose your fans.” But at the same time I thought she could do a really good job just based on the work that we did in Shadowboxer. She read it and said, “Sign me up.”
Filmmaker: Would you guys have discussions on how she should dress or talk?
Daniels: That’s the magic we have. It’s not just respect, it’s love. She knows what I want her to do almost as I am about to tell her to do it. “Grow your arm hair, I want zits on your face, eat greasy food. Put this wig on, no, put that wig on, no, don’t wear a wig. How long is it going to take you to grow hair on your legs?” It was just, whatever. “Yes, Mr. Daniels.” That’s a direct quote, that’s what she would say on set. Then behind closed doors it was like, “What the hell are you doing to me?” [laughs] So with her and Mariah, too, there was a trust.
Filmmaker: When did Mariah sign on?
Daniels: Much later. Helen Mirren was supposed to play the social worker and then she couldn’t do it. People would ask me, “How are you going to go from Helen Mirren to Mariah Carey?” I’m just really happy for Mariah because in Tennessee [a film Daniels produced that was released earlier this year starring Carey] we developed our own working relationship and were able to take it to that next level for Precious.
Filmmaker: One of the most riveting scenes in the film is when Precious looks in the mirror and imagines she’s a skinny, blonde white girl...
Daniels: And I don’t think that’s just about [being] black. I think a lot of women see themselves differently in the mirror. The way society deals with self-image is so destructive and unhealthy. [That scene] was really for my daughter who at 13 feels uncomfortable because she has some curves and all her friends are rail thin.
Filmmaker: Were there supposed to be more scenes of the white fantasy girl appearing?
Daniels: Oh yeah, but you can only do it so often. I had her appear originally three times and by the time we put the movie together we realized we were hitting people over the head with it. Same thing with Mary masturbating upstairs to a big O.J. Simpson poster and telling Precious to come upstairs. I [decided I] didn’t want to hold onto it. I just wanted to get in and get out.
Filmmaker: Were Oprah and Tyler Perry instrumental in the sale to Lionsgate?
Daniels: I think so. I had given Oprah the film prior to my arrival at Sundance, and she had tried to see it but she couldn’t get it to play. At Sundance Tyler’s people saw it, so then he saw it and he told Oprah to see it. She found a DVD player that would play the DVD and then she called me. I was winning the first award and Oprah calls me as I’m walking up to the stage. I’m like, “Who is this?” And she says [in a whisper], “It’s Oprah.” And I’m like, “Who?” It was surreal. And Tyler has a brilliant brand and knows how to tap right into the African-American home.
Filmmaker: Are you concerned that general audiences won’t respond as strong as festival audiences?
Daniels: No, because before I showed the film at Sundance I needed a barometer of African Americans and how they felt so I did a test screening at the Magic Johnson Theater in Harlem on 125th Street. Three hundred people, all African American and it scored amazing.
Filmmaker: Because of your success producing and now directing films about very tough subjects do you feel obligated to keep telling these stories?
Daniels: I don’t feel obligated, but I am drawn to them. It is something in my nature, and it’s something that I’m trying to fight away from.
Filmmaker: So you feel like you’re getting pigeonholed?
Daniels: Yeah. I’m trying to find a romantic comedy, but what can I say, I’m as twisted as a pretzel. I’m probably going to find an edgy romantic comedy. But I really want to break away from this type of storytelling. I think it’s important for me to grow as a filmmaker.
Filmmaker: Do you have things in the pipeline?
Daniels: I’m writing something for Oprah. I’m writing a very dark comedy.
Filmmaker: You’ve never had a screenwriting credit.
Daniels: I’ve always helped write but I don’t start from a blank page. I’m also up for a few studio films to direct. I’m trying to figure out what the next thing is. It’s really difficult because after Precious you think, “How do you make everyone happy?” but then you realize you have to [think], “No, make yourself happy.” It’s hard to find good material, so that’s why I’m writing — I’ve given up on being at the mercy of garbage.
IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER: JASON REITMAN'S UP IN THE AIR | By Scott Macaulay
Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Scott Macaulay interviewed Up in the Air co-writer-director Jason Reitman for our Fall 2009 issue. Up in the Air is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Reitman), Best Actor (George Clooney), Best Supporting Actress (Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner).
Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, which debuted at Telluride and went on to critical acclaim at Toronto, is a perfect film to watch at a film festival. It stars George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a frequent-flying corporate downsizer whose Zen of life consists of collecting miles, amassing perks at his favorite hotel chains, crashing parties with great hors d’oeuvres spreads, and the serendipities of chance, no-commitment hookups. Indeed, one colleague said to me at Toronto after seeing the film, “I don’t know whether I liked the film because it’s a good film or because I think I’m that guy.”
But if the above makes Up in the Air sound like a light-hearted boomer comedy, a Wedding Crashers of the skies, that’s far from the case. Bingham’s job as he jets from city to city is to fire people. Lots of people. He’s brought in to do mass layoffs, and while his smooth talk applies a psychological salve to the destroyed egos of the suddenly unemployed, neither Bingham nor Reitman are under any pretenses that it’s anything more than a temporary Band-Aid intended to keep them from falling part before they leave the room. One of the astonishing things about Up in the Air is the clear eye it casts on 2009 America and a workforce undergoing the shock treatment of recession, outsourcing and the creative destruction of so many of our traditional industries. Reitman cast real fired workers in his film and what might have become a casting stunt is quite the opposite: Their voices are honest ones that humanize the employment indices that scroll along the bottom of our flat screens.
Up in the Air’s story takes off with a clever irony: Business-school grad Natalie (Anna Kendrick) proposes modernizing the layoff consulting business by doing the firings by iChat, a move that would destroy Ryan’s carefully constructed way of life. Ryan fights back, convincing his boss (played by Jason Bateman) that Natalie accompany him on a national tour in which she’ll learn just how difficult and necessary his face-to-face job counseling is. Stuff happens, including a relationship with a sexy businesswoman (Vera Farmiga) who would seem to be Clooney’s ideal match. (She and Natalie become a kind of ready-made wife and daughter for Ryan.) Of course, the film winds up juxtaposing the enduring value of family against the unexpectedly fragile identity provided by our jobs, but even here Reitman refuses to go for stock Hollywood uplift with a last line and image that’s among the most resonant cinematic closers I can remember.
