Chuck Palahnuik On "Choke"

By Cole Smithey

In adapting Chuck Palahnuik's novel of sexual addiction, con artistry, and subjugated maturity screenwriter/director/actor Clark Gregg creates a fantastical brand of satire that is engaging as it is diabolically ribald. If the film never gets around to paying off on its absurdist themes of debauchery and search for identity, it at least points in a direction of public liberation that is at direct odds with the outrageous level of surveillance Americans are subjected to. Sam Rockwell is positively devilish as medical school dropout Victor Mancini who works a day job at a Williamsburg-styled colonial theme park where the staff is made to speak only olde English to one another. At night, Victor chokes on his food in fancy restaurants in order to be Heimliched by rich patrons he then bilks in order to pay for his dementia-suffering mother Ida (well played by Angelica Huston) to stay in an expensive private care facility. "Choke" is the most assertively anti-mainstream film of the year, and to that end it succeeds as a positive form of cinematic/social rebellion.

I met Chuck Palahnuik at the 20^th Century Fox publicity offices in Midtown Manhattan where he charmed everyone in the room with his soft-spoken yet effusive demeanor.

Cole Smithey: You asked screenwriter/director Clark Gregg not to stick to the book when adapting it. That seems like an unconventional way to go.

Chuck Palahnuik: Yeah, I said, "I know the book, I’ve read the book." I always really curious to see how people interpret things. I know my version, and I’m kind of bored with my version so I want to see their version. Also, I didn’t know it at the time, but Clark’s father is a minister--so he had a body of information that allowed him to write a speech, which I think is the most important part of the movie, and is not in the book. So he was able to bring things to the movie that I had no inkling of.

CS: What was your reaction when you saw how Clark handled the sex scenes?

CP: When I first started writing, there was no way I’d write a sex scene. That just seemed impossible. That’s why in "Fight Club" all the sex happens off-screen. It’s all just a noise on the other side of the wall or the ceiling. I just couldn’t bring to write in a scene like that. So one of the challenges with "Choke" was I wanted to write sex scenes until I was really comfortable just writing them in a very mechanical way.

So I thought he (Clark Gregg) handled it just perfectly—in a very mechanical, perfunctory way—cutting right to the physical moment and then cutting away from it.

CS: "Choke" is a mix of several genres. How do you view the genre it best fits?

CP: It’s interesting because when David Fincher was making "Fight Club," he said, "It’s a romance." And it really is. Almost everything I ever write is just a romance. And that needed to be sort of pointed up at the end of "Fight Club." The film has a very different ending than the book does. Now "Choke" has a much more romantic ending, which I think is important, otherwise you lose track of the fact that it is a romance.

There is a social contract in "Fight Club" and in "Choke" where the protagonist has deceived a whole bunch of people. In "Choke" it’s all of these people who think that they’ve saved his life, and really care about him because they’ve embraced him and they’ve been his saviors. In "Fight Club" it’s all of these people who are dying of various diseases, and they thought that Edward Norton was also dying so they allowed him really strong pent-up emotions. In both books, there’s a scene where the deceiver is brought back to these communities and is unmasked and is humiliated in front of those people that have been deceived, and the social contract is completed. In both movies that social scene is missing. It’s interesting, but it is of a pattern that the social contract is absent from the third act of both movies. People didn’t miss it in "Fight Club," so I think ultimately they won’t miss it in "Choke."

CS: Can you talk about your use of support groups like the 12-step sex addict group in "Choke."

CP: I’m always looking for context in which people tell stories. In "Fight Club" it’s these support groups for dying people, and then in "Choke" it’s 12-step recovery groups. In one novel it’s artists’ colonies, in another novel it’s a diary form that submariners’ wives typically keep so that when their husband comes back from serving on a submarine they have an accounting of their spouse’s time. So I’m always looking for, number one, a non-fiction context—because you can tell a more outrageous story if you use a non-fiction form. "Blair Witch Project," or even "Fargo," which had the "Based on true events" part at the beginning, lent a gravity to an otherwise outlandish story. "War of the Worlds" told as radio broadcasts—suddenly this Martian story becomes frighteningly real because it’s told in this non-fiction context.

Number two, looking for a place where people go specifically to tell stories. My theory is that church used to be that place. Instead of being a place where you went to look good, it was a place where you could risk going every week to look your worst. You could go church and you could describe your worst behavior, your worst self, and despite your worst behavior you would be forgiven and then redeemed and then accepted back into the community through communion. So you didn’t have to carry this burden your entire life. Once a week you went someplace you went someplace where you could really look terrible and be loved despite how terrible you were.

Nowadays church doesn’t seem to really serve that function. It’s more of yet another place you go to look good. I find that people willing to risk looking bad go to support groups, 12-step groups—those have really become the new church for us. Phone sex hotlines—that is people at their worst self, and they’re seeing it and they’re confessing it. And they’re bonding and they’re uniting with other people despite their worse selves. So a non-fiction sort of form for gravity, for credibility, but also finding a storytelling situation where people present the worst aspects of themselves.

CS: Did you visit a 12-step program to help you develop the book?

