Archives

Q&A with James Mangold and Jenno Topping

Posted on by

Can you talk about what it was like to craft these characters?
James Mangold: I’m a big believer in hanging out. I am not a big believer in rehearsing. I do sometimes rehearse things, but with actors of this caliber, I find that the most important thing is that we are on the same page. When I teach film classes, somethings I am always shocked about is hearing the students ask, “why does my acting suck?” I’m like, “well, did you talk to them?” I don’t mean did you discuss the scene, I mean did you treat the actors like they’re plumbers, who you only talk when the drain is broken and then otherwise you stay away? Invariably the answer is always, “no, I didn’t talk to them.” It is very easy for film students to get cliquey with their own kind and not interact with actors. I love the geekdom, but I also love acting and actors, so what I do is I try to hang out and try to understand what they are thinking. Everyone has a completely different process, and I try to address it. This is the second movie I’ve made with Christian. He will write these beautiful stream of consciousness text that I will get at 3AM. It will be about the character or something he’s read or what he’s feeling, and it’s never it must be this. It’s more this kind of poetry of an actor thinking out loud in the middle of the night, typing some thoughts away. Because I’m not stupid, I read it and observe things that are really powerful and try and engage a dialogue with him about it. But sometimes it’s nothing more than me answering the text and then we don’t speak about it. Matt is very direct, very down to earth. I’ve known him since the mid ’90’s and the two know each other as well. Although they haven’t made a movie together for a long time, they share an agent and a world of mutual friends. I think that there was an ease that was very important. It is very important to me in every way in making a movie that everyone can do their best and be their best. Also that there is no toxic energy on set. I’ll be very quick to stomp on that very hard. There is nothing more damaging to creativity than people being frightened to experiment, offer something, or to play. Even on a large film, there has to be freedom to experiment, because there are moments that are not written, they just happen. When Christian sings H-A-P-P-Y, that just occurred to him on the day. We cleared that song from the set, because it just occurred to him. We fell a little bit behind that day, but stuff happens and I just want everyone to be free.
Jenno Topping: I’ve never worked with a director before who reads himself or herself with the actors in auditions. That was a very interesting process even before we got to the starting gate. The extent to which he lived with the scenes and the actors, regardless of whether they were cast or not, and kind of hearing what works and what’s cool was astonishing. The other thing I would say is that it’s incredible to have actors feel really safe and know that someone is really going to protect them, their performance, and the movie. And also be kind of hard on them in the sense that James was going for greatness. It allowed James to be open to the actors, because he was being so clear about the movie he was making and clear about the basic architecture and it allowed for enormous experimentation and being open in a way that’s incredibly neutral.

the movie looks like it is a race movie, but it’s actually a friendship movie.

Was there any collaboration with Ford in terms of clearance for script and production?
JT: We did not need anyone’s rights per se. Ford did see the script and see the movie and loved it, which is saying something since they are not always the heroes of the movie. So it wasn’t like a collaboration or a partnership. Christian did go up and spend some time with Ken’s son Peter. There was a lot of talk, but no formal partnership.

