Daniel J. Jones Archives - National Board of Review

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.

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.