CP: I went to Sexaholics three times a week, and it was fascinating. It was absolutely the most incredible…because it’s not just people telling really outrageous stories that are completely in opposition to how they present themselves. The most boring ordinary person you’d ever want to meet, suddenly opens their mouth and describes the completely outlandish secret life. But also, they’ve really become performers and so they know how to craft and present their stories to get the strongest reaction possible. It’s good for your writing as well as for your content.

CS: Were any of the scenes in the movie derived from a specific story you heard?

CP: I didn’t use anybody’s story. I used the context and the structure of the situation. People were so, so desperate to tell their story and begin to digest their experience—like turning it into a story—that after the fist few weeks I could go with a pad and pencil and take notes. People didn’t seem at all bothered by that.

CS: Did you ever have to tell any stories?

CP: Oh my God…people were so desperate. No. We were lucky if we made it half way around a room. There was a two-minute rule and nobody ever told a story in less than 20 minutes.

Vin Diesel on Vin and Babylon A.D.

By Cole Smithey

Although based on Maurice George Dantec’s sci-fi novel "Babylon Babies" "Babylon A.D." comes across as an undercooked retooling of Alfonso Cuaron’s much better 2006 film "Children of Men."

Vin Diesel plays Toorop, a mercenary living in a near-future Kazakhstan who takes an offer he can’t refuse from Russian kingpin Gorsky (played by Gerard Depardieu) to transport a young woman named Aurora to New York, along with her convent chaperone Sister Rebeka (played by Michelle Yeoh). James Bond-styled snowmobile chase sequences, marital arts displays, and gratuitous gun battles follow the trio on their 6,000 mile journey that fizzles out with an ending that hardly ties together any of the story’s vague narrative threads. Charlotte Rampling plays a High Priestess of commerce whose face is inexplicably plastered on giant digital billboards in a seemingly unfinished film by French director Mathieu Kassovitz. Even the most forgiving sci-fi fans will have a hard time making sense of "Babylon A.D."

I sat down with Vin at a mid-town Manhattan hotel to talk about "Babylon A.D." and his other movie projects.

CS: Your character Toorop has issues with trust. Do you have trust issues in your personal life?

VD: I always have issues. I’m a New Yorker. I always have issues with trust—you adopt it from being a New Yorker.

CS: What does it take for you to trust someone?

VD: The logical answer is time, experience. But really, I think trust is something that comes from the gut. I don’t think it’s anything specific. I don’t think it’s anything tangible.

CS: What made you want to play this mercenary terrorist character.

VD: In Cannes in 1995, which was the first time I’d ever been written up as an artist, "La Haine" had won and he (Matthieu Kassovitz) had seen "Strays" and felt an affinity with that film. There’s something interesting about doing a movie with the trappings of an action film helmed by a French director. That felt unique. To play a character like Toorop, that’s a cynic and not trusting—there’s a part of that in all of us--to exercise that to its fullest felt exciting.

This was less about the genre. I was lucky enough to work with Sidney Lumet. I work within the confines of Hollywood, and rarely get the opportunity to branch out, and this was one of those opportunities to try something of the European mind.

CS: What does it take for you to trust a director?

VD: That’s a tricky one. I remember 10 years ago I could go direct an independent movie. (in an exuberant voice) "I’ve been auditioning since I was seven years old. I’m tired of auditioning, in fact why should I have to go in an audition if the director’s not showing me how he sets up the lights or if a director isn’t showing me how he moves a camera along a dolly." Any film that you see is never just the director. If it’s a film that you love, it’s not so easy to say, "Oh it’s directed by this person—that means everything that person directs is going be wonderful."

It’s hard to audition a director. Filmmaking is such a collaborative art that can’t look to one person. It’s really all of us coming together for that period to try to make magic.

CS: When you go between action roles, how do you establish a new character from basically the same mold?

VD: The first thing that happens is the cleansing of the former character. I don’t think a lot of actors talk about it, but there is usually a process where you essentially purge yourself of the character played prior to the movie. Then you want to think about what the character represents, and you write down all of the elements about this character and then take the time to find some synchronicity and start breathing the character.

I grew up the son of an acting teacher but I’ve never been really good at articulating what that process is. It was always a bit more internal.

CS: What’s the status of "Hannibal the Conqueror"?

VD: David Franzoni is writing as we speak. I’m very excited about what he’s doing. He’s so zoned in, I think he’s probably doing the second and third ones simultaneously.

I was always fan of the [Ralph] Bakshi films and that medium. In fact I’m directing now an animated "Hannibal" that will serve as a prequel to the film. It’s Hannibal as a boy, so it’s the boy and the elephant. It will be very fun—great, great voices.

