Writer of Hurt Locker & Zero Dark Thirty on Bringing Realism to Movies

It's such a good movie. Thank you. It's so good because it's so like you can see how he would be like that. You could see how he would be drawn to go back there. You could see how the pull of and the chaos of it all. And then there's a scene where he's I believe he's in a supermarket and it's just fucking boring. Life is just the mundane normal life and he just wants to go back to war. It's and I'm like I buy it all in. You know it's like it's very rare that you know you see him. There's like no suspension of disbelief. You buy him. You're watching that film. You're like whoa. Like I could see. Well that was a big part of what we were trying to do was to was to. So I had been in I had been in Baghdad as a reporter in 2004 I guess and I had seen some of what what's depicted in the in the film. So I had witnessed the bomb squad going out and defusing bombs and then and I wrote an article about it and then the idea came along for a screenplay. I had the idea to write a screenplay. I put it that way and my whole thing is over the course of a year I didn't know how to write a screenplay but my whole thing is I was learning how to do it and doing rewrites was to try to replicate the experience that I had that I felt when I was there. OK so to do that there was a lot of craft and whatnot involved in how to in creating that that I had to learn. But it also meant breaking a lot of rules of narrative and storytelling that you normally would do to make a movie effective but that in this case may would have made it less authentic to the experience like one for example is that most war movies are organized around a mission. It's like in the beginning in the movie you're told hey this is what we got to do and then the rest of the movie plays out like Saving Private Ryan or what have you. When I was in Baghdad one of the things I was struck by was the this ceaseless like hamster wheel repetition of the war that it wasn't organized around a single mission it was this futile attempt to try to find all these bombs that had been dispersed throughout the country by the counterinsurgency. So I couldn't organize around a mission I had at least in my mind to keep it authentic. I had to kind of make the story similar enough to the reality which was like every day a new mission like a kind of you know episodic structure they call it. So there are all these decisions along the way that get made to create that feeling that you have where you go oh I can suspend I can suspend my disbelief because this feels this feels real. And then there's the point at which like you do all this research I did all that research of actually going there hang out with these guys talking to them witnessing what they were doing trying to get deep inside of it learning about IEDs and how they work and really getting inside their mentality hanging out with them. And then there's another point at which you kind of put yourself into the piece too. And it's funny that you mentioned the scene at the end and it's been really instructive to me because when I was doing screenings for the Herlacher a lot of times at the end of the screening like a vet would come up and that scene in the grocery store where Sergeant James that's the character name was like kind of first time back from the war and he's he's like overwhelmed by the commercialism of the supermarket and all the choices of cereal and it's not just that it's boring it's that it's like so meaningless compared to what he'd just been doing and he can't he can't function and you've seen this guy operate on such a high level for the past whatever it is hour and a half. Yeah there's a scene right there. He can't choose you know all this like consumer shit. It was such a good representation of what these guys have to go through but my. And Renner is so good there too. He's amazing but that that actual thing had happened to me coming back. I felt this sense of dislocation and I was only there for like a couple of weeks but I felt this sense of like how surreal. Grow task like certain parts of our wealth are after you're in after you see this poverty and you see the hardship of the war so that was like my thing that wasn't like a research thing and it's just interesting it was like totally from my heart and I remember putting it in and thinking this is one of the rare things in the movie that like I didn't get from reporting and it actually turned out to be one of the things that translated the most to other people and it kind of taught me about like well sometimes if you just dig deep enough probably there's a chance anyway that like your experiences or my experiences if you're really being honest about them and this goes back to where we started this conversation will translate to other people. Even if you don't even if you think they're super hyper fucking specific to you. Yeah it does that make sense. Yes it might be hyper so that's what I'm so relatable. It's relatable because it is in retrospect at the time I was like this is just a weird thing that happened to me. No but you nailed it because you because in the context of the movie you know you see that this guy is mean every time he's defusing a bomb this could be it and he's over there in this this chaos ridden war zone and then he comes back and he's wandering through a supermarket aisle it was perfect it was the perfect juxtaposition and it really does you you you do relate to because I think all of us are aware that you kind of get accustomed to whatever you're around you know you get accustomed to a chaotic home life or a peaceful home life you get a very busy workplace where things people yell at each other and everything's constantly moving fast or boring droning cubicle life like people understand that there's like certain ways of living and existing that you can get accustomed to and they kind of make sense when you've adjusted and adapted to them but then to have such a clear difference between being in a war zone and being in a supermarket it was it was perfect. Well thanks I'll take that. Yeah no it was really good man it's like what what does it feel like to have the responsibility of trying