Choosing after the enormous success of Juno to return to a project he actually intended to be his first feature, Reitman has made a skillfully executed, wonderfully acted relationship drama for our times that also happens to be, yes, a Hollywood movie. His is not a Barbara Kopple or Laurent Cantet film. He knows how to nail big plot points, create slickly inviting music-driven montages, and how to make the most of a movie star in a lead. (At times the movie reminded me of Jerry Maguire, but with “You had me at hello” replaced by “You’re a parenthesis.”) But with this film Reitman confirms that he’s also become a real master of tone and of portraying relationships and ideas honestly within commercial cinema, which makes him part of a tradition of dramatists and social satirists who are just as endangered in the studio corridors as independents are at the multiplex. I spoke to Reitman just a few days after Toronto, where critics dubbed his film an instant Oscar contender.
Paramount Pictures will open the film in November.
UP IN THE AIR CO-WRITER-DIRECTOR JASON REITMAN. PHOTO BY HENNY GARFUNKEL/RETNA LTD.
Filmmaker: So, I was trying to figure out why I loved your movie…
Reitman: Because you work in an industry where everyone’s losing their jobs and the entire business is going under?
Filmmaker: Well, there’s that. [both laugh] But it took me a day to remember a sociology paper I wrote while as a student at Columbia about the sociology of the business traveler. My professor had suggested that I apply for a Fulbright and expand it into a book, and I had this vague fantasy that I’d spend a year after school traveling the country staying in one hotel after another. So I’d have basically been that guy in your movie, except I think my enjoyment of the experience would have been an ironic one.
Reitman: Oh, but he loves it.
Filmmaker: I would’ve loved it, but in a different kind of way.
Retiman: I kind of sincerely love it. I think that’s the reason why I like the book.
Filmmaker: Yeah?
Reitman: I’m an obsessive traveler. I love being in particular airports, and I love that I know how to navigate them very well, and I love being in hotels. I love collecting miles.
Filmmaker: What’s your favorite airport?
Reitman: I really love Denver, which I think is just fantastic. There’s this one terminal that has a long run with four moving walkways going one after the other until the end. And at the other end are these giant glass windows that look over either tarmac. And, specifically, there are red destination boards at each gate. It’s just so open. You slowly pass one destination after another, and you truly feel this idea of, “If I stop here, I can just go there.” And you really can go anywhere. It’s not connected to the main terminal — you have to take a tram to get to it. So when you land there and you fly out of there, there’s also this kind of separation: You’re on an island. You’re not connected to the world. You are in this hub in the middle of the Earth. They built the Denver airport purposefully further away from the city.
Filmmaker: This is the new one, the one that had all the controversy around its construction?
Reitman: Yes, exactly. They built this road to the airport, which was built as a speed trap to earn more money for the city. I mean, it’s just all sorts of insanity. There’s a giant statue of an astronaut, one of the Apollo 13 guys, right in the center of it, which was the basis for a lot of the astronaut-themed elements in my movie. One I cut out, a dream sequence where Ryan envisions himself as an astronaut walking through Omaha. LAX, though, is sadly one of the sadder airports. It’s unattractive, just a hodgepodge of buildings. But often airports are very beautiful.
Filmmaker: And how did you first come across Walter Kirn’s book?
Reitman: I found it at Book Soup in Los Angeles. At the time I’d written Thank You for Smoking and no one would make it, so I started looking for something else. I had made some short films, some commercials, but I had never made a movie. All I was getting offered were bad broad comedies. I found Up in the Air, and there was a quote from Christopher Buckley [author of Thank You For Smoking] on the cover of the book. I thought, “If he likes the book, I guess I will too.” I started reading it and immediately found something that spoke to me very strongly. Again, I was already an obsessive flier, but it also had this kind of philosophical undercurrent about the idea of what you fill your life with. From there I began writing, and I wrote for six years. And there was this strange, simultaneous timeline because over those six years I got married, I had a child, and I kind of learned what was important in life. And as I was writing the script, the character started to take on kind of these lessons. I remember the first time I read it back. I hadn’t really gone back to rewrite to make sure it was tonally consistent, and reading the script was like reading a timeline of my own journey. The first act felt very much like me when I was writing Thank You for Smoking — very satirical, libertarian and winking [at the audience]. Through the middle it became a little more like Juno, and by the end it really was dealing with the questions that I have now.
Filmmaker: There weren’t multiple drafts over six years?
Reitman: No, there were 30 pages right before I made Thank You for Smoking, and then between Thank You for Smoking and Juno I wrote probably another 30 pages, and then I went to make Juno and I came back, and I wrote the final 60, and then went back and reworked the first two acts as well.
Filmmaker: You made some changes to Kirn’s story.
Reitman: Yeah, I had to. Alex is not in the book, Natalie’s not in the book, firing online is not in the book, the wedding is not in the book, the backpack is not in the book, and the cardboard cutout thing is not in the book.
Filmmaker: He’s headed to a wedding in the book.
Reitman: His sister’s getting married, but he never goes. [laughs] So it’s like it doesn’t happen, you know. Someone said it to me recently, and they put it best, “The book is about a man who loses it, and the movie is about a man who finds it.” The book is about a guy who is dying of an unknown disease, who thinks that some mythical company is trying to draft him. He’s slowly going insane. He goes on a giant drug and alcohol bender in Vegas and winds up in the middle of nowhere, truly lost. What I liked from the book was that it was about a man who fired people for a living who collected air miles, and who seemed to have this sense of joy from being unplugged.
Filmmaker: Didn’t Sheldon Turner do a draft?
Reitman: He wrote a spec script back in 2002, I guess, that I’ve never read. I talked recently to him and it seems that he was drawn to the book for the same reasons I was. The Writer’s Guild of America read his script and, obviously, there was enough similarity that he got credit.
Filmmaker: When did George Clooney enter the picture?