There is a version of this film where the race is the end of the film and then you get a card afterwards that gives us the trivia of Ken’s death. You guys chose to give us a couple of scenes after to really sunset the characters and their relationships. Could you talk about the decision to tell the story that way?
JM: That was an early decision that I made coming on. There were scripts that tried to end on the race, although it is not really a victory. I don’t think you could have ended that well with them walking off because the victory was sort of a tie that came out of Miles’s loss. I wouldn’t know what I’m saying with the end of the movie. It is really easy for me to make movies simple for myself. I think movies are essentially simple, and this is a movie about a friendship. So it isn’t a movie about a race. To me the fading out at the end of the race is a kind of lie that you could get away with, because the movie looks like it is a race movie, but it’s actually a friendship movie. The questions about the friendship are not completely resolved to me at the end of the race, and how could I even put up a card after the race fades out that says he died six weeks later? People would throw tomatoes at the screen! To me, we worked hard at the opening of the film to show Matt as a lonely figure with his heart disease and trying to find his way, and then meeting his best friend and recruiting him into this great purpose and they complete this task together. Though they were compromised, each of them knew that they had succeeded, and then one of them passes and leaves the other to go on, but in a way was forever changed because of this friendship. Shelby, who spoke with our screenwriters, also gave is input during the writing. Some people say he never let go of what happened at this race and his own regret from participating in asking Ken to slow down, since no one knew this would be the last time he raced professionally. It seems to me where you land a movie isn’t about making an audience happy or sad– I try to find a grace note that is thematically appropriate, that makes you think. I don’t think it’s my job to cheer you up or depress you. I think it’s my job to make you feel something and walk away with complex feelings at the end of the film… not to hand you either a lollipop or a turd. The movies to me that have resonance are like To Kill a Mockingbird: is it a happy movie or a sad movie? I don’t know but I never forget it. I could name a dozen where I don’t know if they are happy or sad. I also don’t do the bad guy good guy talk. I think all of that is turning all of our movies into comic book movies or worse. There are a lot of people who do bad things or make mistakes that are not evil and there are a lot of good people. The second you start thinking about your movie in happy endings with good people and bad people, you get very dopy movies in my opinion. For me I wanted to have the courage to take you past the race. I wanted to make clear to you that the movie was not about the race for me, and therefore, could not end just at the finish line, because it really wasn’t about the race, it was about something more.

Could you talk about the process of finding and using so many period piece cars in this film?
JM: From the beginning I had to figure out how to get the numbers to a certain place, and also to  fulfill what we wanted to do with the film, not have it feel like one of those computer assisted films where everything was done at a workstation. So the goal was to put real cars on the road, but there are a million ways it can fare out. It was hell. It was very hard on the crew because they broke down. They did put us in a really good position of shooting something real. You are reacting and adjusting to the way the hair is moving, the way the light is hitting the body, the way the dirt looks when the tires kick it up. The great danger in the pre visualization of movies is that the actual primal moment where a director and their crew interact in the moment on set gets lost and becomes a sort of fulfillment of a plan that was made in an air conditioned office. You feel those movies. I feel them and I feel numb when I watch them. I would just as soon watch the pre-viz because I feel like the expensive actors acting out what was already made in a cartoon for the camera is sort of unfulfilling for me. So putting real cars on the road is impossible when you are talking about vintage cars that are worth 30 million dollars a piece. We had to put mockup cars on the road. No one who actually owns one of these cars will let us put it out on the road, let alone drive it. So there were a huge amount of challenges that we had to work out. We basically built a garage out in the San Fernando Valley. It had its own body shop wing to repair and repaint. One of the ways we got by with less cars was that as soon as a car was retired from a sequence, it was sent to the body shop and reborn as a new car. Also the cars themselves needed continuous maintenance because of the pounding we were giving them, which was similar to what would actually happen in a race.
JT: The reality of putting the guys in the cars when the cars themselves were really small and the guys are pretty big. For example, the scene with Tracy, Matt, Ford, and Shelby had them all in that tiny car, which they had not been in at those speeds before. They could not get out, so Jim talked to them through a mic. The reality of what they were going through and the kind of miracle of Tracy’s performance in that scene was that it happened in the moment. I think Matt was as startled and stunned as the rest of us to watch it unfold in that way. 