to relay one of the most complex aspects of human life which is war. It's funny when you said perfect I just flashed on not to not answer your question but I remember there was some reviewer at the time that called it a near perfect movie. And I remember calling him up and being like near perfect. Like is that near really necessary because I want to put it on the I wanted to put on the DVD anyway we did without the other. I mean you know but it's hard for someone to say something's absolutely perfect. No of course it's it's stupid. When you said perfect what the fuck bro near perfect what's near. The more do you want. No I do feel the sense of responsibility. I mean I think that I think we're all responsible. I think whether you're doing a topic like that where I tend to do real life stuff although the this most recent thing is fictional. I think that anybody in the media has a huge sense of responsibility that comes with the territory whether they feel it or not or take it on. I don't know. I think it would be nice if we lived in a world where people felt more responsible because I think a lot of what is put out there is very irresponsible. And I'm not even talking about like with true stories of like history where you're distorting history that's obviously irresponsible but there's so much of our cultural production. The corporate production that is in my view irresponsible. I take the responsibility seriously just because I know in that case there are there are people. There were people that were still down range and in harm's way. So there were all kinds of things that I did. I was careful to not depict because I didn't want to put anybody like that's the most basic level of responsibility right. Nobody should get hurt because you burn some classified thing. So like in terms of like tactics that are you tactics or like there was at the time in the war there was there was a. There was this like jamming system that was that was used to help prevent like remote detonation of these IEDs electronic jamming systems and I didn't depict that at all. And then after the movie came out a bunch of army guys were like that wasn't realistic. I'm like yeah I mean it is super realistic but yes I left some things out because yeah that makes sense. People called me and they're like dude you can't put that in that right. That would be bad. Yeah. So there's that level of responsibility but then there's another responsibility to to more like mystical things like truth and history. Which I also feel pretty acutely. What when you talk about irresponsible depictions like what what do you mean by that. I mean I think that like I think that media is really important. Like to our culture to our to our civilization and. One way to think about it is like. There's more responsibility now around. Let's say portraying diversity. We've we've gotten a lot better at. At least trying to make movies and television shows that are more reflective of like what the country really looks like. But there's other areas where I don't see that same level of responsibility one is like the obvious one that that the right talks about all the time is like depiction of guns and violence where. There's just so much. And I mean I have violence in the show. I'm not I'm not like saying like and I and I'm not like anti firearm or anything but but but there's so much irresponsible kind of. Taking heavy shit that has real consequences and aestheticizing it is irresponsible to me. It's fucked and. And and there's that's a kind of abuse of I think of like the responsibility that that that comes with the power of telling stories when you're telling a story like in a way it's it's a kind of like remote teaching you're kind of putting something out in the world and saying like this is how it is. So that's that's another one is like plot people abuse plot all the time which which kind of bugs me because. If I'm telling you a story and I and the plot is so radically disconnected from how things really work I'm not talking about science fiction but even within science fiction if I posit to you like here's here are the set of rules of this story and then I break them. I think that's really responsible because it's fucking with people's heads it's making them dumber in a certain way that I mean it would take me a while to explain but these are the kinds of things that I think about sometimes. No it makes sense like you're trying to do a film that's impactful but it's also you it's it's easy to follow because you understand that this is how people behave and this is how it really go down. Here's an example like if I made a movie about Iraq where you ended up feeling. You ended up feeling. Like really good about the war. Like a feel good movie about the war. Happens all the time. Yeah, you know I think that's irresponsible not that there are like amazing stories of heroism and not that there aren't moments about that war to feel good about but the overall gist of it is it like was. Catastrophe how is it. Managing that when you're dealing with studios and executives and all these different people and you know like they is it difficult to get people on board with what you're trying to to do. You're really trying to make it authentic and I don't really I typically haven't really messed with any of that stuff like we made those movies Catherine Bingo and I made those movies like independently. Oh that's nice. So we had. Well that makes it like very cowboy issue. I mean we had financing from from a whole bunch of different places like we pre sold the foreign rights and this is getting inside baseball but we never had to deal with like. A fox or a universal or a Sony and even when we made zero dark thirty. That was financed by one person Megan Allison who just wrote a check Jesus what a gangster. Yeah. I love Megan shout out to Megan. Yeah that's a crazy move how much of that movie cost. It depends how you if it depends if you include the production budget I think was around 40 million dollars and then promotion I think she put up another 20 something. Yeah it's pretty big. It worked. I know I lost somebody I lost a lot of her money on Detroit so. Oh did you but she made a lot on zero thirty.