Director Gavin Hood says that his new thriller about drone warfare is “the grown-up version” of his last film, “Ender’s Game.” The Orson Scott Card sci-fi story written in the 1970’s anticipated much of today’s technology, including drone-styled remote machines make it possible for us to get closer to the enemy for obtaining information and keep us farther from the weapons we deploy to defeat them. “This is the real world,” Hood said in an interview, “present time, no sci-fi.” He continued:
We are living in an interesting age where we are more connected than ever before and yet in our connectivity we are also physically disconnected almost more than ever before. So there is something strange about this new world where we can see what’s happening far, far away, we can even control weapons that are far, far away without being in the conflict zones ourselves and therefore we are not physically as a drone pilot, for example, risking our lives. And yet we are engaged in warfare and witnessing close-up, albeit through a lens, close-up, the body counts and the effects of warfare. And so psychologically this is a strange new world for pilots of these drones, a very strange world. As it can be for the military commanders running the operations from places like the joint headquarters. Do you know that all of these places in the film really exist? Everything you see in the film is a real place that really exists, run by real people. The US-based and geospatial unit in Hawaii which we called in the movie Image Analysis Unit with the permission of the Geo space guides because it just what Geo space means and what it basically means image analysis. They analyze imagery from different places in the world, not only face recognition, but that’s a teeny part of it. They analyze for example if they catch a piece of YouTube footage or something from some wanted person who posts it, where exactly it was filmed, where is that object in the background and they have all kind of sophisticated software to try and pinpoint where things are, what things are, they analyzed troop movements from satellite imagery, drone imagery, it’s basically a place to analyze imagery and it happens to be located in an Air Force base Hawaii. I guess if you’re analyzing in darkened places all the time it’s nice to get out into the sunshine.
And then the largest drone piloting base in is Creech Airport base outside of Las Vegas, mostly American pilots, there are those too from other parts of the world that fly out of that base Italians, British, French. And Joint headquarters in London is exactly what its name says but there are many joint headquarters for many operations. So there are military offices and personnel from many different nations working out of that area. The drones which I didn’t actually mention which fire on Somalia are mostly launched from a base in Djibouti where there are subcontractors working for American military, people who have been in the military are now civilians but working for the military.
So it gets really really complicated because the pilots in Creech don’t what they call launch or recover the drones. The drones are launched, made airborne out of Djibouti from ground control crews in Djibouti, they are re-weaponized in Djibouti, they are refueled in Djibouti and then when the plane comes back to land there’s a moment where the ground control people take over from the pilots in Creech and bring the planes in to land and that’s just one base. That’s a sort of East African base in which drones are launched. There are drone bases obviously in Afghanistan, Iraq, all over the world from which drones are launched and recovered but there can be drones from anywhere or pilots from anywhere, and it’s remote.
Copyright Bleeker Street 2016
The movie shows us how different people look at the same set of facts but make different decisions and different assessments based on whether they were looking at military strategy, legal liability, political liability, or bureaucratic liability. When the military officer played by Alan Rickman argues that killing one little girl as collateral damage would be better than allowing the suicide bombers in the building to leave and kill hundreds of people, the politician responds that the key difference would be that it is us killing the little girl but the terrorists killing hundreds of civilians. Hood said that was his favorite moment in the film. “That moment, just when you think, come on people, we know what we’ve got to do here or if you don’t want to do it, and then suddenly comes an argument that spins you off into a totally different but absolutely critical direction. That is said by the Undersecretary of State for Africa named Angela and played by Monica Dolan, I hope playing along into this slight prejudice where you’re going to be ‘Oh, this is a woman, she’s going to be maternal and she’s going to not to want to strike the child,’ and then she comes out with the statement that says she would actually rather sacrifice 80 people at the hands of the terrorists in the local population that to have the local population turn against us because we killed one of their children.Now, you can play with the numbers. It is very important that when people say, ‘what would you do?’ You have to look at the facts. I think the script that I wrote is very humbling. We want to think that there is a policy for every situation and that’s that, but there just isn’t. There are strikes taking place every day in different parts of the world. There are strike taking place in defined conflict zones like Iraq and Afghanistan where we happen to find enemy within the geographic area and then there’s just more complicated questions such as where the enemy has moved into civilian neighborhood in possibly a friendly country whether it be Yemen or North Kenya and strikes are taking place and the question is what is the effect of that strike?
It’s very controversial as to whether the strikes that we made in Pakistan have actually helped us in terms of the overall strategy of winning the population over or whether they turned a lot of the population against us. People ask, ‘Do you think drones are good or bad?’ And that is too limited a question. The real question is: You have a new weapon, and every few years you get a new weapon. There was a time when we fought with spears and swords and then the longbow came along and there is writing from way back when about how the longbows are terrible weapons and horrible weapons and it shouldn’t be used to kill people from a distance. And then we had missiles. So the drone is simply a new weapon. The question is what does this weapon do well? What does it not do well? And when should it be used?