Q&A with Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, and Al Pacino

Posted on by

This film has a different editorial pace and perspective than you usually portray in your films. Would you be able to talk about your approach with these older men in the film?
Martin Scorsese: This is not a film we could have created or made as effectively if we had tried to make it ten years ago. It’s a situation where, like Robert’s character says at the end of the film, you don’t know what time is until you get there. Not until the kids are running around you and worried about you do you have that vantage point. From that perspective, when I read Charles Brandt’s book and Steven Zaillian designed the script did it come together. We went back to the audio recordings of Frank Sheeran. With all those elements, we deduced it was all about memory. Memory is often in flashes, but I was always fascinated at why a slower paced picture is effective. I always remembered Val Lewton films and not seeing everything being the reason it is effective. Or learning again a language of movie making or movie narrative through a slower paced Antonioni which for different reasons, people did not find that accessible in their lifestyle but found it accessible through the film. It is about learning patience with the work. It’s patience and timing. Yes, over the years we have had a lot of excitement and enthusiasm and bursting energy, as part of my makeup; I can’t help that. And the humor is very important, but ultimately over the years, I could not connect, and I think it is bourgeoisie lifestyle, over in Japan, France and here too. And at a certain point I was not interested because there were worse things going on in the world. The thing about it, ultimately, the Ozu pictures when you start to look at them, something happened. Over the period of 20 years ago and earlier is when I began to appreciate the use of inserts and the objects that are photographed. I do still have to put myself in a frame of mind to watch one of those films. I have been in Taiwan and other places, where I see something on Television and I say that looks like Ozu. He’s peeling an apple for 20 minutes and it’s really good. Why am I looking at that? There is a series of small essays by a Japanese author from I think the 17th century called “Essays in Idleness” which has this tone of the film. It deals with life and it deals with the passage of time and how dying is a part of living. Ultimately, it’s like reading Nabokov’s autobiography, “Speak, Memory.” He talks in his autobiography about a memory of light coming through a window when he was a small child. These sorts of things are the memories that stay with us, for whatever reason!

I could have shot for another six months. It was just great.

How did you live inside Jimmy Hoffa and figure out who he was through your very internalized performance? Who was Jimmy Hoffa to you?
Al Pacino: First of all, I had the help of these two great artists, so that was comforting. It’s just that age is part of this, as well as the things you learn and find out. I’ve worked with Bob before, but I only appreciated Marty and what he has done, but have never worked with him. This was a wonderful opportunity, so that helped a lot. Going into the question, to me I have to understand him on my own actor’s terms and try to interpret him. I also had to find him within myself. That is the long complicated story of the actor and the actors work throughout the years. It is to try and find different ways to try to get to something and make it alive and relevant to oneself. There is so much data on Jimmy Hoffa. They were in the process of filming for weeks before I hopped on the project, so it was almost necessary for me to get the research, although actors always use research. There is a certain gestation time where the information needs to be absorbed, and I had so much help here. At the same time, there was all this data, and I watched it, took on some of it in, tried to understand some of it, and find what I would say to him, which would probably be different from someone who knew him very well. It had something to do with his love of something, and his need to somehow be behind something, which was the union and the connection to it. It was that sense of righteousness in him that is understandable when you think of his background and the poverty he came from and the fighting for the rights of the people who did not have wealth. He was sent away to prison and what did he do? He formed groups and tried to help people. When he saw what they were living through, he knew. That aspect of him I related to. The machinations of his life, I don’t know much about them, but he had to take up whatever kept him going. That’s all there was to it. There was a reality and it was real, and although he had the power and believed in it, he was not doing it for the power. He connected with the people he felt connected to in some way. They came from the same kind of background, but he was not mob person.

Mr. De Niro, you are the one who found this book. Is the film as you visualized it? You also do so little and say so much in the performance; can you speak to that?
Robert De Niro: Marty and I were doing another movie. It was kind of like a popular hitman type of thing, but it was not the same thing. Then Marty started showing me the movies of Jean Gabin and Jacques Becker. So then I was saying I had to read this book I had been aware of for a couple of years. I first became aware of it with Eric Roth about two years earlier and he said you have to read this book while we were editing The Good Shepherd. So I said let me read it for research. Then I said to Marty you have to read this. When he read it, he said this is more of what we should be doing. 
MS: Also, me and Bob had been trying to make a picture together since 1995. So that was 24 years we had not worked together. And we kept trying to meet up but we kept missing each other. He would be involved and I would be involved. It ultimately came down to what Bob felt when he read the book and what you thought of the character Frank and the situation of his life. He had a strong connection when he presented the idea to me. I immediately felt we could tap in and go with it.
RD: I felt it also had a greatness and grandness to it. It had these historical characters that had died in ways that we still haven’t actually found out how they died. But there was enough in the character of Frank Sheeran. Personally, I believe what  Frank said. There are others who might not, but I do it as Marty says. This is the way we tell it. It’s like Jake LaMotta. At the end of the day, we interpret it how we felt. 