Icelandic Beauty Export

Anita Briem Makes a 3-D Debut
By Cole Smithey

An example of the famed Icelandic fact that its women are stunningly beautiful, Anita Briem is also a stage-trained actress, perfectly at home on a green screen set for a big Hollywood action/adventure movie. In this visually outrageous three-man showcase, Briem plays Hannah, the Icelandic adventurer who will guide American scientist Trevor Anderson (Brendan Fraser) and his flirty 13-year-old nephew Sean (Josh Hutcherson) to the destination of Jules Verne’s prototypical sci-fi novel. Hannah reminds Trevor that her $5000-dollar-an-hour fee keeps ticking even as they are attacked by giant flying prehistoric fish and chased by one very large dinosaur. Needless to say, Trevor gets every penny’s worth of value from Hannah’s levelheaded resolve and quick thinking. Briem plays the straightman heroine opposite two boyish males intent on pursuing a journey that they are direly incapable of accomplishing without Hannah’s guidance. Hannah is the adult in the equation, and Briem carries off the role with a maturity that grounds the wild spectacle of the first feature-length Digital 3-D movie. Anita Briem knows how to break out big. You get the picture.

CS: Are you worried that there might be a sudden upsurge of tourists in Iceland after the movie comes out?

AB: I try to show everybody Iceland all the time. My people are like, "Don’t tell everybody the secret. It’s so peaceful and beautiful here!" It’s incredible; I go home and drive across country, and go to my mom’s place and it’s dark with the Northern Lights, and I like to sit in some hot springs.

CS: As a native of Iceland, how did you feel it was depicted in the film?

AB: There’s a reason why Jules Verne chose the place where the glacier was, where we start to descend into the center of the earth. That area specifically has magical powers and people come to this place from all over the world. I actually think that’s true of all Iceland. I think it’s so special, apart from the water and air being so clean. It was a great joy for me to develop a strong female character in the spirit of an Icelandic woman. Icelandic women tend to be very strong and very independent, and I think that came in very handy. As Hannah, the mountain guide, I often found myself in these very dangerous situations. On one hand I have a geeky scientist and on the other a small child and they are both about to get us killed, so I have to intervene and save the day, regularly. I think that’s where the strong sense of the core Icelandic woman came in very handy.

CS: You have strong background of theatre training.

AB: I come from a theater background. I was in the National Theater of Iceland from age nine, and my parents are both musicians, so I grew up behind my dad’s drum kit on studio floors. So this, as my North American debut, was a real surprise to me and I fell in love with this genre. I started watching incredible movies like "Back to the Future," and the films of Tim Burton, and saw how magical the action adventure genre can be. But at the same time it doesn’t change for me, as an actor, the core of my character and how I structure and develop the character. You want to learn, and experience being taken aback by things. That’s the same as with every piece I do--whether it be in the Cherry Orchard or playing Jane Seymor in "Tudors" or Hannah in "Journey into the Center of the Earth." So it was a beautiful journey, pun intended, into the world of cinema, and of that genre specifically.

CS: Do you have other movies coming out?

AB: Yes, it’s been a crazy ride. I’m just about to go and film another movie, but my head space is very much in the world of cinema and living in Los Angeles. People ask me, "What is it like?" with a negative tone. But for me, I’m surrounded by the most talented and passionate people in the industry.

CS: What’s the new movie called?

AB: It’s called "The Storyteller." It’s with Wes Bentley, who is the writer to my illustrator. We create children’s books together. My character suffers from an extreme case of agoraphobia, so the family of Wes Bentley’s character starts to believe that I am a figment of his imagination. You know that there is something kind of magical.

CS: So the question is whether or not you’re really a figment of his imagination?

AB: Right.

CS: It sounds like a magical realist movie.

AB: Yes, I think that’s very well put.

CS: What was the most extraordinary thing about making "Journey"?

AB: "Journey to the Center of the Earth" was extraordinary because it was the first live action digital 3D movie in the history of cinema. You, as an audience get to be more immersed in a movie than you ever have been before. The movie is surrounding you creating extraordinary opportunities for both actors and directors. For an actor it’s incredible because you can create a relationship between the character and audience in a different, more intimate way.

CS: Any plans to do any stage?

AB: I love the theater; the theater sort of raised me. So I’m quite sure I will go back to the theater. Right now I’m sort of captured in the all-consuming, fantastical world of movies.

CS: Did you improvise any Icelandic quotes?

AB: I did. In the scene when they come knocking on my door, they told me just to just say something and the little demon inside me said "Oh what should I say?"

CS: What did you say?

AB: (Laughs) We have to maintain the mystery, we’ve only just met! But it was wonderful because I was involved in the process of this film in a peculiar way. I must have auditioned for this movie at least 25 times. This was a 4-month process. I have to check my sources on this but, I think I beat out Cameron Diaz’s record for how many times she auditioned for "The Mask," with how many times I auditioned for this movie. But that gave me the privilege of watching the script in development. So by the time I got the role and we started researching and developing and rehearsing, I had a real sense of what I wanted to do. I really wanted for her to be a strong female presence that is not your damsel in distress – quite the opposite. I’m in fact saving the day – a female character that is driving the action. I think this type of character is somewhat lacking in the family action adventure. I think it’s important for young girls to see a female presence that is in control of the action.

CS: Do you know of any of the actress that you were competing with?

AB: That’s funny because every single actress that I meet socially and randomly go, "I met for that role! I read for that role!" I don’t think I’ve met one that wasn’t involved in the project in some way or another.

CS: How was the experience working with such complicated special effects?