A lot of people say, ‘Well, the drone is so much more accurate.’ Well, first of all it’s not more accurate than a sniper bullet. We see that hellfire; it makes a big mess. So I defy anyone to say that it is somehow the most clean piece of technology that we have. The guillotine is cleaner — chop someone’s hands off, someone’s head off, no elaborate damage. The issue wasn’t what’s the weapon. The question was – Do you have the right person whose head we are chopping off? And what is the effect of chopping this head off and the people watching the beheading? Do they decide that we’re the good guys or not and that also it depends on the particular situation? So I think what Guy’s script does really well is present us with complex ethical, moral, legal, political questions and perhaps remind us not to be so adamant one way or the other about a particular approach. It shows us that we need genuine conversation about this new way of waging war.”
It is both reassuring and chilling that we see the people in the film applying very comprehensive mathematical formulas to weigh the risks and benefits of various strategic options. Hood said,
“You see a very American phenomenon in this formula with five different levels of acceptable ‘collateral damage.’ I don’t mean that in a cynical way. You’ve been doing this for longer than the British. So the British are embroiled in what we might call traditional legal discussion which by the way also applies to America in any war. Even war has laws. Once you’re in war, the rule of war requires that you use only the force that is necessary and proportional and reasonable to neutralize the threat. Even in war when faced with a threat of say three soldiers coming over the hills with rifle we cannot hit them with a nuclear bomb. That would be an excessive use of force and would make you guilty if you gave that order of a war crime.
So even though we’ve gone to war, there is a body of international law or the law of war that attempts to control us within reason and then the reason for those laws, despite what Mr. Trump, says is that it matters how we behave in terms of how we can hold others accountable. So if there is no laws of war there would be no Nuremberg trial. If soldiers did not have to make a judgments about whether the order they are being given is legal or not, we cannot hold anyone from Nazi Germany accountable because they were following orders. The character played by Aaron Paul pushes back and asked for an updated collateral damage estimate. And by the way that’s not us making up a piece of dialogue. That’s a direct quote from a drone pilot commander, a colonel, who said ‘I am the pilot in command responsible for releasing this weapon. I have the right to ask that the CDE be run again. I will not release my weapon until that happens.’
If a pilot believes that he’s been issued an illegal order he is allowed to push back. If he defies what turns out to be a legal order, he’ll be court martialed. So these pilots are in a very tricky situation of having to make a judgment. Now does every controversial moment get pushed back such as we have in the movie? No. Because if you’re doing a drone strike in a defined constricted zone like Iraq or Afghanistan there are already rules of engagement. You’re not going all the way up the chain to the British Foreign Secretary.
But if you are doing something such as happened in the film where you’re targeting in a friendly country in a civilian neighborhood, you have big political ramifications. And so I want to say to my audience: this is 100 percent accurate but don’t think that every drone strike involves this kind of legal and moral complexity. Some do, some more, some less and depending on the degree of collateral damage people have to go higher and higher.”
Hood spoke very movingly about his chance to work with the late Alan Rickman.
I don’t know that he knew that he was sick when we were working but he was ill. I think we were very fortunate to get Alan in this film because the role of a general usually is played by somebody in a very simplistic, stereotypical way. What Alan brings to the role is a fully rounded, fascinating, intriguing and charming human being who is highly intelligent, because he was as a person. I wish he was here to talk to you because he spoke so eloquently about this subject. He was so well read and interested and he said he signed on because he loved the story and he literally said, ‘Gavin I just hope I don’t get in the way.’ He brings a comedy in his ability to be both absolutely mostly truthful and also find humor at moments when the audience needs to release tension and I think he’s enriched the film enormously and I miss him, and I wish he could be here to talk to you.
He said the wanted “the audience is in a position of jury, not being preached to but being asked to do think for themselves. So I hope we’ve given them a thriller with multiple points of view in the end let them have a good conversation. We don’t have the answers but I think it’s great for people to think and talk about these questions because it is where we’re going in terms of modern world.”
Interview: Cyrus Nowrasteh, Director of “The Young Messiah”
Posted on March 16, 2016 at 3:02 pm
Cyrus Nowrasteh is the director of the new film about the early life of Jesus, The Young Messiah. In an interview, he talked about the challenge of casting a child to play the lead role and creating “the first Jesus moment” in the film.
How did you find a child to play the role of Jesus?
Well, first you call the agents and say, “Send us all the resumes of your seven-year-old actors,” and you don’t hear from anyone. You have to put out a casting call and go searching and use multiple casting directors in different locales which is what we did. I had casting directors in Israel, in Jordan, in Australia, in London, in Rome, in Los Angeles and in New York. Basically these were all people who we were just kind of spreading the word that we were looking for X. We were looking for a seven-year-old to play young Jesus. I get a call one day from a casting director in London. He said, “We just had an extraordinary child come in. He made the hair stand up on the back of our necks.” We looked at the tape, went to the London, put him through a fairly exhaustive audition process for which he was very game and I recognized immediately that he’s a very special child and he has wonderful parents. His name is Adam Greaves-Neil and he got the part.