In this film, there are so many scenes where the characters are not saying what they actually mean. They don’t say “go kill this guy. I know he’s your friend, but oh well.” Can you talk about how you play those scenes?
RD: With Marty, it’s great because we were all so lucky to have the time to do it in the way we wanted to do it. I could have shot for another six months. It was just great. Marty would allow us to try anything, and if he thought it was not right or it was going off track, he would say direct it this way. It was this terrific experience allowing you to explore those subtle things, because you don’t have to do very much to convey something. Nobody understands that better than Marty. That is what it’s about.

Q&A with James Gray

Posted on by

Your film is set in the near future, which makes sense given that there are currently plans being formed to transport humans to Mars. What did you learn in your research about such efforts?
James Gray: I’m a little skeptical that they’d make it, but that is their dream. Mars can be either 80 or 160 million miles away from Earth, depending on the orbits of the two planets. Four people would have to be in a capsule that’s half the size of this room for about two years. They were looking for people who were on the spectrum. Schizoid personality disorder. People who were actually happy not to talk to others. To me that’s very strange. These people were going to be the first human beings on another planet, and they’re not going to be able to talk about it in any philosophical, emotional, or spiritual terms. I saw Neil Armstrong’s press conference right after he was released from quarantine. The most amazing thing ever: they ask him about seeing another planet from another celestial body and he says, “the thruster on the left side had 6 liters of oxygen left…” and so on. He was totally ill-equipped. He was the perfect guy for that job, but my point is that I started to see that as a weird vulnerability. This is because we talk all the time about the “math genius.” I hear it all the time. I’ve met a lot of math geniuses in my life. I’ve never heard anyone say he or she is an “emotional genius.” Not once. Emotional intelligence is what’s going to matter. Because your phone and other electronics are going to get rid of the math genius need. But emotional genius…what makes us human… that’s critical. Nobody talks about it. The film started that way. My co-writer and I decided that we would try to do The Odyssey, but from Telemachus’s point of view. That was the idea, the thought of a son searching for their father. That was the impetus of the film a long time ago. 

Who is going to divide up the moon?

Could you talk about the decision to use voice over so heavily?
JG: The voiceover was originally an idea which was simply an output for the psychological evaluations he had to take. It was supposed to be that you were hearing continuing psych evaluations narrated. Brad and I recorded a version of that early on. What was weird was that it did not play as sincere. This was because you did not know if he was lying to the computer or not. Very quickly, we made it straight voice over. It was contemporaneous, not like Apocalypse Now, which was reminiscence. We decided to go present: why am I feeling like this in this moment? We did this because we wanted to be as intimate as possible. I put Brad in a very challenging position. I think he is great in the movie, but he does not have any other actors to act with. He needed something to play with and some way in, so the voiceover was key for us. We got a lot of help on it. There was this brilliant poet name Tracy K. Smith, who wrote a book called Life on Mars, which won a Pulitzer. She helped with the language of it. Kazuo Ishiguro, the famous novelist, also helped with it. Your internal voice is different from your external voice. I wanted a slightly different feel to it than the script had.

Could you talk about crafting the character of Roy with Brad Pitt?
JG: It’s weird because you wonder if the character is cold. I actually don’t think he’s cold. I think he is bottled up, and then what happens is that vulnerability makes him almost like a coward. What I was trying to say was, “here’s this guy, whose pulse does not go above 80.” But the fact is that it’s easy for him and therefore an easy form of bravery. The hard form of bravery is having a conversation that’s open to someone other than a computer. That is what he is really not well equipped to do. Brad and I talked about this every night, in lengthy emails, and it was Kazan who really talked about the core. Every scene would have to have a core. I would do a version of that for Brad. I would say here is what the scene is for me. I would try to be as open, vulnerable, and honest as I could in the emails. Then in the morning, Brad and I would talk about it. He would improv something often, and a lot of times it ended up in the film. Then sometimes he would do exactly as the script did. So it became a bit of a free process. I think it had to be, because I wanted him to reveal part of himself, which I think he does. The Brad that we see, who does a brilliant job of it, as the easy going, confident, smiling guy, has more to him than that. I was anxious to expose that other side, because I’ve know him for a long time and I’ve seen that other side in a major way.