AB: When it comes to acting on green screen, it doesn’t really make all that much of a difference to me because how you interact with your environment or characters is always dictated by your imagination. So when you’re acting against a green screen, you have more of an opportunity to create your own world. So what was magical throughout this process was watching this movie come to life with the 3D.

CS: How was it working with Brendan Fraser?

AB: It was wonderful. He’s a sweetheart and a gentleman. He has a lot of experience in this field with action but in a lot of ways we were all learning at the same time because it really is a new visual medium altogether. So we were all kind of discovering this world together. It was wonderful.

CS: You mentioned that your character is such a strong female presence. What, or who was your inspiration for that?

AB: The Vikings, things like that. "No, don’t tell them that. It’s a family film!" (Laughs)

CS: So what you’re saying is that you’re here to conquer us.

AB: Yes (Laughs)

Kimberly Pierce Feels a Draft

The "Stop Loss" Interview
By Cole Smithey

The director of "Boys Don't Cry" (1999) studied English and Japanese lit at the University of Chicago before receiving an M.F.A. in film from Columbia, and you can see her thorough attention to detail in her films. After playing a wild goose chase over directing "Silent Star," for which Annette Bening, Hugh Jackman and Ben Kingsley had been cast, Kimberly Peirce pulled herself up by her bootstraps to make, as it turns out, one of the most insightful and poignent films about the Iraq war. Articulate, animated and intent on addressing every question with a full explanation, it's easy to see how Kimberly Pierce gets such powerful performances from her actors. She knows what she's talking about.

I sat down with Ms. Pierce at New York's Regency hotel to find out all I could about her latest film "Stop Loss," centered around the U.S. military's current backdoor-draft, responsible for forcing 81,000 soldiers back into war after multiple tours of duty. Squad leader Sgt. Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe), his best friend Sgt. Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum), and fellow soldier Tommy Burgess (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) return to their Brazos, Texas hometown after spending five blood-soaked years in Afghanistan and Iraq. Following a welcome home ceremony, where Brandon receives a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star from a U.S. Senator, he tries to help Steve and Tommy adjust to civilian life in spite of their violence riddled psyches. Brandon's own effort to reacclimate to home life is challenged when he is ordered, under the Stop-Loss policy, to return to Iraq. "With all due respect, F#*k the President," is Brandon's vehement reply to the Commanding Officer who ineffectively attempts to jail Brandon. What follows is an honest, patriotic soldier's desperate attempt to find a way out of a malicious bureaucratic booby trap.

I sat down with Ms. Pierce at New York's Regency hotel to find out all I could about how and why she made "Stop Loss."

CS: How did you plan the production and locations?

KP: I didn’t try to do anything super outrageous. We looked at shooting in Spain. We looked at shooting in Mexico, also shooting in Texas because that would’ve been much cheaper. They tried to get me to shoot at the Alamo set—which would not have worked. They always say [sarcastically], never say never until you try. And when it doesn’t work we don’t do it. But it was very fortunate that the studio spent the money, ‘cause it is an expense to go to Morocco. I wanted to shoot in an Islamist country. It was important to me always to get it as culturally accurate as possible. I learn things whenever I’m on a location. I go out and hang out with the people—I get to know kind of what the vibe is like so when I’m shooting I actually have a sense of it.

We made a choice to shoot in Marakesh because Marakesh is a city, and since we’re representing urban combat, we didn’t need a suburb, we needed a city. We also wanted it to feel very confined, so that was why we loved it when we found this community which has these buildings that have these narrow alleyways. We knew that was a great metaphor for what’s happening to the soldiers. They’re getting in deeper—the walls are closing in—they can’t get out. So that allowed us to bring the humvees in. We block off escape with the humvees, the guys come out. The stacking is very important. This is something that’s unique to this war. The soldiers form a unit together and they move in unison. The guy who’s second in command holds the first guy like a dog. He holds him by his collar. So you’ve got Channing, who plays Steve (number one), you’ve got Ryan (number two), but Ryan’s really in control. He controls the stack. "Go, go, go."

So you hear the guys. They have to hit each other with their bodies, that’s how they move. We had to make sure the walls were perfect because it allowed us a great stack. Then you end up going into to some of the houses. We had to block up most of the doors because otherwise the movie would’ve been ten hours of clearing houses, and you have to clear every open entranceway. So we clear a couple—block, block, block—we move on.

CS: Did you have any trouble obtaining access to filming in Marakesh?

KP: Well, the King is very supportive of filmmaking. They make a lot of money, and actually the people—from what I understand—have a better standard of living than most countries because of film revenues. "Black Hawk Down" was shot there. There’s a history of it. I think if we wanted to do something that was egregious they probably wouldn’t let us, but I was treading so lightly because the last thing I want to do is add one more image in the world of a violent America. So I was being very careful. I was trying to get to know the community a little bit and try to make it a little more gentle.

CS: How did you choreograph the ambush sequence?

So for the ambush, everything’s physical. What I’m doing is trying to figure out how much screen time it’s going to take from one point to another because I don’t want to have too many shots that I’m going to throw out in the editing room because I only have a certain amount of time and days to shoot. So for me it’s all about the economics of time and shooting.

