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Interview With Kimberly Peirce

Out director Kimberly Peirce, whose first feature film was the critically acclaimed Boys Don’t Cry, has just completed her second feature film, Stop-Loss, which opens on March 28. As with Boys Don’t Cry. Peirce has tackled a subject that is both complicated and compelling: the experiences of young American soldiers returning home from combat tours in Iraq.

The film, which stars Ryan Phillippe, Channing Tatum and Abbie Cornish, takes its title from the military’s stop-loss policy that allows soldiers to be redeployed despite having completed their tour of duty. The policy, also sometimes referred to as a “back-door draft,” is central to the film’s story line.

Peirce, in the middle of a 22-city tour to promote her film, took some time to talk with AfterEllen.com about her inspiration for the film, the challenges of telling “real” stories, and, on a lighter note, her appreciation of The L Word and the sexy scene she directed in Season 3 that ended up on the cutting room floor.

AfterEllen.com: I got the chance to see your film when it was previewing in San Francisco and thought it was quite moving. I wanted to ask you first of all what inspired you to make a film about the soldiers’ experience – those men and women who are in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kimberly Peirce:I was actually in New York for 9/11. I had been living there for 13 years, and I unfortunately saw the towers fall. Everybody wanted to come over and congregate, and it ended up being at my house because I have a house and a little film office. And we watched the day unfold. And it was one of the most devastating days for us as it was for, you know, everybody.

AE: Mm-hmm. Everyone, I think. KP:And we went to the vigils for victims. They started in New York because New York was in a state of mourning. When America declared war it was just so dramatic, and I could just tell we were amidst this seismic cultural change. I just knew that I needed to tell the story of the soldiers – who they were, why they were signing up and what their experience in combat was and upon coming home.

Not long after I got that idea and had started looking into it, my baby brother signed up to fight. We had a grandfather who fought in World War II and now we suddenly were a military family again. And it was a very significant kind of life-changing experience for all of us.

My mother – we were all terrified that he would get killed, terrified that he would get injured, didn’t know about the emotional ramifications of what he would do or experience. My mother would call me crying. She wouldn’t go home at night because she knows if a soldier gets killed they have to inform you in person, and she didn’t want to be there in person.

But there was also this very profound, personal side in that I am IM-ing [instant messaging] with my brother and other soldiers, which was amazing – that they were actually fighting and then getting on the internet, and you had instantaneous communication with them.

And the other thing was that my brother and other soldiers brought back from combat soldier-made videos. And this is probably the biggest influence on the movie. They were videos that the soldiers had shot with one-chip cameras.

They had … put the camera on a sandbag, they had put it into a Humvee. They had put it on a gun turret. They even put it on the ground during a firefight. So the camera wasn’t moving around the way you’re used to watching a movie, but it was just in the action.

AE: Right in the midst of it. KP: So you were hearing: “Oh, my God. We’ve got a guy down.” You were seeing it.

AE: Like that opening combat sequence that you shot. I just found that incredibly chilling – I’ve never been in combat, but it just struck me as incredibly real – what it must be like to have that experience, to be in that chaos, not knowing what is around the corner. How did you create such a real scene? KP: Well, I was looking at these soldier videos and really learning about this experience from their point of view. And I knew that the movie needed to come from the soldiers’ point of view. Every word. Every image. Every song. Every movement needed to feel as they experienced it.

So I not only gathered these video images, but I also interviewed a number of soldiers and I would ask them: “Tell me exactly what it’s like. Tell me what you do on a daily basis.”

And so I would learn all about their missions, and I found that the checkpoints were the most emblematic, the most moving of what soldiers in this generation are going through. … They’re told to stop at a certain point. One Humvee goes to the front, one goes to the back. And they trap whatever traffic is coming either way, and that’s how they hope to find somebody who happens to be doing something that they don’t want.

But that puts the soldier in an incredibly vulnerable position. That means that everybody who comes up to that checkpoint – they don’t know who’s in that car. It could be an innocent. It could be somebody with a weapon. It could be a car bomb. And … I knew that I needed to tell [that] – I knew that that needed to be one of the elements in that opening scene.

AE: I really think that came across very vividly, that you had a lot of empathy for them. When they had to chase those guys into the alley, I was sitting there asking myself, why do you even have to go there? But I knew that was part of what they were required to do. KP: That’s what they’re required to do. But then again that intensifies the whole experience of being vulnerable. So as they’re going down the alley – and this is the thing that came directly from soldiers’ testimony to me – they said: “Look. I signed up for all the right reasons – to defend my family, my country and my home.

“I volunteered. But when I went over there, particularly to Iraq, the enemy that I thought I was going after wasn’t there. And the enemy that I thought might be in the desert was in fact in the bedrooms and the hallways and the kitchens of these peoples’ homes.”

And that was incredibly challenging because [of] the same thing: You don’t know who’s gonna come at you. Is it an innocent person? Is it somebody with a weapon?

AE: Right. KP:So you’re in a higher state of danger of accidentally killing an innocent person, and you have a harder [time] protecting your men. And the whole job of a soldier is to survive and protect his or her men. The people to your left. The people to your right.

So that, to me, was profoundly important to do that opening. And the way I work is it’s all about character. It’s about bringing the character to life emotionally, truthfully, and bringing to life the physical circumstances. So as I heard these things, I would just keep [trying to understand] from a soldiers’ point of view.

So particularly in the alley scene, where would we put the Humvees? [speaking from the point of view of a soldier] Oh, we would put them at the front. Then what would happen? Oh, we would get out of the Humvees and we would stack along either wall. OK. Then we would walk down the wall, and we would go into a house … and we would clear that house.

