Sunday, March 30, 2008
A+E, Movies
Back to the front
Kimberly Pierce on ‘Stop-Loss’ and dealing with the Hollywood machine
Ryan Phillippe and Abbie Cornish star in “Stop-Loss.”
CREDIT: PHOTOS/COURTESY OF PARAMOUNT PICTURES
“STOP-LOSS”
Ryan Phillippe, Abbie Cornish
Directed by Kimberly Pierce
Rated R
Wide release
By Steve Warren
Movies about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan fell like dominoes at the box office last year: “Home of the Brave,” “In the Valley of Elah,” “Rendition,” “Redacted” and “Lions for Lambs,” not to mention “No End in Sight” and other documentaries. The makers of “Stop-Loss”—about a soldier (Ryan Phillippe) who comes back home from the war only to find that his enlistment has been extended and he has to go back—hope to turn that around. And they’ve got a few things going for them: producer Scott Rubin, who just won an Oscar for “No Country for Old Men”; a marketing campaign emphasizing the youth appeal of a story focused on twentysomethings; and director and co-writer Kimberly Pierce, making her first film since 1999’s “Boys Don’t Cry.”
The Sunday Paper recently talked with Pierce about the film.
Q Francis Ford Coppola just went 10 years between films. You’re not far behind.
A Actually, we sold the movie in November of ’05, so it takes a little while. I guess if it comes out in March it will be eight years [since “Boys Don’t Cry”].
What took so long? What were you doing in the meantime?
[Hollywood] certainly came to me with a lot of projects, millions of dollars, and as I would get into them they wanted to hire me because I brought such authenticity to it, but what I brought to it wasn’t necessarily what the Hollywood machine was looking for. For me it’s like, I’m going to make it anthropologically truthful, I’m going to get deeply inside the character, I’m going to make it as honest as possible. That’s not always what the machine wants.
You spent four years working on a project that ultimately stalled. What happened then?
I picked up my camera, like I did on “Boys Don’t Cry,” and I started traveling the country. I started interviewing soldiers. My little brother was fighting in Iraq. I was interviewing him, interviewing my mother, and I was using all that information to transform this into a story. I worked with a wonderful novelist [Mark Richard] from Texas and we co-wrote a script—on spec. I paid for everything, which is an expensive development process, but I tell you, I woke up every day and did exactly what I wanted. I worked 20-hour days, I interviewed soldiers and I was in heaven because I was following my passion.
I’ll never give that up again. I don’t want to be in a situation where I’m calling executives saying, “There’s a homecoming of a thousand soldiers in Paris, Ill. It’s the 1544th, highest rate of casualties, highest rate of combat hours. This is stunning. This is what’s happening to America right now, and I wanna jump on a plane for $300 and I wanna buy some tapes that cost five dollars each and I wanna film everybody in that town.” I don’t want somebody saying, “I don’t know if it’s worth the $600 or the $1000 it’s gonna cost.” I don’t want somebody saying, “I don’t know if that’s really interesting,” because you know what? It’s so interesting it’s mind-boggling! So I allowed my own interest to drive me.
What we delivered to Hollywood on a Friday was a script. It had the fundamental story of these patriotic guys who sign up for all the right reasons—to defend their home, their country and their family after 9/11—who go over there and have this experience that I found every single soldier I spoke to said: When you’re over there in combat it’s about one thing, and that’s survival, keeping the guy to your left and the guy to your right alive. It was that story of the script—Sgt. Brandon King [Phillippe] comes home, he wants to put it behind him, he can’t because he gets stop-lossed and he and his whole family and his community are affected. … And we said, “Here it is. If you buy it, you make it. If you don’t make it, you pay us a huge fee, millions of dollars. We don’t want the money. We want you to make the movie.”
So we sent it out on a Friday. Monday morning we had four studios that wanted to make it and finance it, and that was wonderful. They knew what the story was and they knew what the sensibility was.
Masculinity seems to be the link between your two films—in one case, in the body of a woman, and in the other, war as the ultimate test. Is that something you’re consciously interested in?
Hugely interested, yeah. Hugely interested in constructions of masculinity. Its not like, “Oh, I wanna go write a thesis on it,” but it’s a thing I’m drawn to—particularly, a girl who was dressing as a boy and performing masculinity and bonding with the boys, and these young men, because I think in America it’s so fascinating looking at the demands and the expectations that are put on men to be masculine.
Obviously, masculinity might come more naturally for men than it does for women, but I still think that our men are struggling with what it means to be a good man. Does being a good man mean that you sign up and are willing to die for your country? Does it mean that you get drunk? Does it mean that you get into a bar fight? Does it mean that you don’t? Maybe that’s why men are sometimes boys and metrosexuals versus being what we would consider “real men.” And I think also there’s been this resurgence of masculinity because of the war and because of these images of strength.
It moves me and it breaks my heart, and I think the great thing about this situation was that I not only got to understand masculinity more, but I love the idea of the masculinity that forms in groups of men. So many soldiers said to me, “It’s about the guys. I love the guys I fought with.” “I would die for him, and that was the most intense relationship of my entire life.” That says so much about what men need.
Do you wish “Stop-Loss” had been rated PG-13 so more young people could see it?
Sure, I would love it—but … I felt that to alter it any, to bring it down, wouldn’t have been authentic to what’s really going on. So that’s tough, because I would rather everybody see it. So then we have to work harder to sell it, but what you don’t want to do is diminish the underlying truth of it. SP