I have four camera crews that I’m operating with, and that’s because it’s very expensive to blow things up. There’s a lot of clean-up time. You’ve got blood going off. You’ve got to clear the guns. You’ve got to have gun masters around to make sure that it’s safe. So I’ve got different crews handling guns, handling make-up, handling explosives. They all require resets.

Then you have to cut it into two. You have to cover each guy. So each guy gets a single. Then you’ve gotta get your doubles, then you’ve gotta get your scope. You need to know how big it is. You need to know that there’s somebody up top. You need to have shots looking down so you have a sense of foreboding. That’s where a lot of your angles come in. When an RPG (rocket propelled grenade) comes, that has to be shot totally separately. So that’s not main unit. Main unit is the actors. So, I’m working with the actors in four different camera angles to maximize. But then I have to go off this set and go do things exploding, stunt doubles exploding. And that’s very tricky because I have to make sure that everything that I shoot is going to cut in on that. And I’m watching four monitors the whole time that I’m doing this—which is an interesting skill because your brain has to look at all four, and you can’t replay it. You have 300 people waiting. So you have to learn to watch it very quickly, and just write down what worked and what didn’t work. It’s interesting learning how to direct in four spaces of your head at once.

CS: The scene when Ryan speaks truth to power and says, "Fuck the President," uses a different kind of violence. How did you develop that scene?

KP: It was a very delicate scene. It’s not a scene that I take lightly, and it’s a scene from a soldier’s point of view. I wanted to make sure that it was honest and accurate to them. What we didn’t want was a guy who suddenly became a political activist, who suddenly had an agenda, because that wouldn’t have been truthful to soldiers. So I interviewed a number of soldiers about that scene, and we were very clear in setting up the circumstances. It had to be a completely patriotic guy who signed up for what he considered all the right reasons—to protect his family, his home and his country. And he gets over there—and this is revealed in a scene in the car. He says, "It wasn’t about anything that we signed up for. Instead of being in a desert, instead of fighting the enemy that we thought we were fighting, we were in the bedrooms, the hallways, and in the kitchens. It was impossible to not kill innocent people and not have our men killed, and not have our men injured." So, what do we do, we fall back on the one thing that all soldiers can agree on; it’s about comradery; it’s just about survival.

So, that’s why you needed to see that opening battle scene. That’s why he wanted to come home. I’ve always had a sense that if it was World War II and his country needed him, this guy would go right back, but something didn’t seem right to him. He couldn’t protect his men. So he comes home and he thinks, "I’m going to put that behind me. I don’t even have to process this." What’s so interesting to me about Stop-Loss is it just maximizes all the problems that everybody’s been going through. So here’s a guy who feels he did everything right. "I’m a golden boy; I gave my country my life." And when the system does that to him, we wanted it to be a reactive moment. We wanted it to be a moment when he says something that he’s never said in his life and he never imagined saying. It comes out. It is a true expression of how he feels, but it’s not intellectualized because if we thought it was intellectualized it wouldn’t work. So he spurts it out, and that’s why you hang on him. He’s kind of not sure he said it. He doesn’t want to back down, but he’s really gotten himself into something, and he spends the rest of the journey catching up with his emotions. It was interesting. We needed it to be an irrational moment, so that’s one thing in terms of how I had to direct it.

He says, "Fuck the President," and then the commander says, "Fuck the President?" What was interesting about the commander saying "Fuck the President," in interviewing guys like this—a lot of them are in a position where they’re managers. They love the men. It kills them to see the men recycled and destroyed. We didn’t want it to be the political activist guy and an angry dumb commander. No, no, it was a sergeant who was coming to a rational and normal realization, and out of frustration saying this, and his commander, who doesn’t totally disagree with what he’s saying. That was a very delicate thing to get across. We were sort of looking at people like McCain in a way, for that commander. It was a very interesting thing that we had to get clear. You didn’t want it to turn into rhetoric or anything. It’s a very emotional scene of two men who are fundamentally agreeing that our men are being chewed up, and that’s the heartbreak, because he says, "I’ve lost more men than that." They’re both saying, losing men is killing me.

CS: Is your brother still in the war, and how has your family coped with him being in Iraq?

KP: My brother has gotten out. He would have been stop-lossed but he got out on a medical.

I come from a military family and was home when the war stories were going on, and we were playing the soldiers’ videos. My mother walked out of the room. She said, "I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to see it, and I don’t want to know the details." Because when her son was gone, my mother would call me crying, saying, "You will never know what fear is until you’ve had a child shot at in a combat zone. I often times don’t want to come home from work because I know that if I’m there—I have to be there in person for them to tell me that, God forbid, he’s dead or he’s injured."

That was profound. And she has such a distaste for the details of the combat stuff, and yet, maybe because I’m his sister, maybe because I’m younger, maybe because it’s fascinating to me—I could listen to it. That was why I knew we needed a scene where they were talking graphically about their experiences. When soldiers come back—it’s graphic; they’re in it. So I knew we needed a scene that was just as graphic as the way boys talk, but they were sort of tuned out and they were insensitive to what was going on around them. That’s why the father says, "Steve, pay attention to how you’re making the families feel." But I do feel we need those scenes more and more. We need the soldiers and the civilians. We need to be sharing these experiences. It’s all of our experiences.

