Brian De Palma: "Making You Aware of What You're Watching"

Brian De Palma arrived for the North American premier of Redacted at the Toronto International Film Festival direct from Venice, where he won the prestigious Silver Lion for Best Director. It was a controversial award for a controversial film, a fictionalized portrait of real-life war crime in the current Iraq occupation, which De Palma has made more provocative by using the techniques of non-fiction filmmaking, TV news reporting, video diaries and propaganda pieces to challenge audiences to question what exactly they're seeing. He was clearly exhausted from his whirlwind schedule (he was ordering a sandwich when I was ushered into the hotel room; "I just don't have any time to deal with anything else," he remarked as I set up my tape recorder), but it didn't blunt his comments about his feelings of impotence in the face of war and the cinematic response that is Redacted.

It is pure coincidence that day of the interview, which also happened to be his birthday, was September 11.

I saw Redacted two days ago and I confess that I still don't know how I feel about it.

That's perfectly understandable. I've seen this reaction many times and it's because of the powerfulness of the emotional element and also because it's new. It's presented in number of ways that you haven't processed before. People come out of the film like, "I've got to think about this." They've been affected but they have to sort out everything and it takes a while. It's usually about 24 hours before they can really deal with what it means to them.

I don't really make an emotional connection because the style, by its nature, keeps you at such a remove, but the film is sticking with me.

Well, it is the Brechtian idea of making you aware of what you're watching while you're watching it. These video forms that seemingly are reality TV are really fictionalized. I'm going to make up a story here and you're going to believe it.

Salazar [Izzy Diaz] starts off talking into his camera, saying, "I'm here to show you the truth."

Right.

And then we have the French documentary which is their truth, and then the news shows, and on top of all that, all of these elements are fictional creations of yours. What are you trying to say about the nature of truth?

There are a couple facts here. Even though this is all based on real material, real material which I found on the Internet in these forms that you see in the movie, because of the legal problems, I couldn't use the real material. I couldn't use the real news stories. My first idea was to use the real material, the real news story, but the cases were being prosecuted while I was making the movie, so the lawyers said, "Well, you can't use any of that." So anytime I used anything that had to do with the real case, I'd have to fictionalize it. Fortunately, I had made Casualties of War and the incidences were almost exactly the same. So I drew most of my characters from the soldiers of Casualties of War, with a lot of other stuff I had found on the web about certain soldiers - you know, their blogs; you get all sorts of characterization stuff from that. And that became the way to tell the story.

So it was constructed via the way you discovered it, through the video footage and video blogs you found in the Internet?

Yes, that presented the form to me. And I'm very technically savvy. I used to build computers when I was a kid and I'm very interested in the whole computer revolution. This'll change in another couple of years. There wasn't YouTube two or three years ago. There's all kinds of new stuff and people are using it to express how they feel about things. They're performers; they're doing all kinds things and it's interesting to see how it's going to evolve. And I also think, certainly with digital storytelling, it's a new way to tell narrative, to create narrative. I've made a lot of movies and most narrative forms have been pretty much exhausted now. They do them on television, they've recycled every plot and character you can imagine, so now there are whole new ways to deal with story forms that are emerging in these bits on the web.

How much comes from the material you discovered on the web and how much from your imagination?

For everything in that movie, there is a story or a website or something that it is all based on. As I said, if I could have used the real thing, I would have been happy to do it. It would have made my job a lot easier. But you can find them. If you put in "US soldiers," "Iraq," "rape," "murder," the whole case will come up immediately. And then you put in "soldier's wife website" and you'll see a website very much like Judy McCoy's [Bridget Barkan]. The girl ranting about what she wants to do the guys, that's one of the few things we were able to buy. We bought that blog and I just dramatized it, and the best person that did it was this girl. It's a guy's blog. So everyone had a computer full of references where all this stuff came from. And as soon as I wrote it using the real material, I would get another stack of pages from the lawyers. They would find the thing that I had found and put, "You can't use that," which is exactly the thing that I wanted to use. And then I would have to find another way. It's like a poem - you would have to find another word to say the same thing.

