The "Stop Loss" Interview
By Cole Smithey
The director of "Boys Don’t Cry" (1999) studied English and Japanese lit at the University of Chicago before receiving an M.F.A. in film from Columbia, and you can see her thorough attention to detail in her films. After playing a wild goose chase over directing "Silent Star," for which Annette Bening, Hugh Jackman and Ben Kingsley had been cast, Kimberly Peirce pulled herself up by her bootstraps to make, as it turns out, one of the most insightful and poignent films about the Iraq war. Articulate, animated and intent on addressing every question with a full explanation, it’s easy to see how Kimberly Pierce gets such powerful performances from her actors. She knows what she’s talking about.
I sat down with Ms. Pierce at New York’s Regency hotel to find out all I could about her latest film "Stop Loss," centered around the U.S. military’s current backdoor-draft, responsible for forcing 81,000 soldiers back into war after multiple tours of duty. Squad leader Sgt. Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe), his best friend Sgt. Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum), and fellow soldier Tommy Burgess (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) return to their Brazos, Texas hometown after spending five blood-soaked years in Afghanistan and Iraq. Following a welcome home ceremony, where Brandon receives a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star from a U.S. Senator, he tries to help Steve and Tommy adjust to civilian life in spite of their violence riddled psyches. Brandon’s own effort to reacclimate to home life is challenged when he is ordered, under the Stop-Loss policy, to return to Iraq. "With all due respect, F#*k the President," is Brandon’s vehement reply to the Commanding Officer who ineffectively attempts to jail Brandon. What follows is an honest, patriotic soldier’s desperate attempt to find a way out of a malicious bureaucratic booby trap.
I sat down with Ms. Pierce at New York’s Regency hotel to find out all I could about how and why she made "Stop Loss."
CS: How did you plan the production and locations?
KP: I didn’t try to do anything super outrageous. We looked at shooting in Spain. We looked at shooting in Mexico, also shooting in Texas because that would’ve been much cheaper. They tried to get me to shoot at the Alamo set—which would not have worked. They always say [sarcastically], never say never until you try. And when it doesn’t work we don’t do it. But it was very fortunate that the studio spent the money, ‘cause it is an expense to go to Morocco. I wanted to shoot in an Islamist country. It was important to me always to get it as culturally accurate as possible. I learn things whenever I’m on a location. I go out and hang out with the people—I get to know kind of what the vibe is like so when I’m shooting I actually have a sense of it.
We made a choice to shoot in Marakesh because Marakesh is a city, and since we’re representing urban combat, we didn’t need a suburb, we needed a city. We also wanted it to feel very confined, so that was why we loved it when we found this community which has these buildings that have these narrow alleyways. We knew that was a great metaphor for what’s happening to the soldiers. They’re getting in deeper—the walls are closing in—they can’t get out. So that allowed us to bring the humvees in. We block off escape with the humvees, the guys come out. The stacking is very important. This is something that’s unique to this war. The soldiers form a unit together and they move in unison. The guy who’s second in command holds the first guy like a dog. He holds him by his collar. So you’ve got Channing, who plays Steve (number one), you’ve got Ryan (number two), but Ryan’s really in control. He controls the stack. "Go, go, go."
So you hear the guys. They have to hit each other with their bodies, that’s how they move. We had to make sure the walls were perfect because it allowed us a great stack. Then you end up going into to some of the houses. We had to block up most of the doors because otherwise the movie would’ve been ten hours of clearing houses, and you have to clear every open entranceway. So we clear a couple—block, block, block—we move on.
CS: Did you have any trouble obtaining access to filming in Marakesh?
KP: Well, the King is very supportive of filmmaking. They make a lot of money, and actually the people—from what I understand—have a better standard of living than most countries because of film revenues. "Black Hawk Down" was shot there. There’s a history of it. I think if we wanted to do something that was egregious they probably wouldn’t let us, but I was treading so lightly because the last thing I want to do is add one more image in the world of a violent America. So I was being very careful. I was trying to get to know the community a little bit and try to make it a little more gentle.
CS: How did you choreograph the ambush sequence?