They need to get it out. I’ve gone to 22 cities now with the movie, I’ve done Q&As at every single one—people stay and not only do they ask me questions and listen, they stand up and they tell their story. I’ve had vet after vet after vet in all of these screenings stand up and say, "Thank you," and share some incredibly emotional story. I’ve had Viet Nam vets come up to me and say, "Thank you, it took years for me to speak." One of them in San Jose said, "You know I lost my humanity. I’m only now getting it back slowly." They should be telling their stories, so I have this site stoplossmovie.comsoundoff. We give cameras to soldiers and their families. They make videos, we post them, and people write in about screenings all over the country. I believe deeply in the power of healing through storytelling.

CS: Did this movie come from any kind of grudge against the Bush administration?

KP: No, it came from having gone around the country. For example I went to Paris, Illinois where there was a homecoming of a thousand soldiers of the 1544^th. They’re a transportation unit that had the highest causality rate, and the highest number of combat hours. I found that odd. Why would a transportation unit have that? They’re not supposed to have that. They’re supposed to be transporting Generals. But they are commonly used to transport arms. So these kids are getting shot up. They haven’t had combat training, and that means they’re on the top of the gun turret and they’re firing machine guns to save themselves. I read amazing stories. They’re jumping out trying to save one another—clearly not what they signed up for.

So I went there to that town with my research partner Carolyn Reed, and we just videotaped the families. We went to the homecoming parade, which you could intercut with the homecoming parade in the movie. We learned about that. We talked to the military families. We talked to widows, sisters—people who had multiple generations in the military. It was near a base town. So, it became clear to me that if I was going to tell the fundamental story of this generation, most of the kids are coming from Middle America. Texas has the most base towns. I was reading story after story of kids getting killed from Texas. So I thought, let’s set it here. And then also, I really love Texas because it does convey a sort of emblematic Americana. I can have the homecoming parade there. If I had it in New York City, it wouldn’t be real. I can have the flag-waving, and it’s not mocking them; it really is what they do. I can have the fact that the father fought in Viet Nam, and the son fought; that’s typical. That isn’t typical here [New York]. Like, I was unusual among my friends that my brother was fighting.

I went to that dancehall two nights before we shot, and they were dancing Texas swing, and it was that band. It’s gun country. It’s car country. There were all of these really graphic, physical elements that I could bring to the fore—the boys fighting in the cemetery.

CS: Do you see any similarities between "Boys Don’t Cry" and "Stop-Loss"?

KP: They are both stories about masculinity. She’s trying to construct herself as a man to get love and acceptance. I think even if you’re a man you’ve always dealing with masculinity. I don’t think it just comes naturally. Men are also in a process of shaping their masculinity, and I feel like that’s a lot of what the boys in the movie are doing. There’s a lot of real deep connection among them. It’s a quest for identity. Ryan is coming to understand himself. When he says, "Fuck the President," he’s entering a new fold in his life of self-awareness.

CS: As a woman filmmaker, was there more pressure to make a great second film?

KP: There certainly is a commonality that a lot of the women directors who make it, make a first film that is very personal, very powerful, and they try to do that again. I see that among my friends Tamara Jenkins and Patty Jenkins. The quest to make something that’s emotionally moving, and on a scale that we’re trying to make it, is a struggle because you not only have to write a script that’s commercial and moving, then you’ve got to launch the whole thing.

I sold this as a green-lit script in November of 2005. That was considered really quick because I started writing it at the beginning of ’05—started researching it at the beginning of ’04. It takes a year to shoot. It takes a year to edit. It may be that we’re questing for emotionally moving material. You know I should have worked sooner. I think that that would have been great. I think that "Boys Don’t Cry" was the greatest gift of my life. I was in grad school at Columbia, fell in love with that character, and had a feature film way earlier than I ever expected, and had a Hollywood career. They offered me millions of dollars and lots of scripts. I would read them, and they didn’t have an emotional authenticity because they weren’t really being created by people who had a quest. They were ideas that people had had in the system. So, I had a hard time finding something in the system that spoke to me.

I ended up working on a screenplay that I did write—that is amazing, I think, and I got it cast with Ben Kingsley, Hugh Jackman, Evan Rachel Wood, and Annette Bening at the end of 2003, which wouldn’t have been too long. On the one-yard line, the studio ran the numbers; they said, "We would love to see the 30 million dollar version. We would like to pay for the 20 million dollar version." I lost some time there. But literally a week after, I picked up my video camera and said "You know what, screw it. I’m gonna pay for it and do it myself."

CS: Abbie Cornish is a unique actress. How did you arrive at casting her?

KP: She was my first choice. I had seen "Somersault" and I had seen "Candy." Phenomenal—and she was not available, which is a heartbreak when you know somebody’s right and you have to go cast. And you’re like ‘okay,’ and you make do. So I was interviewing all these great young actresses. They weren’t right, but I was trying to make it work, and all of sudden her agent said, "Abbie read the script. She loves it, she wants to audition, and she wants the part."

I would have hired her, but if she wants to audition, I love audition. So we flew her in and we just got to work more. We had an old-fashioned screen test in Texas. It was gorgeous. We fell in love with her.