Reitman: I had always been thinking of him. It was one of those things where as my career improved, it went from, “He’ll never do this,” to “Well, maybe he’ll do it.” I gave him the script last August. I had run into George during the Juno awards campaign. I was like, “Hey, I’m writing a script for you,” and he’s like, “Oh, great. Let me know how it turns out.” Last August I said to his agent, “I’m either a week away or a month away, but I’m going to Italy with my wife. We’re going on vacation, so I’ll either finish before I go or I’ll give it to you when I get back.” And he goes, “You should go visit George!” And I was like, “I don’t know. That seems honestly like a horrible idea to me, showing up at an actor’s home. What if he hates the script?” I mean, there’s a reason why I like being unplugged in airports. The idea of going to his home in Como seemed uncomfortable to me. I said [to his agent], “I’ll get it done, and if he likes it, you tell me and I’ll show up.” I was in Italy, and I call him, I said, “So do you want me to go?” And he said, “Go! Go! Go!” “So he read it?” “Just go to his house!” “All right.” I get to his house, and one of the first things he says to me is, “So what are you working on these days?” [laughs] “The screenplay.” “Oh, right, Up in the Air. Right, it’s around here, I gotta read that.” A couple days go by, and I’m completely uncomfortable [hanging out in Italy]. I was like, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing here.” And he just walked up to me at one point and said, “I read it. It’s great. I’m in.” We had a six-hour dinner that night, talked about the whole thing, got along really well. It was one of the great moments of my life.
Filmmaker: I thought the film pretty boldly riffed on his persona.
Reitman: Okay. [laughs] I mean, look, I think at the end of the day George and Ryan are very different, but certainly you can draw parallels between [Ryan and] some of the things that we associate with George. The only time he ever spoke about that was very early, it was on that first day, and he said, “I see how people are going to draw links, and I’m ready to stare that straight in the eyes.”
Filmmaker: How much do you think the film judges his character?
Reitman: Hopefully, very little. What I try to do as a director, and I’ve done this with very tricky subjects — I’ve done this with the head lobbyist for big tobacco, I’ve done this with a teenage pregnant girl, and now with a guy who fires people for a living — is to [portray] them in the most honest light possible. So hopefully I’m not judging them at all. Hopefully [the films] just serve as a mirror.
Filmmaker: Some people are slotting Ryan in a specifically American tradition of the tragic business figure, like Willy Loman or Sinclair Lewis’s Babbit. But there’s something very special about the film’s last line and image that gave him a kind of dignity for me. How did you come up with that great line?
Reitman: It’s the opening of Chapter 3 in the book. I remember reading it and I was like, “This is amazing. I’m totally ending the movie with this.” [laughs] You’re talking about the, “Most people tonight will be welcomed home by squealing kids and jumping dogs…”
Filmmaker: Yeah, but it’s what’s right after that, when he says —
Reitman: “Tonight the sun will set and the stars will wheel forth into the sky and one of those lights will be brighter than the rest, and that will be my taillight passing over.”
Filmmaker: Yes.
Reitman: Love that! I remember reading that in the book! It just came out of nowhere. When I’m adapting, I read a book, and then I read it one more time with a stack of Post-its. I put a Post-it on every page where I know I’m going to need something. I know I’m not going to just adapt it like, “This scene and then this scene.” It’s usually just like, “Oh, this line of dialogue.” I highlight it. “I need that.” Post-it. “Use that here. This line here.” And that [line] was odd, almost a poem towards the beginning of the book. It had no place or meaning where it was in the novel, but it spoke to Ryan’s existence so perfectly that for me, it was like, “Well, that’s the ending.”
Filmmaker: To me, that line speaks to the fact that people like Ryan have a function for everyone else. They give people another kind of life to fantasize about.
Reitman: I often fantasize about being Ryan. But for me that’s what the movie’s about. The movie is not about the economy. The economy is one of the many settings of this film that allow me to explore the idea of how we spend our time, how we spend our lives. The truth is that we are more disconnected than ever, and simultaneously we have a false sense of connection — connection to people, to family, to home life, community, really everything. And that’s what the movie is about. It’s the fact that there is something really enticing about just unplugging. It’s funny because I think when I was younger a movie theater was that place that I could escape to. You go to a movie theater and you are unplugged from the world. And oddly that’s become less so with cell phones and everything. You can’t disappear in a movie theater. But you can disappear in a plane. When you’re in transit, you kind of don’t exist anywhere, and there’s something really nice about that moment. Here’s a guy who is constantly in that moment, and who has found a way to live his life doing that. The fact that he fires people for a living is really just a fantastic metaphor.
Filmmaker: At the same time, I felt you did justice to the real pain of the fired worker.
Reitman: Well, I have a heart.
Filmmaker: I imagine this movie plays differently now than when you made it, because obviously more and more people have been fired in the last year.
Reitman: Well, yes. I started writing it at the tail end of an economic boom, and that has changed. When I started writing it, I wrote those [layoff scenes] as satirical. Things really changed for me when we went to St. Louis and Detroit — we happened to be shooting in two cities that were hit hardest by the economy. Suddenly you could feel the sense, unlike Los Angeles, of so many people who have lost the same job, and there’s nowhere to go. And the more I talked to people, the more I understood: No, it’s not about just maybe changing a gig or looking at a new company. It’s like your choices are: Are you going to move to a new city? Are you completely changing industries? Are you going to start from scratch at 50 years old? I mean, the kind of unthinkable things that no one should have to face, let alone hundreds of thousands of people. So all the people who lost their jobs in the movie were people who actually lost their jobs, and that [casting decision] did many things at once. Most selfishly, it brought a lot of authenticity. What was crazy to me as a guy who for a living tries to get people to be honest on film and who works with professionals at the height of their game, is that all these people just — [Reitman snaps his fingers]. The second we started talking they forgot about the camera and started saying the kind of things that you can’t write. I’m proud of the fact that we put a face to something that is otherwise just a number. It’s impossible to really understand the scale of how many people have lost their jobs.
Filmmaker: I feel your film walks a line between being somewhat unsentimental about the topic of layoffs while also containing more heartfelt moments. But did you feel the need or the pressure to offer more hope for those hurt by the economy?