The camera loves this kid, and that’s a quality you can’t really predict when you see someone in a room, even when you see them on videotape you don’t really know until you start shooting scenes.
My favorite part of the film is His endless curiosity about the world, and, like all parents, the way Mary and Joseph have to try to figure out how to explain things to Him.
It’s a part of the story but it’s also part of the character. I mean I have to believe that young Jesus was a very bright, capable child and very curious and very interested in the world. So in a sense that was sort of a part of why the human side of Jesus was amongst us and dwelt among us because He is here to learn and experience what it is like to be human. And that takes with it a lot of curiosity and intelligence and thought.
Tell me how this project came together. Who began it and how did you get involved?
It started when Anne Rice wrote a rave review of my previous film, “The Stoning of Soraya M.” Through some happy coincidences involving people that we knew, her book got in our hands, I looked at it and fell in love with it. My wife and I adapted it for Chris Columbus’ company 1492 Pictures and we took it to producers that we knew and trusted and then we brought in a financing entity led by Tracy Price and Bill Andrew, Ocean Blue Entertainment and they got it. Everybody just sort of kind of clicked to the idea that this was a really fresh and original take on the Jesus story. Now we knew there were inherent risks attached but we were willing to tackle those.
What did you see as the most significant risks?
That Christians might not like it. That they might think that the fact that we are taking on the unknown years, that we’re telling a story that’s not directly from the Bible, that might be objectionable to them. I felt all along and I said this 1 million times, it’s how you do it and I felt confident that we could do it properly.
It’s inspired by Scripture and rooted in history. The story imagines one year in the boyhood of Jesus. So we’re saying that it is fiction but it’s scripturally inspired, meaning our guidepost for this young boy, for this character of young Jesus, is Jesus as he is revealed in the Bible and how he acts in the Bible. So whenever we wanted some kind of idea of what he would do in the particular situation we looked at the Bible and try to say, “Okay, where is there a similar type situation so that we can interpret how He is going to act?”
I thought it was fascinating and very smart that His first miracle involved a bully because it showed so much about his character right from the beginning, and how he responded when the bully was killed by someone else.
I called that the first Jesus moment in the movie. The bully comes up and shoves Jesus first and makes mockery of him and he calls him a little baby for playing with girls. What does Jesus do? He kind of does a half turn away from him, He turns the other cheek, He’s not going to fight him. Then the kid jumps Him and is beating on Him and He really doesn’t fight back. He just covers up to protect Himself. It is then when the bully turns on the girl who tries to get him off of Jesus by hitting him with a stick when the bully goes after the girl and Jesus gets up and says don’t touch her, stop, don’t touch her. So He’s protecting the girl. This is a whole bundle of what you call revelatory simple Jesus moments even in just that scene but I actually think that’s throughout the movie. People have even pointed out some to us that we weren’t even aware of.
Tell me a little bit about the characters of Mary and Joseph and how you thought about them and the struggles that they were facing.
We have an opportunity in this movie to give the audience a window into the holy family in a fashion that they really never seen it before. I think it’s an amazing opportunity, because they have always been sort of shown to us as these icons and now they have to be real. They have to be a mom and a dad. I love that we were able to do that. I think for example Joseph, who is always just wallpaper in these movies, he actually has some presence, he has strength and he has sensitivity. You could see how he could be a loving father to his child and an example to his child. I think one of the reasons why Joseph gets so lost is because Mary and Jesus are such icons and here we get to see parents working together, supporting one another, loving one another, loving their child, going through all of life’s trials and challenges together. I think it’s a real opportunity in this movie to sort of portray that for parents watching the movie to connect with it. This is not only their child, the child they love and they want to protect but this is also the son of God. So it’s an interesting dilemma.
So why is this important to you personally to tell this story? What is it that you want people to take from it?
First and foremost I want people to have a very satisfying motion picture experience. I want them to go to the movies to be entertained and to be moved. I was approaching it from story level. This is this a story that attracts my interest. When I sit in the movie theater the only reason I’m sitting there is because I want to see what happens next and it is on that level I want it to work the most but of course you can’t get around what is about. This is a movie about faith, about God and about family.
Interview: Michael Showalter of “Hello, My Name is Doris”
Posted on March 10, 2016 at 3:12 pm
Copyright Roadside 2016
Writer/director/actor Michael Showalter has a great eye for talent. The original “Wet Hot American Summer” was a career starting point for Bradley Cooper (who missed his Juilliard graduation to be on the set), David Hyde Pierce, Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, Amy Poehler, and many more performers who went on to starring roles. “The Baxter,” with Showalter as a man destined to have his bride run out on him at the wedding, starred Peter Dinklage, Justin Theroux, Michelle Williams, and Peter Dinklage. In “Hello, My Name is Doris,” his star is not a new talent, but he gave two-time Oscar winner Sally Field a role that gives her a chance to show us that at age 69 she can still astonish and surprise us. She plays the title character, who has spent her life taking care of her mother. As the film opens, at her mother’s funeral, Doris has to begin to figure out what her life will be.