She is really extraordinarily talented. There are some actors that are so charismatic, and whom from emotion rides over the face and over the eyes so well that you don’t have to give them a line and they can carry their own in a scene. That to me is what it’s all about. It’s amazing. Of course you can then direct them—give them action. But they’re essentially emoting every single second they’re on screen, and the other actors have to watch out because they absorb the energy of the scene.

CS: The term "Stop-Loss" is alien to most people.

KP: It's actually an economic term. Stop-Loss, to me, is so interesting because the soldiers are stop-lossed (at least 81,000), the families are stop-lossed. If you read my website, they’re all writing in saying, "My husband is stop-lossed. He’s not seen the birth of our child." "My nephew was stop-lossed. He got killed." So the families are stop-lossed, and in a way America is stop-lossed, because it means that you’re just recycling those resources that need to be utilized in a better way. Clearly, we need to figure out some solution. Only this war is stop-lossed, and only at this time, with these soldiers.

And I want to tell you one thing about Canada—why it’s really not viable right now. In Viet Nam, I think 50,000 people—that’s the conservative estimate—crossed the boarder and got citizenship. That was because you could go the boarder and get citizenship and walk right in. Now, you can only get citizenship by applying from the country that you’re from. I think we have 12,000 soldiers that are AWOL right now in America. Look up Harpers 2004—great article. So we have between 200 and 300 soldiers in Canada, but they won’t give them citizenship. They won’t give them refugee status, and they’re on the verge of deporting them or at least deciding whether they’re going to be deported.

The Scorsese/Stones Interview

Martin Scorsese Shines a Light on the Rolling Stones
The Scorsese/Stones Interview
By Cole Smithey

Martin Scorsese returns to the rock 'n' roll concert documentary genre that he helped develop in 1978 with "The Last Waltz," to capture an energized performance by The Rolling Stones at New York's Beacon Theater in the fall of 2006. Sparsely augmented with brief interview and performance clips, "Shine a Light" (the film's title was taken from the Stones' "Exile on Main Street" album) provides an incredibly intimate look at rock 'n' roll's greatest band performing a slew of timeless favorites and a few lesser known songs. Buddy Guy, Jack Black, and Christina Aguilera make memorable guest appearances on several songs, but it's Mick Jagger's famous athleticism that captures your imagination. Even in his '60s, Jagger never stops moving as he drives the band to the far reaches of sonic precision. The level of musical sophistication on display is divine, and Scorsese seals the enchanting event with a closing bit of camera virtuosity that puts it all in context.

On a cold Sunday at Manhattan's Palace Hotel, Martin Scorsese, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood, and Charlie Watts joined a throng of anxious journalists so we could pepper them with questions. Needless to say, Marty and the Stones looked marvelous, laughed a lot, and cracked wise to everyone's delight.

Q: Marty, why was it important for you to make "Shine a Light" in a small venue in your native Manhattan.

Martin Scorsese: We discussed doing it at a bigger arena and I looked into that, and actually while I was doing it, I began to realize I think I'm better suited to try to capture the group on a small stage--more for the intimacy of the group and the way they play together. You see the band work together and work each song. I found that to be interesting and more than interesting, it's just a compulsion of mine. I love to be able to see that and be able to cut from one image to the other-movement--that sort of thing, but really about the intimacy of the group and how they work together.

For me it was literally the moments when you can see the band working together. All the songs--it's like a narrative, a story, and the whole sound of the band is like a character, one character in each song. With the grace of these wonderful cinematographers, headed by Bob Richardson, and people like Bob Ellsworth and Ellen Cass and Bob Toll and Leslie, who did "Lord of the Rings," Edgar Rollins-- they were like poets at times--knowing exactly when to move that camera to pick up a member of the band. We shot this in 35mm, not video, so we had 10-minute loads, and cameras were going down all the time, running out of film, so another camera would pick up where someone left off. That's why there were so many, to be able to pick up the slack. But the key was to find the moments between the members of the band and how they work together. It's like a machine, its own entity during each song.

Q: Keith, did you find anything special about the Beacon Theater?

Keith Richards: The Beacon Theater is special. It wraps around--especially if you're going to play there for more than one night--the room sort of wraps its arms around you, and every night it's warmer. It's a great feeling room, and also, this band didn't start off in stadiums (chuckles). 

Q: I understand this is going to be available both on regular screens and also on IMAX. I was wondering how that experience would be different for the fans.

Mick Jagger: It will be very larger (laughter). The funny thing really is that Marty, after looking at all the options, decided that he wanted to make this small, intimate movie and I said, "Well, the laugh is Marty that in the end it's going to be blown up to this huge IMAX thing, so the intimate moment is shown in IMAX." But it looks good in IMAX. We've got both formats, so we're happy with that.

Q: What vitamins do you take and what's your workout like to do this.

Mick Jagger: God! (laughter) You can forget about that.