Reitman: No, I don’t want to make social agenda films. There are enough directors doing that, and that’s not really what’s in my heart. You know, to a certain extent I’m a fairly cold libertarian. I think Thank You for Smoking kind of explored it best for me in that I’m this weird mix: I’m a libertarian guy, but I have a big heart, and they’re constantly butting heads. And Thank You for Smoking for me was my movie dedicated to the fact that I can’t somehow make amends with the fact that I have a heart, I want to help people, and simultaneously I believe, you know, in the Darwinian sense of life. And so I guess I approached this with the same way I approached Juno, with teenage pregnancy, and with the cigarette issue, which is I want to have as honest an approach as possible. I think that’s what makes — hopefully makes — my film different. I mean, hopefully, that’s what makes Thank You for Smoking different from The Insider, and that’s what makes Juno different than an after-school special, or any other film about teenage pregnancy. And that’s what’ll make Up in the Air different from, you know, the Michael Moore film. Even though I’m a fan of Michael Moore, and I really love what he does. But it’s just not my agenda.
Filmmaker: The film has an interesting conceit in that Ryan is kind of a middleman. He’s firing people, but he’s not their employer. And because we see the film largely from his point of view, we never really learn much about the corporations actually doing the firing.
Reitman: My wife was actually fired by one of these companies.
Filmmaker: Really?
Reitman: Yeah, and it’s interesting because I’m not sure if there’s a better [way to be fired]. It s kind of strange to sit across from a complete stranger who is telling you you’re fired. You’re like, “Who the fuck are you?” On the other hand, so many of the people that I talked to in St. Louis said, “I walked into a room, saw a guy I’ve known for 15 years, who knows me, knows my family, has been to my home, and I sit down and he pulls out a piece of paper and reads a legal document and then I had to leave.” So which one is worse?
Filmmaker: Have you had to fire people before?
Reitman: I was doing a commercial and I had to fire a 7-year-old girl. That sucked. It’s no fun. Neither side.
Filmmaker: Tell me about the approach you took towards depicting travel on screen. There’s a kind of glamour to it, but also a kind of soullessness. And, there are no travel delays. Ryan always gets to places on time.
Reitman: The whole movie works on a giant arc, and this was department-wide. The idea was that at the beginning of the film everything is perfect, and by the end of the movie everything’s real. Every [department] had a schedule of how [the design] would change over the course of the film. So at the beginning of the movie — I’ll start with the camerawork — there are a lot of fluid moving shots, a lot of wide angles. The color palette is kind of gray and clean and sleek. The lighting is more kind of half-light — very beautiful, carved lighting. The costuming, down to the extras, is very elegant. People, even the extras, are more trim. Their shirts are tucked in. They’re handsome. You get lines of flight attendants who are in perfect synchronicity. The production design is clean. Everything is kind of spotless. You get a shine on every piece of metal you can find. And then over the course of the film everything gets sloppy. By the end, whole sequences are shot handheld. Extras are kind of sloppy-looking and more real-looking people. The color palette and lighting has become a lot more like Juno; it’s become real and warm. One of the last times we see Ryan in an airport, there’s a guy mopping the floor. He can hardly get through people on the way to the desk. That was actually a very tricky endeavor because we worked at four different airports over 10 days. Twenty percent of the shoot was in airports. To always be keeping that continuity in mind was very difficult.
Filmmaker: As you know, it’s a time of drastic change in the film business. What advice would you offer someone trying to become a director today?
Reitman: It’s interesting, because just 12 years ago when I started, film festivals were it. That was the move. Make a short film, submit it to film festivals, enter the kind of democratic process which is getting into a film festival and maybe winning an award, and simultaneously writing a screenplay so that if your short film hits it out of the park, you could get people to read your screenplay and maybe get a movie made, or get an agent. But what’s now happened is the realization of something I think Coppola said back in the ’70s. He said, “The next great director will be just a kid with a video camera.”
Filmmaker: I remember that.
Reitman: And he was ahead of his time. He was right, but he wasn’t right then. It’s actually become right now. You needed three elements to come to fruition. First, you need the video [image], which was shitty but now is actually great looking. And not only that, but the look of digital has finally become a look. Cinema vérité used to be like 16mm black and white, and now it’s digital color. You needed editing, and now you can steal Final Cut Pro in about 30 minutes with a decent Internet connection and can cut your film for free. And then you needed a distribution system, and that came through YouTube. So you can now shoot, cut and distribute a film for close to nothing — depending on, you know, what kind of movie it is — and, oddly, establish yourself. I mean, my first short film was made for $16,000 and went to the Sundance Film Festival and it was the beginning of my career. My last short film I shot at home for nearly nothing, put it online, and it got millions of hits. The technology means that you need less to tell a story, and so there are going to be more storytellers. There are going to be a lot of crappy storytellers, but hopefully there will be room for some of them to break out.
Filmmaker: But it’s still hard for that work to get noticed.
Reitman: Well, film festivals still mean something. They are still a democratic platform for young filmmakers. To say, “My short film won Sundance” means something. You can probably get an agent to say, “Well, I should probably take a look at that.” [laughs] I remember reading Robert Rodriguez’s Rebel Without a Crew. He had a very straightforward attitude: just go make a movie. Now you can just go make a movie more than ever. How that relates to the business of filmmaking depends on what kind of movies you want to make. The hard thing for me is there’s no middle anymore. There are the indies, and there are the huge fucking movies, and I don’t want to make a huge fucking movie. That’s just not in my heart. I have no interest. I’m not interested in the money. I’m not interested in being on a giant set. No part of it interests me. What I want to do is make adult movies that are somewhere in the middle. I want to make movies for the same audience that used to see Billy Wilder films, Preston Sturges films, that then saw Hal Ashby films, then saw James L. Brooks films, and then saw Cameron Crowe films. The final guy in that lineage is Alexander Payne. It’s a little daunting because I’m lucky in that my last film cost $7 million and grossed $230 million, so I’m in a rare position where I get to make my movie and no one fucks with me. But there should be 10, 20, 40 directors like me trying to make these kind of movies. I like that this movie cost $25 million, but that seems to be without a category. I mean, $25 million seems to me to be a fair price for a smart movie that should be able to connect with a kind of a medium-size audience. But you feel this kind of divide where it’s just like you’re either an indie director or you’re making a tentpole, and that leaves me in kind of a strange place.
THE MOURNING AFTER: TOM FORD'S A SINGLE MAN | By Peter Bowen
Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Peter Bowen interviewed A Single Man co-writer-director Tom Ford for our Winter 2010 issue. A Single Man is nominated for Best Actor (Colin Firth).