So for the ambush, everything’s physical. What I’m doing is trying to figure out how much screen time it’s going to take from one point to another because I don’t want to have too many shots that I’m going to throw out in the editing room because I only have a certain amount of time and days to shoot. So for me it’s all about the economics of time and shooting.
I have four camera crews that I’m operating with, and that’s because it’s very expensive to blow things up. There’s a lot of clean-up time. You’ve got blood going off. You’ve got to clear the guns. You’ve got to have gun masters around to make sure that it’s safe. So I’ve got different crews handling guns, handling make-up, handling explosives. They all require resets.
Then you have to cut it into two. You have to cover each guy. So each guy gets a single. Then you’ve gotta get your doubles, then you’ve gotta get your scope. You need to know how big it is. You need to know that there’s somebody up top. You need to have shots looking down so you have a sense of foreboding. That’s where a lot of your angles come in. When an RPG (rocket propelled grenade) comes, that has to be shot totally separately. So that’s not main unit. Main unit is the actors. So, I’m working with the actors in four different camera angles to maximize. But then I have to go off this set and go do things exploding, stunt doubles exploding. And that’s very tricky because I have to make sure that everything that I shoot is going to cut in on that. And I’m watching four monitors the whole time that I’m doing this—which is an interesting skill because your brain has to look at all four, and you can’t replay it. You have 300 people waiting. So you have to learn to watch it very quickly, and just write down what worked and what didn’t work. It’s interesting learning how to direct in four spaces of your head at once.
CS: The scene when Ryan speaks truth to power and says, "Fuck the President," uses a different kind of violence. How did you develop that scene?
KP: It was a very delicate scene. It’s not a scene that I take lightly, and it’s a scene from a soldier’s point of view. I wanted to make sure that it was honest and accurate to them. What we didn’t want was a guy who suddenly became a political activist, who suddenly had an agenda, because that wouldn’t have been truthful to soldiers. So I interviewed a number of soldiers about that scene, and we were very clear in setting up the circumstances. It had to be a completely patriotic guy who signed up for what he considered all the right reasons—to protect his family, his home and his country. And he gets over there—and this is revealed in a scene in the car. He says, "It wasn’t about anything that we signed up for. Instead of being in a desert, instead of fighting the enemy that we thought we were fighting, we were in the bedrooms, the hallways, and in the kitchens. It was impossible to not kill innocent people and not have our men killed, and not have our men injured." So, what do we do, we fall back on the one thing that all soldiers can agree on; it’s about comradery; it’s just about survival.
So, that’s why you needed to see that opening battle scene. That’s why he wanted to come home. I’ve always had a sense that if it was World War II and his country needed him, this guy would go right back, but something didn’t seem right to him. He couldn’t protect his men. So he comes home and he thinks, "I’m going to put that behind me. I don’t even have to process this." What’s so interesting to me about Stop-Loss is it just maximizes all the problems that everybody’s been going through. So here’s a guy who feels he did everything right. "I’m a golden boy; I gave my country my life." And when the system does that to him, we wanted it to be a reactive moment. We wanted it to be a moment when he says something that he’s never said in his life and he never imagined saying. It comes out. It is a true expression of how he feels, but it’s not intellectualized because if we thought it was intellectualized it wouldn’t work. So he spurts it out, and that’s why you hang on him. He’s kind of not sure he said it. He doesn’t want to back down, but he’s really gotten himself into something, and he spends the rest of the journey catching up with his emotions. It was interesting. We needed it to be an irrational moment, so that’s one thing in terms of how I had to direct it.
He says, "Fuck the President," and then the commander says, "Fuck the President?" What was interesting about the commander saying "Fuck the President," in interviewing guys like this—a lot of them are in a position where they’re managers. They love the men. It kills them to see the men recycled and destroyed. We didn’t want it to be the political activist guy and an angry dumb commander. No, no, it was a sergeant who was coming to a rational and normal realization, and out of frustration saying this, and his commander, who doesn’t totally disagree with what he’s saying. That was a very delicate thing to get across. We were sort of looking at people like McCain in a way, for that commander. It was a very interesting thing that we had to get clear. You didn’t want it to turn into rhetoric or anything. It’s a very emotional scene of two men who are fundamentally agreeing that our men are being chewed up, and that’s the heartbreak, because he says, "I’ve lost more men than that." They’re both saying, losing men is killing me.