Can you talk about your vision of the near future? For example you had an Applebee’s on the moon…!
JG: If you look at the facts for the ground versus the moon, you will see the moon is 1/6th the gravitational pull of the earth. So the idea that you have to go to the moon to go to Mars is correct. There is less gravitational pull so you are going to need less thrust, which is why almost all deep space rockets are going to launch or orbit around the moon. We would have to stop on the moon, because that is how we would be able to get to Mars. Then you ask yourself what does it look like 50 to 70 years after. You would have to set up some kind of base, because you are going to have to launch from there. What are you going to eat? You can’t have grass-fed beef on the moon, right? Growing vegetables in 1/6th gravity is also challenging, believe it or not. Processed food is basically going to be the way to go. And who is the best at processed food? Fast food chains. They are already spending a lot of time and energy with what they call artificial meat. This is what they are going to have as space food. I love when I talk to these guys in Dallas who are focused on artificial food. They say it tastes almost like the real thing and I don’t know if that’s a good thing. So then that became the food chain thing. Then the piracy thing is a very obvious fact. White Europeans made over 400 treaties with the ingenious people of the Americas and have adhered to zero. So the idea, that we are going to have space treaties, where if one nation state group finds out there is more helium 3 in one part of the moon than they got, do we really think this unenforceable treaty is going to be adhered to? I don’t think so. So if you look at the facts on the ground, where some parts of the world are unbelievably rich in resources and other parts have nothing, who is going to make those decisions on how to divide it up? The facts on the ground tell you that unless the human species undergoes some massive come to Jesus moment, things will not change. I don’t have total optimism about what that is going to mean as an outpost. There will be some great things, but I’m not a dystopian person. I think there will be some great things and there will be some terrible things. I don’t know how you solve that one I just laid out. Who is going to divide up the moon?

Q&A with Lorene Scafaria

Posted on by

The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Hustlers.

This film is very inclusive and focused on women. Were you aiming to make a film about female empowerment? What was your concept about the story, initially?
I like the idea of making something that people can take away from it whatever they want. I think we all know the difference between right and wrong, but I like the idea that we don’t necessarily have to paint anyone as a hero or a villain. We can tell the story of what happened and perhaps a fuller story just to get to know these people better. For me, writing is always an exercise in empathy. I empathize with all of us who are navigating this really broken values system, certainly for women. I think depending on who you are, you have a different amount of hurdles in front of you just to get to the starting line. Some have more than others. I kinda wanted to tell a story about the people who are already out of breath at the starting line. I wanted see how we can all finish at the race.

we don’t always get the family we want or need

Everything came together really well. It feels great to watch this cast interact. Everyone has a certain chemistry…
Yeah the locker room is what I was casting for. That is where I think this sisterhood comes from. I wanted to treat it like a sports movie in a way: It can be a solo sport. It can feel really lonely and isolating. Or it can be a team sport. Strippers work in pairs or teams. There is more safety in numbers and it is a little more lucrative when you’re working together. Destiny definitely starts in this place of loneliness and isolation until Romana pulls her into the fold. I was really excited about seeing her pulled in and meet all the other girls.

As you were thinking about this, knowing it was based on a true story, did you reach out to the women whose characters are depicted in the film?
I wanted to all along. I think when you have large corporations involved, they are kind of scared by things like that. I wanted to, because truth is stranger than fiction. I think they had their own complicated feelings about it. It was about a third of the way through filming when I started to receive calls. There was Rosie, and Carina, another girl who was in their group. I’ve spoken with both of them and really like them a lot. They are just on the other side of this. Rosie’s a Mom and Carina’s on a different path in her life, so they’re really reflective of this time in their lives. They are all hustlers and I think they have books coming out. So look for Rosie’s book! It was hard for me not to get the chance to talk to them before making the film, but I did a lot of research, of course the article provided a lot. I think reading between the lines of the article provided a lot. Because it was a years-long process, there was a lot of research that went into it. I met with a lot of strippers and sex workers and former strippers. We talked about the effect the financial crisis had on them. There were friends of strippers. There were friends who graduated high school and college and became strippers, where they were paying off their student loans forever. I felt like I grew up with these girls and guys. I worked in a “boiler room” when I was 17, answering phones only. It was a room full of phones. There were these guys on headsets, selling bad stocks to old people on off off Wallstreet, somewhere in northern New Jersey. My mother worked there for a little bit. A guy was totally going to hit her in the head with a baseball bat. The boss just basically said “bottom line… can you keep working with him? Because he makes us a lot of money and you just code.” It was a really wild environment and that was the ’90’s. The auts did not feel that much different than then, so that is part of why this very recent period piece. It was to talk about where we are now without really being in the now. I never thought I would be nostalgic for 2007. I never thought I would wish for 2007, but here we are.