Although fashion and film have always been closely intertwined, Tom Ford may be the first fashion designer to cross over to the role of filmmaker. To be sure, his debut feature, an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, reflects his immaculate sense of style. But its story, a melancholy tale of a day in the life of a middle-aged college professor (Colin Firth) who is still mourning the unexpected death of his longtime lover Jim (Matthew Goode), is a far cry from the sex-saturated tableaus that Ford created for the fashion world. The novel, which at its inception reflected Isherwood’s own fear of losing his lover Don Bachardy to another man, is a very internal work, capturing through its interior dialogue the profound questions that the most banal events in one’s life inspire. To translate the book to film, Ford reworked its plot so that protagonist George Falconer now plans to commit suicide at day’s end, making his every moment charged for us by the realization that it is among the last of his life. His dalliance with an infatuated college student (Nicholas Hoult), his drunken dinner with Charley (Julianne Moore), his best friend from London, and even his painful run-ins with dolefully conventional neighbors the Strunks all resonate with the singular sense of mortality. The novel’s title, after all, underscores the inescapable individuality by which each of us must confront life and death as much as it does George’s marital status.
When Ford left the design house Gucci five years ago, he talked about wanting to make a feature film, although what and when remained open questions. In 2006, he acquired the rights to Isherwood’s A Single Man, started reading up on directing, and wrote and rewrote the script about 15 times. Ford secured financing from two large investors, and then lost it when the market tumbled. Instead of looking elsewhere, Ford financed the entire $7 million budget himself. He got an immediate “yes” when he offered Charley to Julianne Moore but was originally turned down when he approached Colin Firth for the lead. Only later, after his second choice dropped out and Ford appealed personally to Firth, did the British actor sign on. To assist him with his screen debut, Ford reached out to a team of both seasoned (costume designer Arianne Phillips and production designer Dan Bishop) and relatively new talents (d.p. Eduard Grau and composer Abel Korzeniowski).
After premiering at Venice, where Firth won a best actor award, A Single Man was acquired by the Weinstein Company in Toronto and then launched in an Oscar-qualifying run at year’s end.
A SINGLE MAN CO-WRITER-DIRECTOR TOM FORD. PHOTOS BY EDUARD GRAU
Filmmaker: You read Isherwood’s novel when you were young. When you reread it with an eye toward adapting it to a film, how had the story changed for you?
Ford: In my twenties what spoke to me in the book was the character of George. I’d really developed a crush on George. My first boyfriend, Ian Falconer, who lived with David Hockney, introduced me to Christopher Isherwood. I read everything he’d done. But in my early twenties, I didn’t grasp the spiritual side of the story, or its midlife crisis. In my forties, rereading it, it was something different. The book is written in the third person, but I didn’t originally understand the significance of that. Reading it again in my forties, I see it is about the true self or soul watching the false self, or material self, go through the day with a certain detachment. The spirit of the story is summed up in the first line: “Waking up begins with saying am and now.” It’s about learning to live in the present, learning to share your connection with the rest of the universe, and those things really spoke to me after I had left Gucci and couldn’t see my own future. I had had every material advantage that one can have, and a wonderful boyfriend I have been with for 23 years, and yet I wasn’t seeing all those things. That’s why the book resonated with me.
Filmmaker: In the documentary Chris and Don, Don Bachardy talks about the origin of the book. Did you speak to Bachardy about it?
Ford: Oh yes, I got to know Don quite well. I had met him once in the ’80s, but he didn’t remember me. Why should he — I was just a kid then. But I got to know him quite well while working on this. Anytime I had a question about something I talked to him. And he loved the movie, which made me feel very happy.
Filmmaker: Supposedly Isherwood wrote this when Bachardy was going to leave him.
Ford: Well, he did leave, according to what Don told me. He moved to New York with somebody else for eight months. So Chris [Isherwood] imagined that Don was dead and that he was single. But they got back together. I don’t know if he finished the book before they got back together or after, but Don thought of the title “A Single Man.” He said it is one of Christopher’s favorite books.
Filmmaker: What is it about the book that conveys spirituality to you?
Ford: Chris spent the second side of his life developing the spiritual side of his nature. Not to get too astrological, but he was a Virgo — his birthday was August 26 — and I’m a Virgo. My birthday is August 27. And Colin is a Virgo. For the character in the book, his inner world is very much related to his outer world, which is developed even further in the film. This man holds himself together by holding his outer world together and that is what contains him.
Filmmaker: Isherwood was very involved in Vedanta, which was a very important movement at the time.
Ford: Yes. Today The Power of Now seems to have taken its place. For me, it’s the I Ching, which is the grandfather of all in terms of spirituality. I grew up a Presbyterian and went to Catholic school, but Western religion never really struck me. I have always had a kind of inner voice and a feeling of connection with things. Maybe it’s from growing up in New Mexico with all that space — you have a definite sense of the Earth and your place in it. I had neglected that part of self. I reread the Tao Te Ching, which I had read earlier in my life, and I started to concentrate on flipping that switch in the brain that makes the difference between happiness and unhappiness. It really is a state of mind. The film really is about looking at the small things in life and realizing that they are the big things in life.
Filmmaker: When you acquired the book I understand there was already a script in place.
Ford: Yes, there was a beautiful script by a guy named David Scearce. And it was attached to the book, so when I bought the book, I acquired the script as well. It was quite literally the book as a screenplay. I didn’t intend to write the screenplay when I started working on this project, but when I started laying it out as a film, I realized that that book and that screenplay were not going to make the film that I wanted to make. Nothing happens in the book. There is no planned suicide in the script that David wrote. There are no external things happening to let the audience know what is happening in George’s mind.
Filmmaker: Was the Cuban Missile crisis in the book?
Ford: Oh yes, the Cuban missile crisis is definitely in the book, but a lot of things changed. The character of Charley is not at all the way she is in the book. When I got to work on it, I took the book and the screenplay and put them aside. And then I wrote out the new plot lines, wrote out new scenes, and completely restructured a new screenplay from scratch. The original book and David’s screenplay served as reference and source for the story. And while I diverged quite a bit, I kept the intention.