CS: Is your brother still in the war, and how has your family coped with him being in Iraq?
KP: My brother has gotten out. He would have been stop-lossed but he got out on a medical.
I come from a military family and was home when the war stories were going on, and we were playing the soldiers’ videos. My mother walked out of the room. She said, "I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to see it, and I don’t want to know the details." Because when her son was gone, my mother would call me crying, saying, "You will never know what fear is until you’ve had a child shot at in a combat zone. I often times don’t want to come home from work because I know that if I’m there—I have to be there in person for them to tell me that, God forbid, he’s dead or he’s injured."
That was profound. And she has such a distaste for the details of the combat stuff, and yet, maybe because I’m his sister, maybe because I’m younger, maybe because it’s fascinating to me—I could listen to it. That was why I knew we needed a scene where they were talking graphically about their experiences. When soldiers come back—it’s graphic; they’re in it. So I knew we needed a scene that was just as graphic as the way boys talk, but they were sort of tuned out and they were insensitive to what was going on around them. That’s why the father says, "Steve, pay attention to how you’re making the families feel." But I do feel we need those scenes more and more. We need the soldiers and the civilians. We need to be sharing these experiences. It’s all of our experiences.
They need to get it out. I’ve gone to 22 cities now with the movie, I’ve done Q&As at every single one—people stay and not only do they ask me questions and listen, they stand up and they tell their story. I’ve had vet after vet after vet in all of these screenings stand up and say, "Thank you," and share some incredibly emotional story. I’ve had Viet Nam vets come up to me and say, "Thank you, it took years for me to speak." One of them in San Jose said, "You know I lost my humanity. I’m only now getting it back slowly." They should be telling their stories, so I have this site stoplossmovie.comsoundoff. We give cameras to soldiers and their families. They make videos, we post them, and people write in about screenings all over the country. I believe deeply in the power of healing through storytelling.
CS: Did this movie come from any kind of grudge against the Bush administration?
KP: No, it came from having gone around the country. For example I went to Paris, Illinois where there was a homecoming of a thousand soldiers of the 1544th. They’re a transportation unit that had the highest causality rate, and the highest number of combat hours. I found that odd. Why would a transportation unit have that? They’re not supposed to have that. They’re supposed to be transporting Generals. But they are commonly used to transport arms. So these kids are getting shot up. They haven’t had combat training, and that means they’re on the top of the gun turret and they’re firing machine guns to save themselves. I read amazing stories. They’re jumping out trying to save one another—clearly not what they signed up for.
So I went there to that town with my research partner Carolyn Reed, and we just videotaped the families. We went to the homecoming parade, which you could intercut with the homecoming parade in the movie. We learned about that. We talked to the military families. We talked to widows, sisters—people who had multiple generations in the military. It was near a base town. So, it became clear to me that if I was going to tell the fundamental story of this generation, most of the kids are coming from Middle America. Texas has the most base towns. I was reading story after story of kids getting killed from Texas. So I thought, let’s set it here. And then also, I really love Texas because it does convey a sort of emblematic Americana. I can have the homecoming parade there. If I had it in New York City, it wouldn’t be real. I can have the flag-waving, and it’s not mocking them; it really is what they do. I can have the fact that the father fought in Viet Nam, and the son fought; that’s typical. That isn’t typical here [New York]. Like, I was unusual among my friends that my brother was fighting.
I went to that dancehall two nights before we shot, and they were dancing Texas swing, and it was that band. It’s gun country. It’s car country. There were all of these really graphic, physical elements that I could bring to the fore—the boys fighting in the cemetery.
CS: Do you see any similarities between "Boys Don’t Cry" and "Stop-Loss"?