Most of the men in the film are minor characters. Was there any point in the process where you got pushback to add a male character in a more prominent role?
That did not happen. I certainly got a lot of notes how to water down what these women did or how to embellish what these men did. To me the takedown of the global economy was pretty bad, along with all the aggressions and microaggressions these women faced on a daily basis. Obviously some guys are better than others. There’s good behavior in a strip club and there’s bad behavior in a strip club. I was happy there was nothing forced on me as far as that went. It was pretty obvious who this story was about. I was really excited about the Christmas scene. That was probably the happiest day on set. It was like Christmas in April. To see all women sitting around the table giving gifts to each other for me was like seeing your chosen family, because we don’t always get the family we want or need. Sometimes we have to create our own. I felt like that was a scene where you really got to see that this was their family. Maybe they don’t have other people in their lives to support them. So they are there for each other. I kind of like that a whole relationship can happen in a montage. I kind of like the idea that Johnny can come in and out of her life in a flash, and that Romona does not even bother. All of them have their own agency and they are all seeking independence in different ways. I like that the relationship that Mercedes has with Dragon is the real one. Trace and her boyfriend have a relationship, but in a way I didn’t want to have characters that only serve certain functions. I’m glad I did not get that kind of pressure. I was very lucky to work with a studio, STX, who was incredibly supportive of the vision because it took a long time to get the movie made and so it landed in the right hands thankfully.

Q&A with Adam Driver, Daniel J. Jones, Steven Soderbergh, and Scott Z. Burns

Posted on by

The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of The Report.

Your characters spends a lot of time in an underground room, and doesn’t interact with a wide variety of people. But you still manage to develop a sense of urgency for the audience. Can you talk about that process?
Adam Driver: There is a kind of decorum that comes with being in that kind of space that I really related to. There is a withholding of emotion, because you are there to do a job and not to insert your opinion or to have a feeling that you can express to your higher ups. Even though there are a lot of scenes of research, it is still exciting to play someone who is conflicted internally with his own morals about this institution that he’s grown up idolizing. At the same time you can’t help but feel the bigger picture of the morals of the country that he cares about. Those things, even though there is a lot of research, there is an underlying drive that I thought was really exciting that Scott and I talked about. It was also necessary to not just spout information; there has to be something underneath. The internal drive that Dan so clearly has is exciting to play.

I felt like I needed to show you enough to make you want to leave, but I hoped that my actors were engaging enough so that you would stay.

Scott, you were wrestling with this mammoth source text, and you had to bring it through a dramatic arc over about two hours. You are also telling the story through a couple of different people. How do you as a screenwriter begin to do that? It seems like an incredibly hard thing to do.
Scott Z. Burns: It is really hard to balance the different components to the characters. You sit there as a dramatist asking, “What is my obligation to the story” and then you look at the fact that there is reality underneath it all. With this more than anything I have ever worked on, we had a lot of table readings so that I could hear the script out loud and figure out which parts were redundant or emotional. It was interesting because I went back and thought about a movie like Serpico and the scenes I found least compelling were the ones where we go home with him. Steven [Soderbergh] and I have talked over the years about when it is appropriate to go home with your characters and when it’s not. Dan has a great story about being asked about the Report and Senator Feinstein looked at him and said, “You’re not a Senator, Dan.” I was more interested in the emotion that comes from somebody who is not allowed to express their feelings. When I’ve worked with actors in the past, telling them they can’t express something is more interesting to watch than giving them the luxury to feel all over the scene.