Filmmaker: How did you change the character of Charley? Ford: Some of the things that I did were things that Christopher had thought of doing. I wrote Charley in a more glamorous way with a past history with George. I asked Don about that, and he said, “It’s really funny that you did that. The original Charley was based on Iris Tree. She was really glamorous, very much like the character that you have written, but Christopher didn’t want her to know that she was the basis for that character so he had dramatically changed her in the book.”
Filmmaker: When you rewrote it, did you bring in things that are personal to you?
Ford: A lot of it. The suicide comes from a suicide that happened in my family.
Filmmaker: What were the cinematic or literary influences that came into play? Obviously there’s a sense of Virginia Woolf in that sense of a life lived in a day.
Ford: There absolutely is. In fashion design, I catalog things, and they go into my mind in a sort of file cabinet, and when they come out again, I never realize where exactly they came from. And hopefully they come out with a certain personal stamp. It was much the same way with the film. Loving film, and having watched film voraciously for my entire life, I think I have a very good file cabinet, filled with images, shots, angles, storytelling techniques: Fritz Lang, Hitchcock (probably my favorite director), Kubrick, Antonioni. One of my favorite movies is Umberto D. by Vittorio De Sica in which there are long silences in which you just watch. But there wasn’t a point where I said, “Okay, I’m going to reference this [shot or director].” I am sure there though, that there are some that I am not at all completely aware of.
Filmmaker: Douglas Sirk comes to mind a lot.
Ford: People keep saying that, but I have to say, I don’t like that reference. I like Douglas Sirk and I like those films. There is a certain campy quality to them, with the color and the artificiality, so I can see that connection, but it wasn’t my intention. Hitchcock is also completely artificial.
Filmmaker: Your use of music is very Hitchcockian.
Ford: That was my intention, a sort of overblown, Bernard Herrmann-esqe score.
Filmmaker: That certainly comes across...
Ford: I think I’ll say... thank you?
Filmmaker: Yes, I loved the score.
Ford: I had such great luck with a Russian composer called Abel Korzeniowski. I started off contacting Shigeru Umebayashi, who did In the Mood for Love, but he was not free to do the entire film. So he wrote a few small pieces. He sat in my office in L.A. and watched the movie for three days, and went back and wrote some very beautiful pieces of music.
Filmmaker: How then did you integrate the two scores from the two composers?
Ford: I had a very specific sound that I wanted. I wanted the principal instrument to be the violin, because the violin is the most human of all instruments. It can be sad and sound like it’s crying. I think that the two scores mesh beautifully, and I don’t think that you can tell where one ends and the other begins. Abel’s great strength is his ability to score. Shigeru produces beautiful freestanding pieces, but Abel scores — he writes music to reinforce the moment.
Filmmaker: You clearly were engaged in all stages of production. As a first-time director, what did you find the most challenging, and what was the most enjoyable? Ford: Every single moment was fulfilling. At the start, I would sit in my bed writing a scene, and nothing would go wrong because it would all be in my mind. I loved writing it. I loved preproduction. I loved production. I loved shooting. I loved editing but it was the biggest surprise for me. I had no idea how tedious it could be, and how you can take the same scene and twist it into 10 different directions depending on how you cut it. That tortured me in a way, but I also loved it.
Filmmaker: The film has a precise visual vocabulary. How did that come about?
Ford: While I was writing it, I could visualize every single scene perfectly. Now, I am not trying to tell you that I had the whole film in my head like Mr. Hitchcock — which we now know was false since many of his storyboards were sketched after the fact. But while I was writing I knew that I wanted the color to intensify at certain moments. I had a friend who was dying of cancer and I remember so vividly him telling me that during a snow storm the snow had never looked that way to him before. Everything was so intense. As a fashion designer, I often found myself living in B&W environments. I’d made them B&W because I couldn’t face color after having worked with it all day. I guess that’s what I am getting at — when I’m depressed I don’t see color. Everything is flat. Then when I am not depressed, in a happy state, everything is very intense. Color is very intense. When George decides that this is going to be the last day of his life, then for the first time in a long time, he is really looking at things. Which is why we have so many eyes in the film. He hasn’t looked into anyone’s eyes in so long. All at once he is connecting with everyone through their eyes.
Filmmaker: You seemed to have paid a lot of attention to the architecture in the film, especially George’s house.
Ford: I knew that I wanted him to have a modern house. He says what he likes about America is that this is a country in which you can create your future. So I feel that he would have wanted a piece of modern architecture. But since he came from England, grew up in darkness with wood-paneled rooms with a fire and scotch, I felt that he wouldn’t have wanted a cold, glass-and-steel modern house. Selecting his house was tricky; I wanted something dark and covered in wood, but also modern. The house I found was an early [John] Lautner house in Glendale. It’s the first house that Lautner did after he left [Frank Lloyd] Wright in 1948. And it is a great house. We shot everything in the same room. It is not nearly as big as it looks. The rooms are miniscule so we just redesigned the rooms in different incarnations and moved the walls and shot everything in the same room.
Filmmaker: And what kind of notes did you give to your production designer about the furniture?
Ford: Well most of it came from my house. We were on a budget. Some of the paintings were things that Julianne Moore and I did.
Filmmaker: I noticed you used several of Don Bachardy’s drawings.
Ford: I did. I believe in luck. I used a lot of things that I hoped would bring me good luck. All of his family pictures, which there are not too many, were my family. I used Don’s drawings where I could. And I used other personal items, many to help the actors understand who their characters were but also to help me to develop the characters. For example, Arianne Phillips designed the costumes — and she did a beautiful job — but George’s suits I manufactured in my factory in Italy. And in the inside of his suits I came up with the name of a tailor that I imagined that George would have gone to when he went back to England to have his clothes made. So there is a date and a name sewn in the pocket of the jacket. I don’t know if Colin ever looked at it.
JUDITH EHRLICH AND RICK GOLDSMITH, THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA | By Damon Smith
Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Damon Smith interviewed The Most Dangerous Man In America directors Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith for our Director Interviews section of the Website. The Most Dangerous Man In America is nominated for Best Documentary.
