View from the front

>>Brian De Palma works to right the wrongs
of military censorship with his scathing
and bruising new movie Redacted

by MATTHEW HAYS

Brian De Palma is scaring me. Not with one of his movies, but in person. It’s September 11 at the Toronto International Film Festival, and the veteran filmmaker has just learned that the producers of his latest, the low-budget Redacted, are bowing to pressure and accepting the advice of their lawyers.

The result? The final montage of the film—which features a series of photographs of actual Iraqi corpses, dead as a result of the current war—has been itself Redacted, with faces blacked out.

It’s a brutal irony, one not lost on De Palma, who wants those faces in the final cut of the movie. “This totally annoys me, that the lawyers are doing this,” he tells me, after he finishes screaming into his cell phone. “They’ve told me the faces must not be identified. I feel like their souls and expressions have been Redacted. If you see their faces, then you’ll be as upset as I am. That’s one of the main points of the movie.”

Though I dare not suggest it to De Palma, his Redacted remains a remarkably powerful film, even with faces obscured. Based on the true incident of a group of American soldiers who raped a teenage Iraqi girl and then murdered her entire family to cover their tracks, the film was shot on a shoestring budget, digitally, faux-doc style. Using unknown actors, De Palma uses the rape of the girl—in a scene that is unblinking and typical of the sensational director—as a central metaphor for the Iraq War specifically and America’s demented foreign policy generally.

It’s the latest turn in De Palma’s surreal career, one that includes the seminal horror movies Sisters (1973) and Carrie (1976), the Hitchcock-inspired hommages Obsession (1976) and Dressed to Kill (1980), and the flat-out duds Snake Eyes (1998) and Mission to Mars (2000). We spoke about the film in a posh hotel room in the midst of the festival.

Mirror: It’s funny about the controversy surrounding the faces being obscured, because you open the film with Redacted words, and then it ends with Redacted faces. I actually thought that you had intentionally Redacted their faces.

Brian De Palma: It’s extremely effective in a way that I never predicted. But it’s not something I planned. (Laughs) I wanted people to see the effects of this war.

M: That’s one of the most effective moments in Fahrenheit 9/11, when the Iraqi man picks up the dead baby and shakes it at the camera.

BDP: Yes, exactly.

M: It’s odd to speak with you on the anniversary of 9/11. I remember that day, because I was here at the festival and there were a bunch of us in a hotel lobby watching the big-screen TVs they’d arranged so we could watch the news. You were among the crowd in that lobby. What was your immediate reaction?

BDP: The immediate reaction was going after Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan made sense. That was done quite surgically, and that was fine. But the invasion of Iraq made no sense whatsoever. The build-up to the war was ludicrous. Frank Rich has written about this very well. As a filmmaker, I’m fully aware of how you can manipulate images and tell people anything you want. Television can be used as a selling tool for any product or position or ideology you want. And I can see the puppet masters pulling the strings. The irony of this war is that we don’t see any of the images, despite the fact that everyone’s got a camera, and people can upload stuff online all the time. It was harsh images that galvanized the American public to get out of Vietnam. The architects of this war learned from Vietnam.

MINDFUL OF MANIPULATION: De Palma

Born from the blogs

M: You chose to do a faux documentary with this film.

BDP: It evolved because when I researched this incident, I got all this stuff from the Internet that was unique, stuff I’d never seen before. I got a lot of soldiers’ blogs. You don’t expect a soldier is going to give you anything beyond talking points for the military. But in many of their postings, you see things that are akin to what you see in Redacted. You get their real feelings about where they are, the people around them and the lives they’re leading. I use a photo montage at the end of the film, and there are lots of those on the Web. That’s where I got that idea. The girl ranting about what they should do to the killers—that’s taken from a blog. A lot of what I got came from the Internet, and that’s why it’s fitting that it was shot digitally too. Obviously, you can see beheadings on the Internet too. That informed a lot of the decision to do things as I did. I also wanted to indicate that I was manipulating things too, that you’re aware that when you’re watching something, it’s all manipulated to present a certain point of view.

M: The lack of questions prior to the war and for its first year or two were disturbing.

BDP: I never believed it, like I never believed Vietnam. From the outset, it never made sense to me. You get the professors, the diplomats, the generals—it was obvious they were all reading from the same script. It’s not even subtle any more! What many were saying were the Bush talking points. They kept repeating over and over that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. They kept repeating it. And that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

M: You have made some extremely memorable horror movies. It seems you’ve found the greatest horror in the reality of war.

BDP: Making horror and suspense movies, you learn a lot of visual vocabulary. You learn how to make horrific moments. God knows, I’ve been making movies like that for quite a while.

WMDs and wildcards

M: Why did you choose this real incident through which to illuminate the Iraq War?

BDP: The same reason I wanted to make Casualties of War, and that took me 20 years to make, is because it’s a metaphor for this kind of war. First, you send young guys to war, based on ginned-up reasons. In Vietnam, it was the domino effect, that if one country went communist, all the other adjacent countries would fall. Sorry, I don’t buy it. This war, it was WMDs. This is a country, we destroyed their military, we’ve been starving them with sanctions, they have no air force and suddenly Saddam has got a nuclear bomb? What was he going to do, attach it to a spear and throw it at the U.S.? Ludicrous! The fact that anybody bought if for even 10 seconds seems crazy to me. What’s scary is that they can actually convince people of these things. None of the Europeans or Canadians bought it for a second. That’s the power of the American media, and it is indeed powerful. A lot of people still think that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. They just keep repeating the same lie over and over again.

M: Jon Stewart joked about social-issue movies at the Oscars, essentially saying that they don’t have much effect in actually changing things. What do you hope people will walk away with from Redacted?

BDP: The right-wing bloggers are going to accuse us of attacking the troops, and making them into monsters, and why did we choose this particular incident, and so on. But I think it’s a very good metaphor for this invasion and occupation. There’s a real debate that goes on among these soldiers. There’s always the wild card, there’s always someone who takes things beyond where it’s going. In some of the most famous crimes that have ever been committed, including the ones in In Cold Blood, that’s what happens. One person, a wild card, takes things way too far. It’s not anti-army, it’s looking at what happens when you put people in this situation. These are the kind of things that happen.”

Redacted opens Next
Friday, Nov. 23

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