Your casting choices are always impeccable, even in the smallest roles. How you approach casting, or do you just to know everybody?
I weirdly know a lot of people even though I’m not like a social person really at all. But I do know a lot of people or I know people who know people. Sally Field was a total shot in the dark. I certainly don’t know her other than I’m a huge fan of hers and have been for a really long time. I felt that she would be amazing in this part and offered her the role not thinking that she would want to do it but she did want to do it and of course once she is cast the rest is pretty easy. Once you are able to tell other actors that Sally Field is playing the lead role it’s pretty easy to cast the movie after that because all the other actors want to work with her.
when I’m casting usually I do have a couple people in my mind. I watch a lot of movie and I see a lot of TV shows so I kind of know who is out there and I go, “Gosh, if we could get that person it would be amazing. Wendi McLendon-Covey for example who plays the sister-in-law, I always knew she would be so good in this part. I think she’s so funny and interesting and I just always envisioned her and Natasha Lyonne and just people that I know or whose work I like and then you just go and you make them an offer and a lot of times you’d be surprised that people are interested. People want to work.
Doris has an exceptionally eclectic wardrobe in this and it is fun to see how people react to it. How did you create her look?
I live in LA now but have lived in New York for many many many years. Doris is a New York kind of person that you encounter. You see people like Doris who are kind of eccentric. Their clothes are very wild and specific and collected and interesting but they don’t necessarily talk that much, you just see them on the subway or on the bus or walking on the street. I just wanted, I like the idea of a character who have this sort of fashionista quality but it was kind of all cobbled together. She’s probably been collecting clothes and buying clothes and buying jewelry for years and that’s this character’s armor in a way. She’s lived in a little bit of a fantasy. That’s kind of how she get through her days, by putting on these clothes and becoming different characters the way that you can use clothing to do.
I like clothes a lot. I myself don’t wear interesting clothes but I appreciate clothes, I like costumes and I like fashion and kind of pay attention to it. And so we always knew that her costume and her wardrobe would be a really, really important part of the character. And her hair piece and the cat eyeglasses and wearing two pairs of glasses at once. A lot of that stuff was Sally Field. She really dove into creating the character and the way she looked and the specificity of it and that piece was entirely Sally’s creation. She had a name for it, Beverly, they called the hair piece Beverly. So when we would be shooting she would say someone, “I need you to come get Beverly for me.”
What did she want to know before she agreed to the role?
She read the script first and then took the meeting with me so it was more about me answering some of her questions. She knew I wanted her to do the movie it was about her wanting to know how are you going to balance the comedy and the drama? Wanting to just meet me and see what kind of person I was, did we click? I think wanting to know how we’re going to make this movie on such a low budget. She has never done a movie with such a low budget.
Sally has done huge giant Hollywood movies and has done that for a long time so how are you going to make a movie for no money? How are we going to shoot this movie in such a short amount of time? Like do you know what you’re doing was essentially what you wanted to know and I just tried to be as honest with her as I could and just to say I have faith in myself, I have faith in the other people that are working on the movie and we want to create an environment that is conducive to you doing the work, the best work you can do. Sally Field has three sons. One is a very successful writer, her two older sons are both filmmakers and the youngest son is in film school. And they all to varying degrees were familiar with me and some of the other things I’ve done and I think they kind of recommended me to her and said, “You should do it, he is legit.” And so she agreed to do it. She took a huge risk on me and on the project and she’s just been fantastic obviously in the movie and I love working with her.
And this began as a short film, right?
Yes, the short film was called “Doris, the Intern” and it’s nine minutes long or something like that and is really just a very silly, sweet comedy about an older office worker named Doris who is a little bit like this Doris but not nearly as fleshed out, more just kind of a cookie lady working who becomes romantically infatuated with a much younger intern. I think in the short film he was 19 years old. And nothing happens with them at all. There is no relationship; they don’t really even know each other.
It’s much more kind of from afar and basically the way that movie ends is that she sees that he has a girlfriend and she kind of does something kind of rebellious to make herself feel better about it. It’s a really sweet little movie and I really like the main character and felt that she was really charming and comedic and different and kind of adventurous in a way that was really surprising. And then I kind of envisioned the whole role around that character. And Laura Terruso and I spent a couple of years fleshing it out and created the story adding in all of the elements of the hoarding and the mother and the brother-in-law, the whole hipster culture and the whole idea of the way she dressed being so extreme, really just invented the whole story around her that we could use. But we did keep the spine of the love story that it all kind of hinges on that she had this crush on the younger coworker.