Dan, can you talk a little about the path you’ve been on in your life, from the years we see depicted in the film to now?
Steven Soderbergh: Can you believe you’re talking to the National Board of Review right now, after all this! How does that fantasy happen?

Daniel J. Jones: It is really gratifying and wonderful to have a film depict some of the events in your life, but there are a lot of people in the world who do amazing things, and films aren’t made about their work- there was a scene in the film where Adam says to Annett [Bening], “Maybe when the report comes out, the world will know.” There was a period of time where I thought this was bigger than the report we were working on. We had gone so deep in the weeds, 6,700 pages and 38,000 footnotes. No one had ever really looked at a program like this in such detail. I did think anyone who is serious about acquiring the intelligence from detainees, if this report was released, regardless of the regime, they would say this does not work and we’re not going to do this. I thought there was value in this; feeling that pressure; feeling it needed to get out because of all the research we had done. I did not think films would be made, but I think it did have huge implications to the world. 

Daniel J. Jones: It is really gratifying and wonderful to have a film depict some of the events in your life, but there are a lot of people in the world who do amazing things, and films aren’t made about their work- there was a scene in the film where Adam says to Annett [Bening], “Maybe when the report comes out, the world will know.” There was a period of time where I thought this was bigger than the report we were working on. We had gone so deep in the weeds, 6,700 pages and 38,000 footnotes. No one had ever really looked at a program like this in such detail. I did think anyone who is serious about acquiring the intelligence from detainees, if this report was released, regardless of the regime, they would say this does not work and we’re not going to do this. I thought there was value in this; feeling that pressure; feeling it needed to get out because of all the research we had done. I did not think films would be made, but I think it did have huge implications to the world. 

In the film, there are a few bold-faced names; Snowden comes up. Also you immediately think of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers in the opening scene. How much were these characters and these similar historical events in your mind as you were making the film?
DJ: We ended up where we ended up. There was Senator Udall depicted in the film. There was the Democratic Caucus meeting when he says, “I’m prepared to read this on the Senate floor.” There were a lot of roads not taken. We were down to the wire. The fact that the report came out right before the congressional Senate changed hands from Democratic to Republican could have made it not come out. But it did and it is hard to think what the other options could have been.

SB: For me, it’s interesting because in the film when Feinstein says that Edward Snowden is a traitor, she said that; that is a direct quote. What was important to me was to show that the character of Dan was living in a different kind of box. The movie is in a lot of boxes, both metaphorically and physically. He couldn’t have been Edward Snowden without betraying everything he had done up to that point. The only path for him was the constitutional path, which has now been blocked by all manner of bullshit. It was just about a bunch of boxes; The room where he did the work, and even when he goes to meet [an attorney played by Corey Stoll], the reason I fell in love with that location is because after having been in a windowless room for six or seven years, he finds himself in a room that is entirely a window.

There is a great scene in the film where you talk to your colleague about the nightmares you are having. It is remarkable because we don’t see inside your character’s head that often, and this is a startling admission, that this stuff is touching you in a deep and profound way. I was wondering if through talking to Daniel or just through how you conceived it, how he kept doing this, in spite of the horrific facts he was unearthing.
AD: I think Dan just kind of answered that. He was driven by a sense of faith in the system that this report had the potential to change our identity as a country. Even just that idea is enough to make someone persevere with almost no support. That kind of faith and patriotism is pretty strong within him. It’s not just him against the CIA as a whole or against any one person, but unearthing what is true, even with people who are trying to support him within the CIA. I don’t think it was a lot of support, but the potential of what the end result could be is a big reason.

I’m curious as to whether or not the hypotheticals that John Yoo gives in that OLC meeting were actually said that way, or if there was some dramatic license taken. They were totally shocking.
SB: You can Google them. I did not write very much, but he did. It goes to a larger thing which we are all living through now, which is the issue of the unitary executive, and exactly what it means to be president of this country. John Yoo really started this. It did continue through the Obama administration as well. It was sort of an amplification of the powers of the President. It was stunning to me that suddenly, the president, in the minds of some of these people, had these supreme powers and that they could order things that I always thought were horrible crimes and that they were above the law. So I started reading John Yoo’s speeches and googling them. I went back and read the OLC letters and even the OLC itself is a strange, arcane body that sort of exists between the White House and the Department of Justice.