Keith Richards: (If we tell you) you'll all be on it. (laughter)

Mick Jagger: No gym, no vitamins--just do it, just get out there and yeah…you get very pressurized in these situations. The thing I always find is that when it's a movie shoot, you really have to come up to the plate, and fortunately, we had two nights. As Keith was saying, it's good to play there more than one night and I agree with him, because the first night we played it was more like a rehearsal for us in a way. Because we played lots of small theaters in the past, we hadn't done it on this tour, so this was quite different to suddenly go into this small theater. By the second night, we knew how to sort of do it.

Keith Richards: But it was a turn on.

Mick Jagger: Yeah. (laughs)

Q: Marty, with the world of the MAFIA being featured in so many of your films, can you make some comparisons to working with the Stones? (laughter)

Martin Scorsese:  Uh, well, no. I don't think I can make any direct associations to it, but the music is something that reminds me of when I went to see "Three Penny Opera" back in 1959-1960, and how the music affected me and what that play said. The lyrics were so important to me, that particular play. I found I grew up in an area that was in a sense like the "Three Penny Opera," and I think at times the Rolling Stones' music had a similar effect on me. It dealt with aspects of the life that was growing up around me that I was associated with or saw or was experiencing and trying to make sense of. So it was tougher-it had an edge, beautiful and honest and brutal at times and powerful, and it's always stayed with me and become a well of inspiration to this day. As Mick said in Berlin. He said, "I want you to know that "Shine a Light" is the only film (of mine) that "Gimme Shelter" is not played in. (laughter) And when I use "Gimme Shelter" in a film, which I think is just as apropos of the world we're living in today, I don't remember that I used it before. I say, "Well, let's do that" and they say, "Well, Marty you did it before." And I go, "Well, it's alright." I keep forgetting, but it's something that the music has been very important to me over these years.

Q. Mick, which of Marty's films is your favorite?

Mick Jagger: "Kundun's" one of my favorites. (Scorsese laughs)
That's not a joke. (laughter) (to Martin) Did you do that one?

Martin Scorsese: I did do it, yes (laughter)

Mick Jagger: I love all of them. It's hard to choose your favorite. I love nearly all of Marty's movies and I can't wait for the next one.

Q: In your latest film "The Departed", "Gimme Shelter" has been in other films but you used "Let It Loose" which is a little bit more obscure song, one of my favorites from "Exile on Main Street." What made you pick that and for your future films will you pick more obscure songs?

Martin Scorsese: Well, for me, I think it's from "Exile" isn't it? "Exile on Main Street" is an album I like a lot, and that again is sort of in my DNA so to speak. It just came the way Jack Nicholson sat down next to Leonardo DiCaprio and said, "Do you know who I am?" The tone of that and the mood I found… I heard that sound from that song, and I played it against it. I tried a couple of other things afterwards, because invariably, you say "That's the first one; It works but it can't be that easy. Working on the first try can't be that way." So we tried some other songs, but we went back to "Let It Loose," and placed it just at the right moment in between the dialogue for the highlights of the song. It had the tone and the mood and the edge that the scene had- and what the characters were like really.

Q: Does Mick always pick the set list for you guys?

Keith Richards: Mick always comes up with the set list because he's got to sing them. Unless I say suddenly, "Mick, you've got ten songs in the same key" I don't interfere because the man's got to sing them.

Q: Who chose the documentary clips?

Martin Scorsese: Who chose the clips? Dave Tedeschi's the editor of the film, and we worked together almost 10 months. The music came together rather quickly in the cutting. That was very enjoyable. The hardest part was putting together the clips. I think Dave had over 400 hours of archival footage, and then he chose about 40 hours for me to see. And then we worked from that 40 hours and it was a matter of balancing--saying something but not saying too much and then saying nothing with it. That was the key, and balancing it so it wouldn't unbalance the music in the piece. To do a film of all archival footage I think would be a four-or five-hour documentary.

Mick Jagger: There were some moments when I thought the archival footage was going too long and I felt we were going off into another movie and not at a concert. Because it was really kind of riveting sometimes, those old movies, but then if it goes on too long you want to come back to the concert stage. Sometimes David left them a little bit on the long side, so in the end we ended up with what we had, which was good.
Q: Can you talk about your relationship with Buddy Guy?

Mick Jagger: We've done quite a few shows with Buddy Guy in the past. I think we've known him off and on for quite a long time. He's one of those continually wonderful blues performers.

Keith Richards: We met him through Muddy Waters, he goes back a long way.
Mick Jagger: I think the thing that Martin captured, the duet thing that we did with him, was really one of the high points of the movie for me.

Keith Richards: I didn't give him my guitar for nothing, man.

Mick Jagger: And I think all the guests, in slightly different ways, add to the movie. I like all the duets very much, they really all work. And they don't always work--those duets.

Q: I noticed Al Hazleton in a few of the shots. How impacted were you my earlier Stones films?

Martin Scorsese: Al sort of referenced the line of continuity with a number of wonderful films he made with the Rolling Stones. We went back to "Gimme Shelter" and Hal Ashby's "Let's Spend the Night Together" and the Godard.

Keith Richards: Don't forget "Cocksucker Blues."

Martin Scorsese: And "Cocksucker Blues." But in the Godard film you actually see the song "Sympathy for the Devil" come together in the recording studio, which is fascinating. This is a direct reference to the past films, yeah.