It is a lot of fun to see Doris meet young hipsters who see her very differently from her friends, family, and co-workers.
I think she finds a community of people who believe in personal expression and who are also searching for an identity that fits them. That is so much of what being in your 20’s is about. It’s such a quest for identity and to kind of really define who you are and what kind of person you want to be and you are questioning a lot of those things. And Doris is too. She has been in a world where she has known no acceptance and then she finds all this acceptance in this most unlikely of places. You think she’s going to go to that concert and she’s going to look totally different and everybody’s going to laugh at her and it’s going to be a big disaster and it’s totally the opposite. She fits right in with them and she is immediately accepted and nobody questions her. It just seemed like a kind of a wonderful idea.
I also really loved the Tyne Daly best friend character, so fierce.
These characters are roughly the same age as my parents. Over the course of my life I’ve known a lot of women just like Roz that were friends of my parents, super lefty intellectuals of a sort, very high idealistic who were young people in the late 50s and early 60s who just have a certain kind of way about them. They grew up together on Staten Island all their lives and they have a million stories together.
The movie is an unusual mixture of comedy and drama with some very serious moments.
I just sort of go a little bit by intuition. I like it that it has both. I’m not interested as a director in just doing a comedy are just in a drama. I think life is like that, I think life is both, life is funny and serious at the same times at least that is how I try to approach it and so in terms of a strategy it’s more just kind of that I think the lens I see the world through is the comedy the humor and the sadness live hand-in-hand so I just tried to portray that the best I can.
Interview: Dawn Porter on the Abortion Documentary “Trapped”
Posted on March 8, 2016 at 3:20 pm
Dawn Porter is the lawyer-turned-documentarian who directed and co-produced Trapped, a film about the new laws limiting access to abortion. Known as TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws, they are described by legislators as protecting the health and safety of women by imposing requirements that normally apply to hospital settings, waiting periods, and distribution of misleading or inaccurate information. The release of the film is very timely, in theaters the same week that the challenge to these laws was argued in the Supreme Court. As the movie shows, and as the arguments before the Court made clear, medical authorities do not support these requirements, which are not imposed on similarly risky or risky medical procedure providers (liposuction, colonoscopies). They have no medical benefit to women and are intended to and have the effect of limiting women’s ability to make their own choice to have a Constitutionally protected medical decision.
In an interview, Porter spoke about the impact of these laws, her compassion for the women’s reproductive health care providers in the film, and her decision about the portrayal of anti-abortion voices in the film.
How does the death of Justice Scalia affect the prospects for the Court’s decision on the challenge to the Texas TRAP laws?
This film has taken so many twists and turns. A lot of court watchers believed he might have actually pushed to re-examine Roe v. Wade and its legal underpinnings. With him gone, most people think there isn’t anyone who would push the Court that far. It’s probably doesn’t impact the ultimate decision except that if the Court splits 4 to 4, the Texas decision upholding the law will stand with no precedential value which in itself would be a huge issue because the court likes to take cases that will have some precedents. They look for cases that can actually help govern the law. And if the decision in this case doesn’t provide any precedent it means states across the country will still be in this legal limbo; we will still be fighting about TRAP laws. If Justice Kennedy votes with the more liberal members of the court, then it will be a 5/3 to strike down the laws and then that would be the law of the land. So Justice Scalia’s death is quite significant and the final chapter in this is certainly not written.Copyright 2016 Abramorama
How can legislatures enact laws directing doctors and patients to do things that are not medically recommended?
That’s one of the things that makes me the angriest. I read a report this morning that examined the materials that doctors are compelled to distribute to abortion patients and it estimated to 40 percent of the information in some of these pamphlets is inaccurate. I spent times in six different clinics over two and a half years and saw a lot of the patient populations. 60 percent of people in a number of clinics were under the poverty level. A lot of people were not getting any medical information. I saw Dr. Parker just listening to people’s hearts, checking blood pressure, routine medical care. There is a healthcare crisis in this country and the idea that the health department that bears the imprimatur of the state would knowingly distribute false and misleading information to people who do not have resources to help them understand what is happening is so manipulative and such a waste. Most of the equipment in that room is never turned on. And as you see in the film, they are required to buy $1100 of medication every month that is never used but it expires and so has to be thrown away and replaced. We are in a situation where the conservatives are requiring waste and wasteful medicine; that’s not good medicine. While we have people who can’t access healthcare we have this facility that is unused.
What did you learn about the opponents to abortion? Why don’t we hear more from them in this film?