The depictions of torture are very difficult to watch. Could you talk about your philosophy behind keeping them that way?
SB: We went back and forth about this more than anything in the film. I had written a draft where there was no torture and then we talked about how we would shoot it. I knew from the beginning I wanted it to be more about the torturers rather than the tortured – I realized that if I showed a lot of torture, it seems that I am asking for sympathy for the people being tortured, and so I was always very conscious to spend much more time on Mitchell and Jessen and the people who were doing the torture than on the tortured people themselves. But Alberto Mora, who was the Navy’s general counsel and is one of the real heroes of this story after the fact. Mora, when he was at the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld, stood up when he found out about this program and said, “this is wrong. We can’t do this. This is against the uniform code of military conduct. This is against everything we are as a country.” And what he said to me both when I was doing research and more recently, is you have to show people. And it’s the same reason why the CIA burned the tapes. They did not want those tapes because they’re betting that if you saw the tapes you would turn your head and walk away. And that’s the difference between movies and Senate reports. I felt like I needed to show you enough to make you want to leave, but I hoped that my actors were engaging enough so that you would stay.

You grounded it in truth, so it becomes an act of bearing witness as opposed to something else.
SB: I spoke to Malcolm Nance, who created the SERE School at Coronado to protect people. The whole function of the SERE school was, if you serve this country and you’re going to fight some horrible dictator who does brutal things to you, you’ll be prepared. The fact that Mitchell and Jessen took the training that we give our best soldiers and weaponized it is… bananas. When I first reached out to Malcolm, I asked if he could help me with this and he was so passionate about helping us tell the story. It is really important that people understand the moral high ground we lost by doing this and what it means to everyone who goes out and defends our country. Adam was in the Marines and he and I talked about this. It’s not a small thing. We’ve compromised generations of people who will serve this country.

How did you approach the film which is so procedural yet has these very human qualities and startling closeups?
SB: I never went to film school. I did get to stand next to Steven for about two to three hundred days on set. I learned a lot and the main thing I learned is that I am not him and I can’t do what he does. One of the things I did learn along the way when we were doing the Informant is the abuse of the close up, so I knew at the beginning when I wanted to really get in close. The close up of Adam during the scene with Corey Stoll I think resonates the way it does because we didn’t abuse that technique. I really learned from Steven that, if you have faith in the language of cinema, you can save that shot and that it will yield great results. But you as the filmmaker have to have that restraint. Eigil Bryld, who is spectacular, really got that and worked with me and so we knew there were certain points were we were going to go there. The other thing is that we shot this movie in 26 days, and so I knew going in, if you know your quarterback can’t throw, work on your running game! If we had tried to get a technocrane and to build really elaborate shots in every scene, we would not have made our days and I think we would have just obfuscated the story. The great thing when I went back and looked at Alan Pakula films, and solicited advice from Steven, is that they did not put the camera in front of the story. I had such great actors that I knew I could just lay back and I didn’t want what we are doing to interfere. And as Steven has said to me, “there’s really nothing Adam does that isn’t interesting to look at.” And so I knew I could get away with that restrained, because he is that interesting to watch. I also knew there were times I could tip my hat to those great political thrillers. But if the movie was going to rely on a lot of trickery to build tension, it wasn’t going to work.

I would love to know what your reaction was to everything you learned when you had completed the film?
DJ: One of the things that impresses me the most is that the full report is almost 7,000 pages. The executive summary, which we slaved over for a long time, was 525 pages. I did not think you could do it in less, but then Scott goes off and does it in 130 pages! And he  has done a fantastic job not only telling the story of the study itself, but also the story of getting the report out; the process of pulling it all together. I also want to mention Adam here. If you follow Adam’s face throughout the film and his eyes, they convey time. This started in 2007 and it wrapped up in 2014. The film is only 2 hours, but you feel that lapse of time both through Scott’s writing and Adam’s portrayal of the character and I’m really proud of them for what they did.