As a history lesson, Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith’s enthralling new documentary, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, is as solid as a textbook, stitching together old broadcast footage, first-person testimony, tart excerpts from the Nixon White House tapes, and noirish recreations into riveting, revelatory political drama. The name “Daniel Ellsberg” probably doesn’t trigger the same flurry of associations as Deep Throat, the shadowy antihero of the Watergate scandal, but it should: An ex-Marine, former assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, and highly respected analyst at the Rand Corporation, Ellsberg leaked a 7,000-page study detailing the top-secret Southeast Asia policies of five presidential administrations to the New York Times, resulting in a landmark court case, attempted cover-ups, and a nasty smear campaign, all culminating in the ignominious resignation of President Nixon. To be sure, the spy-grade story of the Pentagon Papers controversy has a lot of rich angles, including government secrecy, first-amendment rights versus executive privilege, and the rise of the national security state. But it’s also a conversion tale deeply concerned with the burden of conscience that Ellsberg felt as a government insider to tell the public what he believed they had a right to know, and his desire as a newly minted dove to change the course of the Vietnam War.
Part journalistic exposé, part overdue homage to one of the last century’s most notorious whistleblowers, Most Dangerous Man is a pressurized piece of filmmaking, resonating with issues (civil rights, the press, the conduct of war) still worrying the national conscience. With considerable flair backed by exhaustive research, Ehrlich (The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It, 2001) and Goldsmith (Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press, 1996) guide us through the corridors of power where the Vietnam war was seeded and then bloomed, often against the private advice of military analysts. Ellsberg himself provided McNamara with evidence of “atrocities” that helped push the war along, then reversed course after a two-year stint in Saigon with the State Department convinced him it was not only a lost cause, but a moral travesty based on years of prevarication. Seen then and now, he emerges as a man of principle, sincere and articulate. His fascinating chronicle of that time is augmented by a carousel of outspoken interviewees, including old colleagues like Anthony Russo (the Rand associate who persuaded him to Xerox the papers), Nixon officials John Dean and Bud Krogh (who authorized the break-in at Ellsberg’s doctor’s office), and general counsel James Goodale, who soothed the nerves of the Times’ top brass. Winner of the Special Jury Award at IDFA, and recently shortlisted for the Oscar, Most Dangerous Man is able-bodied and slyly entertaining, and has plenty to teach us, especially in these times, about the power of dissent.
Filmmaker spoke with Ehrlich and Goldsmith about crises of conscience, fair-use issues, and why you won’t be seeing Dan Ellsberg on any talking-head news programs.
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers opens Friday at Cinema Village.
DIRECTORS JUDITH EHRLICH AND RICK GOLDSMITH. COURTESY FIRST RUN FEATURES.
Filmmaker: How and why did you decide to anchor the film around Daniel Ellsberg’s narrative and personal voice as opposed to approaching the story of the Pentagon Papers leak from a more general point of view?
Ehrlich: It was something we struggled with a lot. I always wanted it to be more character-driven and more biographical, not just a generic story about the events. The idea of whether it would be Dan’s voice or not was still up in the air until very late. I think Rick wanted it to be more journalistic and objective, but we compromised. I always felt [his voice] would make it a stronger narrative. For one thing, Dan lives right near us, he’s extremely articulate, his writing is wonderful, and most of the narration is adapted from his [book]. To me it seemed a no-brainer not to use him—it would give it that much more authenticity. But I think Rick’s points were legitimate, so that was a complicated decision.
Goldsmith: I’d actually approached him with a film about the Pentagon Papers and it didn’t get off the ground. Then Judy came to me about a year later with a film about Dan Ellsberg. Some of the initial questions were, Do we have a film about him or do we zero in on the Pentagon Papers? The personal transformation story, obviously, was the kickoff for the whole event, and we spent over a third of the film on that, and then got into the event itself. I don’t know if “morality play” is the right word, but it triggers questions of conscience, not only in Dan Ellsberg, but in so many of the characters that we have onscreen, starting with Randy Kehler and then leading to the newspapersmen, Hedrick Smith and Max Frankel, the Times lawyer, and the congressman. They all had crises of conscience. The Nixon administration, people like John Dean and Egil Krogh, all had to face very big questions that hopefully we all face on some level.
Filmmaker: Was Ellsberg amenable to participating when you first presented the idea, or were there negotiating points in terms of how his story would be told?
Goldsmith: It was a process. We approached Dan when he appeared onstage before a local high school in Oakland with his wife Patricia, where they talked about their remembrances of that time. That was the first time we talked face to face with him about it. He had had other filmmakers approach him about the subject matter, [but] he had not wanted to do anything until he wrote his own account [Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers], which he did in 2002. This was late 2004, when we spoke. He was protective of his story, for sure, and wanted to know what we would do with it, so it was not a slam dunk that he was going to go with us.
Ehrlich: Also, I think there was an intervention by some mutual friends too, who made them feel like we would do a fair job. But I think they had reason to be nervous, because Dan had had a hatchet job done on him by an author. F/X had done a made-for-TV version of the Pentagon Papers, with James Spader playing Dan, except [the producers] never talked to them, they cut them entirely out of the process. I don’t think they felt burned by that, but they certainly were cautious. We were lucky they chose us.
Filmmaker: There’s a confessional aspect to the film that calls to mind TheFog of War. Was this another opportunity for Ellsberg to set the record straight in a different medium?
Ehrlich: Dan’s very quick to accept guilt. That was his motivation for doing what he did. There were moments when we had to be sure we didn’t look too much like Fog of War, because it was the same period, with similar characters. There’s a lot of resonance here between the two films, and we wanted it to feel different.
Goldsmith: I don’t think Dan needed to unburden himself. I think he felt deeply about what he had done, planning the war and helping it along, and he felt very passionately [that leaking the papers] was the right thing. I think he was intrigued with the idea of somebody other than himself telling the story, and was ultimately convinced we would do it justice.
Filmmaker: How long did it take you to gather all the archival footage, as well as selections from the Nixon tapes that were used in the film? Did you have issues with clearances?
Goldsmith: It took four years. The archival stuff started with articles from the time period, and then we went to D.C. to do some filming in 2007. All that broadcast material of Howard K. Smith and Walter Cronkite is in the National Archives, because somebody in the Nixon administration was given the job to tape the nightly news and every public-affairs program. The Nixon tapes were also there, and it took a lot of digging and research by our team to get them. Those were free, but with a lot of the broadcast material, it was kind of an unknown whether we could claim fair use. Often we did, and used that as a way to not break our budget. We also spent a lot for CBS News, which was probably our biggest check, for their footage on the war and everything else.