When I first started filming I wanted to talk to the protesters and just see if there was anyone who would present kind of a non-hysterical point of view. There was either just outright misinformation or people who would not present very well, put it that way. And so I kind of had to make this editorial decision about how to give any kind of voice to people who are anti-choice. So what I tried to do was, I included the voices of the anti-choice people. We see protesters and we see the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court appear at an anti-abortion event. But I tried to make the film from the perspective of the providers as they tried to comply with the laws and their day-to-day experiences. And I wanted to show their compassion and commitment to the women who come to to their facilities. When we filmed in that center the thing that kept coming to me was how beautiful it is.
I thought it was incredibly important to put Justice Moore in because he is a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Alabama. He is charged with enforcing the laws. A really important law that the Alabama courts have to enforce are the consents for minors. So in Alabama the only way that you can get an abortion is if your parents’ consent in writing, both parents or if you have a judicial bypass. The minor has to appear and states her reasons for having an abortion and have an Alabama judge decide whether or not that that is ok. So it’s quite relevant and that the the chief judge of the Supreme Court in Alabama is the person who decides what the administrative rules are. So if you have somebody who is violently anti-choice who is part of the funding operation for anti-choice activist, I felt like that was relevant. I also think it speaks to the political climate. A number of people have remarked to me that the legislators are not hiding their true intent. And as a lawyer as a person who is a poli-sci person I find that horrifyingly fascinating that people are open about this tactic.
Why don’t the opponents to abortion pursue initiatives that actually are proven to decrease abortion, like providing birth control and support for pregnant women and babies?
I think is a great question and but I don’t think that there is a good answer. What the anti-choice people would say is that they support adoption, that children are a gift from God and that sex is for procreation. I mean that’s really what it comes down to. There is the protester in the film who says that men are here to adore women and take care of them. And the way that he shows that is by screaming at them and shaming them. And we did not include the names that he calls women. He screams in front of his own children. Women were supposed to be adored but not the woman who were there for an abortion.So I think if you think the same states that are passing laws that are shutting clinics also do not take federal funding for the Affordable Care Act, do not support sex education, and do not support birth control. So the logical conclusion is they are more anti-sex, they are anti-non-procreative sex than they are anti-abortion. So that’s really what this conversation is about.
The irony there is that a number of the women I saw were married, I saw a number of women who wanted to have the pregnancy continue but were literally saying they cannot afford to bring this child into the world. One of the most heartbreaking things I saw was this woman who cried through her procedures and she cried in the waiting room. She wanted to speak with me but she didn’t want to be on camera. I never pushed anybody once somebody who said no but she did say she wanted to talk about it and she said she had a two-year-old, she had just gotten out of welfare she had gotten into school and a part-time job and she was so excited about her life. She was on birth control that failed and she had an unplanned pregnancy and this woman said, “I love my husband, I love my child, we would love to have a second child but if I have that everything we’ve worked for over the last two years would go away. I’d go back on welfare and I don’t know if I’d ever get off.” And so it was not that she still thought it was the right thing to do but it was horrific time for her to terminate a healthy wanted baby with her partner that she loved. And so not only did I watch her go through it but I watched her being screamed at about how she was a slut and a baby killer as she was already so torn up about this and her husband was in the waiting room. It was just such a range of emotions but the biggest thing that I took away from that was as much as I wanted to hear her story, I didn’t want to be the position of judging anyone’s abortion.
I have two kids and I know what kind of a mother I try to be. Why would I want anything less for somebody else? We were able to wait till we could to have kids. And why wouldn’t I give that same dignity to someone else to make that decision for herself?
There is a disproportionate impact on poor women and their families, too.
There is a deep contempt for poor people in these laws. Watching people count off money that was the equivalent of a month’s rent and know that they were literally taking food off the table and making this choice between having another child or being able to pay their bills that month was also infuriating. Because of these extra requirements you have to make these separate visits and take off from work, which is hard because a lot of people are on hourly jobs or if you’re lucky to have a job, then you have to get child care because more than half of the women already have a child. And also because of shrinking number of clinics so many people are traveling so far so then you have to have overnight costs so you have like the people were sleeping in their cars in the parking lot. And so there’s all these obstacles but there’s also the question of dignity and it was really distressing to see people who were already in some level of crisis have these added burdens. I don’t have to go through any of those things, I have good health insurance and I call and make a doctor’s appointment for a time that’s convenient for me. So if I had to have an abortion I would go to a state where I could be seen within a couple of days I wouldn’t be racing the clock. And half the people who are racing the clock need procedures that are more complicated and it becomes more expensive and it completely gets out of reach for people. So none of it is good health care policy which is why it makes me just also crazy when people say this is for the health and safety of women because there is just nothing to support that.
What led you to make the film and who do you think the audience for the film is?
I was working on another film, Gideon’s Army, and I was shooting interviews in Jackson, Mississippi and I read in the local paper that there was one clinic in the entire state of Mississippi. To give you a comparison in New York metropolitan area there are about 80 clinics. I was so floored by that. So I did what all documentary filmmakers do. I called them up and I said, “Can I come over?”