KP: They are both stories about masculinity. She’s trying to construct herself as a man to get love and acceptance. I think even if you’re a man you’ve always dealing with masculinity. I don’t think it just comes naturally. Men are also in a process of shaping their masculinity, and I feel like that’s a lot of what the boys in the movie are doing. There’s a lot of real deep connection among them. It’s a quest for identity. Ryan is coming to understand himself. When he says, "Fuck the President," he’s entering a new fold in his life of self-awareness.
CS: As a woman filmmaker, was there more pressure to make a great second film?
KP: There certainly is a commonality that a lot of the women directors who make it, make a first film that is very personal, very powerful, and they try to do that again. I see that among my friends Tamara Jenkins and Patty Jenkins. The quest to make something that’s emotionally moving, and on a scale that we’re trying to make it, is a struggle because you not only have to write a script that’s commercial and moving, then you’ve got to launch the whole thing.
I sold this as a green-lit script in November of 2005. That was considered really quick because I started writing it at the beginning of ’05—started researching it at the beginning of ’04. It takes a year to shoot. It takes a year to edit. It may be that we’re questing for emotionally moving material. You know I should have worked sooner. I think that that would have been great. I think that "Boys Don’t Cry" was the greatest gift of my life. I was in grad school at Columbia, fell in love with that character, and had a feature film way earlier than I ever expected, and had a Hollywood career. They offered me millions of dollars and lots of scripts. I would read them, and they didn’t have an emotional authenticity because they weren’t really being created by people who had a quest. They were ideas that people had had in the system. So, I had a hard time finding something in the system that spoke to me.
I ended up working on a screenplay that I did write—that is amazing, I think, and I got it cast with Ben Kingsley, Hugh Jackman, Evan Rachel Wood, and Annette Bening at the end of 2003, which wouldn’t have been too long. On the one-yard line, the studio ran the numbers; they said, "We would love to see the 30 million dollar version. We would like to pay for the 20 million dollar version." I lost some time there. But literally a week after, I picked up my video camera and said "You know what, screw it. I’m gonna pay for it and do it myself."
CS: Abbie Cornish is a unique actress. How did you arrive at casting her?
KP: She was my first choice. I had seen "Somersault" and I had seen "Candy." Phenomenal—and she was not available, which is a heartbreak when you know somebody’s right and you have to go cast. And you’re like ‘okay,’ and you make do. So I was interviewing all these great young actresses. They weren’t right, but I was trying to make it work, and all of sudden her agent said, "Abbie read the script. She loves it, she wants to audition, and she wants the part."
I would have hired her, but if she wants to audition, I love audition. So we flew her in and we just got to work more. We had an old-fashioned screen test in Texas. It was gorgeous. We fell in love with her.
She is really extraordinarily talented. There are some actors that are so charismatic, and whom from emotion rides over the face and over the eyes so well that you don’t have to give them a line and they can carry their own in a scene. That to me is what it’s all about. It’s amazing. Of course you can then direct them—give them action. But they’re essentially emoting every single second they’re on screen, and the other actors have to watch out because they absorb the energy of the scene.
CS: The term "Stop-Loss" is alien to most people.
KP: It’s actually an economic term. Stop-Loss, to me, is so interesting because the soldiers are stop-lossed (at least 81,000), the families are stop-lossed. If you read my website, they’re all writing in saying, "My husband is stop-lossed. He’s not seen the birth of our child." "My nephew was stop-lossed. He got killed." So the families are stop-lossed, and in a way America is stop-lossed, because it means that you’re just recycling those resources that need to be utilized in a better way. Clearly, we need to figure out some solution. Only this war is stop-lossed, and only at this time, with these soldiers.
And I want to tell you one thing about Canada—why it’s really not viable right now. In Viet Nam, I think 50,000 people—that’s the conservative estimate—crossed the boarder and got citizenship. That was because you could go the boarder and get citizenship and walk right in. Now, you can only get citizenship by applying from the country that you’re from. I think we have 12,000 soldiers that are AWOL right now in America. Look up Harpers 2004—great article. So we have between 200 and 300 soldiers in Canada, but they won’t give them citizenship. They won’t give them refugee status, and they’re on the verge of deporting them or at least deciding whether they’re going to be deported.