Ehrlich: We had a very interesting experience with the fair-use issue. I don’t know how much you’re familiar with Pat Aufderheide and that whole movement, to make that more clear and get filmmakers the right to do it legally. We used a lawyer, Lisa Callif, and she went through every single clip a number of times and confirmed that each one of them was within the “safe harbor” of fair use, as she called it. And the quality was good enough we could go straight into DV-cam. I think that’s a great opportunity for anyone who’s looking at this period, to be able to access that material.
Filmmaker: In terms of visuals, the graphics, animations, and cloak-and-dagger-style recreations add another layer of tension and moody suspense. Were those part of your original plan for the film, or did they come later in the process?
Ehrlich: I think we were a year into editing by the time our assistant editor, Lawrence Lerew, came up with the recreation idea. I jumped on the bandwagon immediately and worked with him. It took a long time for Rick to decide it was going to work. So we did a bunch of rough versions and eventually we all got on board.
Goldsmith: The recreations and animation were the last productions we did. For obvious reasons, you want to to have every piece in place and know what part of the story you can [illustrate]. It’s true, Judy was pushing more on that. I like the idea of recreations, but the extent to which we ended up with them, I was skeptical at the beginning. I was concerned with losing a little bit of credibility [if we made it] too first-person. It was a process. But because there were a lot of creative minds on it, it worked. Filmmaker: You’ve corralled quite a roster of talking heads in this film. John Dean and Bud Krogh’s participation seems essential, given their role in the Fielding break-in. Were there other key players you sought to interview who didn’t make it onto film?
Goldsmith: The idea from the beginning was to get as many people [as possible] who were really there. You’ll notice there are very few people onscreen who didn’t actually participate in this story. Robert Ellsberg, Daniel’s son, was Xeroxing the Pentagon Papers so we went after him. Mort Halperin was head of the study so we went after him. We wanted to get Kissinger and couldn’t get a call back, and we wanted to get Alexander Haig, who was peripherally involved.
Filmmaker: You did get Kissinger virtually.
Ehrlich: We actually made him look good! [Laughs] That’s the one thing I kind of regretted about the film. He’s the voice of reason compared to his boss.
Goldsmith: One of the people we tried hard on, and I had at least four or five conversations with on the phone, was Harry Rowen, who would have been a very interesting interview. That was Dan’s boss at the Rand Corporation. He got the shit when the leak happened. I’m sorry that we couldn’t win Harry over to agree to be on camera. But we tried really hard.
Filmmaker: Considering that both of you come from television, what was different for you about the experience of making a feature for theatrical release?
Ehrlich: We were funded by ITVS, German and French television, so we always were making a film for [that medium]. When we saw the animal we had, we hoped it might be theatrical, but we certainly didn’t make it primarily for theatrical release. It had to be public television because we had their money.
Goldmsith: What happened along the way was that among ourselves, through Lawrence, we started to branch out and see more of the creative [elements] that could elevate it beyond the standard documentary. In May or June, even though we were very close to a final cut, we learned that Karen Cooper at Film Forum was interested in the film—we had sent her a rough cut—and also the Toronto Film Festival. However, we had already fashioned it as a more dramatic, dynamic show. We sensed down the home stretch that, hey, this thing is bigger than a TV or educational thing, and we need to make the most of it.
Ehrlich: What surprised me is the interest we’ve had with the film internationally. It won the Special Jury Award at IDFA in Amsterdam, which was really exciting and a huge surprise, since that’s the biggest documentary festival in the world. And we also have had amazing sales around the world. We didn’t think this film would really play that well outside the U.S., but it’s really striking a chord.
Filmmaker: What do you think is registering with people internationally?
Ehrlich: I think people want to hear a positive story about American conscience. [Laughs] We get so much bad press and people in Europe at least are crazy about Obama, they aren’t feeling the negative feelings that we’re having here as progressives at the moment.
Goldsmith: It has a universality to it. The crisis of conscience and the historical stage — it’s the Vietnam War, leading up to Watergate. I like to believe that the film’s pretty well made, too, but the story resonates on a lot of levels that transcend borders.
Filmmaker: Another part of the film deals with the power of the press and the conflict with executive privilege that Nixon invoked in trying to halt the Times’ reporting. It seems to have an extraordinarily urgent resonance today, with the folding of so many papers and news organizations struggling to develop new business models to stay alive.
Goldsmith: I think it points to a time when news organizations defied the government and that, too, I think gives people a sense of what can be done. To me, [it’s amazing] that young people don’t know this type of story, when citizens rise up and do something, when newspapers defy their government and print stories that their government not only doesn’t want them to print, but then goes to court to stop them.
Filmmaker: What were the biggest discoveries that you made in researching this film and interviewing the participants?
Ehrlich: For me, it’s the Watergate period, because I thought I knew that. One of the gifts of this film is that we have reinterpreted the history of Watergate in a more accurate way because of John Dean’s testimony, if we’re to believe his interpretation that it was the break-in to Dr. Fielding’s office, rather than the events of Watergate, that really brought down the Nixon administration. When we first started I thought, “Oh yeah, and it kind of has something to with Watergate, too, because the Plumbers started there and then they did the real thing nine months later.” But in fact the break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office was what brought [Nixon down], because that could be tracked back to the White House.
Goldsmith: For me, it was the extent that Daniel Ellsberg was not only inside the government, but actually took part at the top levels. He has incredible knowledge about how the government works, how the secrecy system works, how organizations like RAND work, and he has an incredible amount to add to the public debate about issues of war. We don’t hear [his voice], we don’t see him on the TV shows. Every time we’re about to go to war, from the first Gulf War to the Iraq war to Afghanistan, you see all these retired admirals and generals, but you don’t see the Daniel Ellsbergs who have as much information about government because they’ve been there. To me, learning that, learning how much he knows, was one revelation, and the other was how much he’s been shut out from public debate. And that’s a loss for all of us.
Filmmaker: So who’s the most dangerous man in America today? Is it still Dan Ellsberg?
Ehrlich: It could be. What he has to say is still pretty scary to the government.
Goldsmith: I think at that time, Dan did do this incredible act, but let’s face it, there was an entire anti-war movement that should not be forgotten. He didn’t exist in a vacuum.
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