I met Dr. Parker that day. He just started talking about abortion access in a way that it just hit me like a lightning bolt that this was such a politicized, such a brilliant way of stopping clinic access is to attack the providers and attack the doctors in the name of women’s health which makes it very difficult for the general public to understand. I thought if there’s a way to show that political story through this individual person that that would be a film that would be accessible to the widest possible audience. And it’s also the kind of film that I like to make. I like films about people. He introduced me to the clinic owners and so the film really kind of unfolded really naturally.
It was complicated and it was challenging logistically because so much was happening and they were actively involved in litigation and the lawyers didn’t always want them to talk or comment so I had to kind of work around those restrictions. I hope and I do think that it will add a different perspective to the abortion conversation. I think most people understand about crazy people who kill doctors, they understand about people who bomb with clinics what they don’t understand is the greatest threat to abortion clinics is the state political process and I think in this presidential year focusing on the mechanics of government is really important. The state and local elections are really important. I really wanted to kind of introduce that this is not an accident that half the abortion clinics in America has closed in the last five years.
I hope this is a wake-up call. Most people support some form of right to abortion, more than 80 percent of Americans. So if that’s the case then my sincere hope is that people will pay attention to the process by which these rights are being eliminated and stop feeling like it’s some private screaming match issue they think they don’t want to get involved in. We can’t sit by the sidelines and allow that to happen. And so I am I’m enough of an optimist and not like so much a cynic that I feel like if people like Dr. Parker can get up and go to work every day, the least I can do is to talk about it.
Interview: “Race” Director Stephen Hopkins on Jesse Owens
Posted on February 17, 2016 at 3:50 pm
“Race” is the story of Jesse Owens, one of the greatest athletes of all time, and an African-American whose four gold medals in the 1936 Berlin Olympics showed the world that Hitler’s propaganda — and America’s Jim Crow laws — could not deny the reality of Owens’ ability, honor, and dignity. In an interview, director Stephen Hopkins talked about why making the film was so important to him and what he wanted audiences to understand about the events that occurred nearly 80 years ago.
One of the reasons I wanted to make the film is there are so few reluctant heroes nowadays. I think most people who are at the forefront of the media tend to be there not for the admirable act. When I was growing up there were great heroes like Mohammed Ali or Nelson Mandela or there were mavericks in the world of rock stars and actors and filmmakers that artist and I don’t know who my kids and my grandkids are going to look up to in the same sort of way. I was originally offered to make a story about his whole life which I don’t think you can ever do in a film really so I kind of honed down to these three years. I’d love to have done more about his childhood and his background which I think has a lot to do with why he was so full of steel and grit like he was. And obviously he had an anger inside of him as a young African-American man in America in those days where racism was a part of the institutional legality. Copyright 2016 Focus Features
So he is a conundrum because he really ran for himself and his family more than for his country. I think running for America was tough in those days because you would be a patriot but you were treated so poorly in your own country and he sort of followed his own compass really and did what he thought was right. And his wife Ruth was very important to him. And I kind of wanted to introduce maybe a younger generation to a hero from what seems to be a simpler time but obviously was a crazy political arena. One of my first questions to myself as I went through his story was how it was possible for a young African-American man to walk into such a hostile gladiatorial arena like the Olympics stadium in Berlin and function and hold himself together and held his head up high and explode for the necessary critical 10 seconds just at the right time and start winning these medals in front of Hitler and this hostile crowd.
He came from an incredibly tough background. His grandfather was a slave, his father was a share cropper which was basically a slave in those days and he grew up in a very, very tough environment with a great family. And often they would eat meat once a month if they were lucky. They grew up in the Great Depression, so whether you were African-American or not, you were suffering and that gave him so much. He almost died himself as a kid; he lost a couple of siblings through malnutrition and illness. And all this he used to forge someone who has so much dignity and so much steel that it just makes me think what the great hero he was.
At the same time, we don’t want him to be a saint. I hate it when you have a hero who doesn’t have flaws because there is nothing to overcome. The story in the background of what he had to go through to win makes the Berlin part of the film work. It would not be the same if you didn’t know what he went through and how high the stakes were before he got there and how clever the Nazis were in collaboration with Avery Brundage to hide what they were doing and to use this giant propaganda machine to put their pretend political party on the map. Because really they were just gangsters and thugs and they were trying to make out as if they were a real movement and a real political party and they were branding a corporate sporting event for the first time. In a sense they created the modern social media idea with live worldwide radio and filming everything and shipping the film quickly around the world, inventing closed-circuit TV and inventing all the technology to support their event they accidentally made the Olympics into the Jesse Owens Olympics and they accidentally made him the world first ever athlete superstar.
Hopkins provides fascinating behind-the-scenes drama as filmmaker/propagandist Leni Riefenstahl insists on telling the truth about Owens’ astonishing performance, though Joseph Goebbels wants her to suppress it.