Right? Then we would walk down the alley more, and we would be going towards that taxi that we’re trying to get to, because that’s where the guys that we’re pursuing have left from. OK, as we’re going down, you know, then we start to get pinned in, and when we get pinned in, what do we do?

So if you asked me how I figured out how to make the sequence, it was by listening to soldiers. Every single thing that they said. And then literally taking that anecdote or the story and drawing a physical diagram –

AE: And piecing it together.

KP: Exactly. … Anything that I included has to be necessary, has to be real and has to be causal. It has to advance the drama and the characters.

AE: Yeah. And I think that you were very successful with that. KP: Oh, good.

AE: In your previous film, Boys Don’t Cry, you also did a lot of research, and with both these films you’ve chosen subject matter that has a very strong social context. Why do narrative film over documentaries? Particularly with Stop-Loss, I thought this could have easily been a documentary. So what drew you to choosing narrative? KP: You ask a really good question. … I started this, in a way, as a documentary by traveling around interviewing soldiers.

But what became very, very clear – and it was the same thing that became clear with Brandon Teena – I could figure out everything about the Brandon Teena story, but I could never interview Brandon. He was dead. But I could come to know Brandon in a certain way.

So I would end up having in my story the recollection of who Brandon might have been, whereas if I wrote a character and made that character Brandon Teena. … I could write it and cast it, and I could bring Brandon to life on screen. You were going to have a much deeper connection and a much richer experience, in my eyes, if I made a fiction over a documentary.

Same thing here. I was interviewing all these soldiers. Their stories were breaking my heart. They were making me laugh. They were moving me. Right? But if I tried to tell this story it would be in recollection. … You would only ever be describing the camaraderie between the men. You would only be describing the danger. You would never be in it firsthand, because it would always be recollection.

AE: So the narrative opens up a different kind of experience for the audience – to participate in these soldiers’ experience.

KP: Yes. I believe for me, because I’m a fiction filmmaker – and I mean I use fiction loosely because it’s so based on reality.

AE: That’s what’s interesting about your work I think. KP: Right. But because I’m aiming for the underlying emotional truth … what I’m doing is I’m bringing you deeply inside the experience of a human being. But I’m bringing you inside of it in a way like – if I was a great novelist I would write a novel.

But I’m not. But what I can do is I can create these characters, and I think I can reveal to you the camaraderie between soldiers better in this medium … than I could in any other medium.

AE: Well, that makes total sense. KP: Instead of having them talk about it, they’re going to do it in front of you.

AE: A few days after I saw your film, there was a big article in the Los Angeles Times about repeated Iraq deployments raising mental health risks for soldiers – it’s obvious – not surprising. KP: Of course they do.

AE: With subject matter like this, it must be tough to get a film made. KP: Well, I’ll tell you, yes. It’s always tough to get a film made. But what I did was I paid for all the research. I paid for writing the script with my writing partner, Mark Richard, who’s a great novelist.

Then we went to the financiers and the studios on a Friday and we said, “Here’s the script, and I cut together a five-minute trailer based on my interviews throughout America of soldiers,” and I included these soldier-made videos. And we were like: “And this is the aesthetic. It’s young. It’s gonna be sexy. It’s gonna be authentic. It’s gonna move you.”

And they bought it that weekend. They bought it overnight – four studios, two financiers, and they greenlit it – which never happens. So I sold a script as a greenlit movie. So was it difficult to get made? It was difficult to make, but they could see the inherent dramatic nature of it, the authenticity.

AE: And your track record, too, speaks volumes. KP: They knew that I was serious, and they knew I knew what I was doing. But … what’s so wonderful is we all saw [that it] was a human story. It was about camaraderie.

I really encourage you to go to stoplossmovie.com/soundoff. It’s a website. I’ve given cameras to soldiers and their families. They film themselves. We get it together. We put it on the website. They interact with other military families, with soldiers, with civilians.

And then [the website] has an area where … people go to my screenings and then they write in … like: “This is my story. I’m a stop-loss soldier. This is my husband’s story. He’s not gonna see the birth of his child.” And it’s just one of those moving things. It’s a real passion project.

AE: AfterEllen.com readers also have an interest, obviously, in your work directing for The L Word. I’m just wondering, do you have any future plans to direct for the show again? And what was that experience like for you? KP: I love the girls. I love the girls. I mean literally. I love Kate. I love Leisha. I love Jennifer. I love – who’s the fourth one?

AE: There’s so many of them now I can’t even remember them all. KP: Yeah. It was great because I know Rose Troche and I know the girls involved with it, and they had asked me to do it and then I went, and it was literally a blast. And they were like – people were like, “Thank you for bringing sex back to The L Word,” because we had like four different sex scenes.

AE: It was a great episode. [Peirce directed Episode 3.5, “Lifeline.”] KP: Actually, the sex scene went on for much longer. It was much more graphic. They cut it down. You know what I mean? I would love for you to see my cut.

AE: I think a lot of people would love to see your cut. KP: I would love to see my cut. So maybe if we can get it out there. It’s just much more graphic and it goes much more farther, you know. I had such a great time. … It’s such a guilty pleasure, but I watch The L Word every week. Like I come home and we’re all like – I mean we’re just, we love it. What can you do? It’s just – it’s hilarious.

AE: Showtime has just ordered a sixth season to wrap things up, so any chance you’ll direct one of the final episodes? KP: I would totally consider it. I’d have to see how my schedule goes. I just – I really would. I’m a huge fan.

Stop-Loss opens nationwide on March 28, 2008. Go to the film’s official site for more information.

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