Do you find that working on a low budget and away from the studio system, that you can be more experimental in your approach?

Totally. They give you $5 million to make a movie about anything you want. So that's a tremendous amount of freedom. You don't have to take any meetings, you just go off and make the movie. The big problem with this movie is that it had all these legal problems and that became quite a nightmare to guide yourself through.

Was this the lowest budget you've worked with?

Oh, no, no, no. When I started out, I made even lower budget films than this one. The first film I made for more than a mere $5 million was Dressed to Kill. It was $6.5 million. Everything up to that was under $5 million. Of course it meant a lot more in those days, but Greetings was $22,000. Oh, no, I know how to work in this venue and I had these great Canadian producers who were very used to making low budget films and they brought their technical people with them.

Where did you shoot the film?

Amman, Jordan.

You went to Jordan with your small crew?

Yes.

Was it completely scripted or did you work improvisations with the actors?

It had to be completely scripted because it all had to be vetted by the lawyers. I initially said to these people, "You give me $5 million, I'll deliver a movie. I'm going to get together with the actors, I'm going to work out the scenes like I did with Greetings and Hi, Mom! and you'll see it in the end." But then I would get all this pressure. They said, "You can't really do that because we've got to make sure there are no legal problems." Consequently, it was all written and vetted by the lawyers, but the soldiers had done the scenes so many times and in so many different ways that they could improvise off them any which way we wanted and I would just keep shooting. All the stuff I shot was basically from one camera set-up, whether is was Salazar following people around or a surveillance camera, an interrogation camera, somebody talking into a computer. So I just had one set-up and I just kept shooting until we had gone through every variation these guys could do.

How did you like using video as opposed to film?

I thought video was amazing. I was amazed at how well the image held up, because usually in video, when you take big wide shots, the image tends to fall apart. I was amazed, especially in the barrage sequence that was shot by my associate, Eric Schwab, who has done a lot of second unit stuff for me through the years. I mean these beautiful shots, and on the big screen you go, "Wow, that's quite something."

Redacted

Salazar's hoarding of the evidence, refusing to report the crime so he can save the footage for an exposé documentary designed to serve him, not justice, reads like a savage critique of the media. Even though he's not part of the media, it plays on the idea that the scoop is more important than truth or responsibility.

Sadly true. Follow the money. The people profiting from this war are defense contractors and oil companies - they're doing very well - and the media. Wars are great for the media. They make stars. They can talk about them on the talk shows all the time, they can make book deals. McCoy accuses him of being one of the jackals, but Salazar is sort of the beginning of what would become a media giant if he can get his story out.

The characters of Flake [Patrick Carroll] and Rush [Daniel Sherman] are completely racist to begin with. They're just...

The bottom of the gumbo barrel.

They've already given up on the idea that the Iraqis are even human to begin with, and they justify themselves out of this skewed logic, "They owe us for coming to this hell-hole," but they act like a conquering army. They're Visigoths taking the spoils due the conquerors, like something from a thousand years ago.

That's an idea that very much comes from Casualties of War. In fact, there's a speech in there where one of the characters says, "We're like Genghis Kahn, we come in here, rape, pillage..." Yes, that's very much there.

Why did you take a story so similar to Casualties of War, not just in the situation and the events but even in the character who tries to prevent it and, because he can't, he becomes so tormented by his conscience that he's forced to report it?

Because I feel that's me. Here we are. Our tax dollars are supporting this war, and I can't do anything to stop it. I feel helpless. I feel like McCoy. I can't stop this horrible thing from continuing and it's extremely frustrating and you feel extremely badly about it. The rest of the world thinks we're insane and it just keeps going on. We have Petraeus in front of Congress saying, "Well, we just have to stay there another 18 months," obviously to the end of the Bush administration. I wonder how that all works out. It seems to all fit very carefully, you know? The scariest thing is that an American president can prosecute a war all by himself. That's scary.