Capturing chaos

>> Director Michael Winterbottom on the story
of kidnapped journalist Daniel Pearl and
his widow Mariane in A Mighty Heart

by MARK SLUTSKY

The murder of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl, kidnapped and beheaded in 2002 while investigating would-be “shoe bomber” Richard Reid in Pakistan, still seems so fresh in the mind that to see the events surrounding his death play out onscreen, dramatized by actors, is startling. Especially when one of the actors is Angelina Jolie, who dons a frizzy wig to play Pearl’s widow Mariane in A Mighty Heart, a new film from Brit director Michael Winterbottom.

It was actually Plan B Entertainment, Jolie squeeze Brad Pitt’s production company, that approached Winterbottom with the property, presumably interested in his almost doc-like approach to films like Road to Guantanamo and Into the World. “Brad was the person who persuaded Mariane to give him the film rights in the first place, so it was an act of trust on their part to start with,” Winterbottom says, over the phone from Toronto. “What they said was that they wanted us to make the film in the way we normally worked. Without saying, ‘Can you make your style a bit more American, or a bit more like a studio film.’”

“Obviously, from Angelina’s point of view, I’m sure it seemed a little eccentric when we started,” he continues. “And I was slightly nervous that she would get a little bored, because she’s in almost every scene, and it could get quite tiring. But she was great—from the very beginning, she was really enthusiastic, very relaxed, made everyone feel comfortable and was a real example to all the other actors.”

A personal point of view

The details of the case are well-known, but the story Winterbottom tells, shot on location where possible in Pakistan and in India, is a less familiar one, focusing on the more personal elements of the story, which you may not be familiar with unless you’ve read Mariane Pearl’s book of the same name. “It seemed to me that the best thing to do was what the book does,” Winterbottom says. “To really stick to Mariane’s point of view, to tell Mariane’s story. The movie is obviously about Danny (played by Dan Futterman) and what happened to him, but it’s even more about Mariane and her response to that—really, what happens to Mariane from the day that he’s kidnapped, onwards.”

Of course, her cooperation was essential—but hands-off. “It never felt like she was going to be the kind of person to say, ‘You can’t do that, you must do this,’” he says. “She’d written her book, she helped us with information, but it was very much on the basis of ‘This is your film.’ She was very generous about giving us the space. It was up to us to decide what to do.”

The film’s central location is the Karachi home of Indian journalist and Pearl family friend Asra Nomani (played in the film by Archie Panjabi). The house becomes the centre of the investigation, led by a Pakistani intelligence agent known only as “Captain” (Irfan Khan) coordinating with the FBI and two other Wall Street Journal staffers. Shooting in a loose style, with mobile cameras and no traditional set-ups, Winterbottom captures the intensity and chaos of the situation.

“In the book, and in real life, what happened was you had this group of people from all different backgrounds,” Winterbottom says. “They didn’t know each other to start with, and gradually they became a kind of team, a family, and by the end of the story, they become very close. I thought the simplest way of getting that atmosphere would be to sort of echo the shape of the story in the filming. So we started at the beginning of the story, we shot for about five weeks—the same length of time the story takes place—and by the end of the filming, we were doing the scenes like the dinner party at the end, where Mariane says, ‘You mustn’t feel bad, you must be strong,’ and the ‘goodbye’ scene.

“And at that point, it felt like everyone had gotten to know each other: people from Pakistan who had never acted before, big stars from America, Indian stars, we had a whole mish-mash of people, but everyone came together and felt like part of the same team.”

A Mighty Heart opens this Friday, June 22

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