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De Palma Defends Redacted From Venice
Count on Brian De Palma to drive people crazy.
His latest polarizer, Redacted, debuted in Venice on Friday to sustained applause and divergent reaction--see Reuters, Premiere, THR and Variety--and then met a mixed response stateside in Telluride on Saturday. (See Todd MccCarthy's fest wrap and GreenCine.)
De Palma wanted to bring attention to the War in Iraq, 18 years after his own similarly-themed Casualties of War. What he got was a debate about his filmmaking methods. Some admired his high-concept low-budget agit-prop mash-up of different video POVS, from a Marine's video diary to Iraqi insurgents planting IEDs at night to surveillance cameras and a glossy French documentary about a Samarra checkpoint.
And four festivals scheduled De Palma's $5-million indie docudrama with an anti-war message: Redacted now moves on to Toronto and finally, New York. Now 66, De Palma faces his first NYFF. And it may not be altogether pleasant.
The doc hybrid movie is nothing new. Filmmakers are always looking for something fresh and real, a new way to convince moviegoers that what they are seeing is not fake. Michael Moore uses the doc form to sell a political message in an entertaining way. And filmmakers Paul Greengrass, Kevin MacDonald and Michael Winterbottom have taken the art of verisimilitude to new heights with guerilla indie filmmaking techniques in docudramas like United 93, Touching the Void and A Mighty Heart. They throw actors into real situations with real people, they follow them with multiple portable cameras, they make you believe they are showing you something close to reality. They also set an awfully high standard.
De Palma cites United 93 as inspiration. It is understandable that an established studio filmmaker like De Palma would relish an opportunity to skip out on the hazards of making movies inside the big Hollywood machine. The director's first stab at returning to his indie roots, last year's moody film noir The Black Dahlia, achieved mixed results. But he enjoyed being the master of his universe on a modest budget in Eastern Europe; he had fun playing around with novelist James Ellroy’s dark materials.
But during the filming of Redacted, De Palma discovered that indie filmmaking has its own hazards. A brainy filmmaker who likes to provoke people with such films as Carrie, The Untouchables, Scarface and Carlito’s Way, De Palma is no stranger to controversy. He called me Sunday morning from Venice to explain what he was doing with Redacted, which in some ways harks back to his early indie years in New York shooting Hi Mom, Greetings and Home Movies.
Last year during his traditional tour to the Toronto fest to see films, De Palma went out to dinner with some old pals and met Laird Adamson from HDNet Films, the low-budget digital film division run by 2929 Entertainment czars Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner. Standing on the street after dinner, Adamson planted the idea that De Palma could have some fun on high def video, like Steven Soderbergh did with The Bubble. "We'll give you $5 million and you can make whatever you want," he told the filmmaker.
De Palma thought about what would lend itself to that format. He was impressed by HBO's Baghdad ER, which brought back his own memories of haunting the ER when his father was on duty, of "sorrow and suffering. I said to myself, 'boy some people will see this and think hard about what we're doing over there.' HD has intimacy on TV; it's more vivid than film."
The De Palma found a shocking event, the March, 2006 rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl and her family in Mahmudiya; five U.S. soldiers were charged; four were sentenced to five to 110 years. Redacted was "inspired" by that horrific episode, a word that De Palma has been told to use by HDNet Film's lawyers.
"It was almost the exact same incident we did in Casualties of War," he says. "You can't tell the insurgents from the people they're supposed to be protecting. In Casualties of War they were abducting a farm girl. There was the usual frustration trying to tell someone about it. It was impossible to get justice. Everyone wants it covered up and forgotten. I wanted to tell that story again, about Iraq."
The filmmaker is no stranger to documentaries: back at the start of his career in the 60s, The Responsive Eye was about Op Art, while Show Me a Strong Town and I'll Show You a Strong Bank was about the NAACP and the Legal Defense Fund. "I was shooting everything myself in those days," De Palma says. "I was brought up in the new documentary era of the Maysles brothers and Richard Leacock."
But since then De Palma has become a Master of the Universe who directs massive tentpoles starring Tom Hanks (Bonfire of the Vanities) and Tom Cruise (Mission Impossible). How was he going to squeeze himself down to $5 million?
Researching the Internet, De Palma found soldiers' and wives' blogs, insurgent videos of people planting IEDs and blowing up people, and rants against the March 2006 incident. "This is the way to tell the story," he says, "the way I discovered it on the Internet. To me the big issue of the day is the way the so-called watchdog media has been coopted by the establishment."
This is where things got tricky. De Palma couldn't get the rights to use the original story, nor could he get CNN or Skye News or YouTube to let him use their material or logos or newsrooms. "Everyone bailed out on us," he says. He wound up using the Arab media instead, filming real Arab newcasters. HDNet's lawyers told him he couldn't use anything real about this true event. He had to fictionalize it. They insisted that he show them a script. Instead of chasing down a documentary about what was really going on and how it was being told---or not told, in the American media--De Palma tried to recreate it in fictional form with inexperienced young actors, relying on young Canadian producers to show him how to film on the cheap.
De Palma admits that he used his characters in Casualties of War as protoypes for Redacted's raw recruits, and wrote the script himself. "It was irritating," he says. "When we started I said 'give me $5 million, and I'll give you a movie.' I wanted to do it like Hi Mom with some younger actors, we'd write a scene and they'd do some improv off it, like Cassavetes. But I kept on getting notes: where's the script?"
The script had to be vetted by lawyers. De Palma had to write the whole thing, word for word, "like I was doing a legal brief," he says. He sent his long-time second unit director Eric Schwab to Amman, Jordan to put the production together; Schwab shot the stylized French documentary about the agonizingly slow repetitive anxiety at an American checkpoint. "He's used to working in every crazy capitol in the world," says De Palma. "He emailed me locations while I was rounding up my cast. We had to make it look like real people, not actors."
De Palma put his actors through two weeks of boot camp under a real U.S. Army sergeant who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan. (He has a small part in the movie.) The shoot in Amman went smooth and fast --De Palma brought the show in early after only 18 days instead of the scheduled 24. "These guys knew the material," he says. "They'd do a scene over and over until they got exhausted."
In the end, while there are riveting and upsetting sequences that are all-too-believable and hard to watch, many of the dialogue scenes with the soldiers lack that punch of the real. It feels like we're watching young thespians spew dialogue.
The movie's ending-- a montage of real war photos of Iraqi casualties-- hits hard. "Europeans are mystified as to why Americans are prosecuting this war, why there are no protests in the streets like the 60s," says De Palma. "I say it's because they don't have the pictures. The pictures will stop the war. The irony is even these pictures have been redacted due to ridiculous legalities. E & O insurance has gotten skittish since 9/11 about insuring anything. They're worried about the relatives of the people who died in Iraq in the pictures. I'm still fighting all the way. It's outrageous, obscene the way they redacted the faces with black lines across them so as not to be identified. Don't get me started! You can't see these pictures in the U.S. and you hardly see them in my movie. Redacted is being redacted."
Let's see how 2929's Cuban, who gave De Palma his $5 million along with his legal advice, responds to De Palma's challenge.
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