I wanted to see it through her eyes because she was an artist born in Nazi Germany, or in pre-Nazi Germany, and became prominent during the Nazi reign and she was a woman which at the time was very much a second-class citizen. In the Nazi idea, they were supposed to stay home and cook and take care of the children. She was dazzled by Hitler and she was Hitler’s favorite but when she made this film she stuck to her ideals and she made Jesse the hero in the center of the movie. She actually had to leave the country soon after making the film because the Nazis were horrified about what she did. They actually made her cut all of Jesse Owens out of the film and then they looked at it and they realized how foolish they looked and they had to grudgingly put it all back in.
It’s all very well for all of us to look back and go “Oh I wouldn’t have gone along with that,” but I think the Nazis were very clever at covering up and their reign of terror was so complete. She should have known better, she should have been a better person and not helped to glamorize them but she was seeing Nazi Germany through an artist’s eyes, I think. And she openly admits that she was a Nazi at the time and then she lost faith in them and had to leave the country because she became so unpopular after making Olympia.
And he puts Jesse Owens’s story in the context of the negotiations that led to America’s participation in the Olympics, over the objections of those who did not want to appear to endorse Hitler.
Avery Brundage is more of a villain than Leni Riefenstahl. He knew what was going on and he helped the Nazis, then covered it up to serve himself. He was actually much more a villain than I think I was able to portray but it is hard to prove all of it. He was a really bad guy.
And there are unexpected good guys as well. Owens’ first-ever stay in unsegregated housing was in Berlin, which was a revelation for him. And he was befriended by one of the German athletes.
I wanted to see these events from as many different angles as I could. Jesse’s best friend became Carl ‘Luz’ Long, the German long jumper. They were very, very close. We have all the letters. They wrote to each other all the time and saw each other. Actually the last letter that Carl Long wrote to Jesse was from Sicily where the Americans were about to invade where he was fighting. His last letter says, “I think the Americans are coming, I’m probably not going to survive, would you go to Germany and find my son and tell him I was never a Nazi.” And then he did get killed and Jesse went searching for his son for years after the war and found him and gave him the letters. So the stories are are so rich and complicated. That’s a whole movie by itself I think, that one.
The movie also shows how competitive running has changed since the 1930’s.
It’s interesting, a lot of the Olympic coaches worked with us on this film and they said if Jesse had the nutrition, the shoes, the running tracks they have nowadays and the techniques they have he would be possibly beating Usain Bolt. He was such a freak of athletic nature. Because in those days they had to run with leather shoes on with no socks and the shoes would cling to their feet but basically with nails in the bottom.
No socks because socks would make them slip and they wanted the leather to sort of cling to their feet, but they were very painful to wear. And the track was made out of ashes and grit so if it was wet you would be running in mud basically. And nowadays the tracks are all so sprung and made of a type of material that these tiny spikes cling onto. And if they are wet it doesn’t affect them.
While he re-created some of the locations digitally, Hopkins was able to film parts of the movie in the imposing arena built by the Nazis for the Olympics.
All of the other arenas obviously don’t exist anymore so we re-created them exactly from the plans and stuff digitally. But we shot in the real Olympic arena. We shot half in Berlin, half in Montréal. So we shot in the real stadium and it visually affected the scenes because it’s an edifice that’s built to intimidate. You are meant to feel small and scared. We are very lucky to have been able to shoot in there and all around. We shot the scene where Jesse goes to meet Hitler and he refuses to meet him, we shot in the real place where it actually happened. In the room behind Hitler’s box which is still in the stadium, and we shot under his box we shot all over the stadium, underneath it, in the rooms, all around it. Every so often that they have referendum in Berlin whether to pull it down or not but it is an important piece of history I think and for better or worse it’s an edifice to something there.
The movie also shows the importance of Owens’ relationship to Larry Snyder (played by Jason Sudeikis), his Ohio State coach.
I think what they learned from each other was interesting. I think Jesse learned the psychology of winning and the psychology of not listening to other people and listening to his one heart and obviously to cut himself off from how the crowd was feeling about him, to really concentrate and focus, because he just loved to run. That’s what he did. It just made him feel free of all the burdens of what it would be like to have been a poor African-American in the Great Depression in American in 1933, which must have been hell on earth. And Larry learned that you can’t treat athletes like they are robots. They became such good friends over their whole lives. Larry was a very private person. He was very edgy and funny and charming. It’s very difficult to find out much about him. I loved having Jason in that role because he’s just got an edge to him, and his comedy has an edge. His comedy has a little darkness to it. And he’s a sports freak man, he just loves sports. So does Stephan so the two of them bonded on that and you could tell.
, and I was shooting interviews in Jackson, Mississippi and I read in the local paper that there was one clinic in the entire state of Mississippi. To give you a comparison in New York metropolitan area there are about 80 clinics. I was so floored by that. So I did what all documentary filmmakers do. I called them up and I said, “Can I come over?”
