Q&A: Brian De Palma

Over his forty-year career, Brian De Palma has established himself as one of America’s most gifted filmmakers, possessed of an astonishing visual sense and a restless, prickly intelligence. No other still-working director of his generation has been so committed to aesthetic and political provocation. He’s still making movies that rile people up while some of his best-known peers have long since settled into respectability.

In his newest film, Redacted, which won him the Silver Lion prize for best director at this year’s Venice Film Festival, De Palma has his say on the Iraq War. The film takes off from an actual atrocity committed by U.S. soldiers in March of 2006: in the town of Al-Mahmudiyah, a fourteen-year-old Iraqi girl was raped and killed by five soldiers, who also murdered her parents and her five-year-old sister. The incident recalls the case of a Vietnamese woman whose rape at the hands of American soldiers during the Vietnam war served as the basis for De Palma’s 1989 Casualties of War, a movie he struggled for years to finance. Back when the Vietnam war was still raging, De Palma was one of the first American filmmakers to address it, when his low-budget comedies Greetings and Hi, Mom! used draft-dodging, the Kennedy assassination, and racial violence as springboards for riotous satire.

Seeing history repeat itself, De Palma decided to tap into his long-standing obsession with the filter of media and tell a story about soldiers in Iraq, driven psychotic by endlessly extended tours of duty, using his own mock-media syntax. The action of the film is seen through the camera of a soldier making his own video diary of his time in Iraq, through the footage of a French documentary crew, through various blog entries and YouTube postings, and even through security-camera feed. Much of the content was inspired by actual material that De Palma came across while trawling the news channels and surfing the Internet. The total effect of all this trompe-l’œil is horrifying, heart-breaking and sometimes very funny, but none of it can really prepare you for the final section, “Collateral Damage”, which includes the most appalling journalistic photographs of actual carnage in Iraq that De Palma could get his hands on, images that resemble events that De Palma staged for the movie but are, of course, much, much worse. (The movie closes with a staged image representing the aftermath of the rape-murder.)

We spoke with De Palma the day after Redacted was shown at the New York Film Festival, a screening that was followed by a Q&A in which the director complained about his producers’ decision to alter the “Collateral Damage” sequence by placing black bars over the eyes of the people in the photos. — Phil Nugent

Does it surprise you that, almost forty years after Greetings, you’re once again using a movie to protest American involvement in a controversial foreign war?
What kind of surprises me is that there are no young filmmakers out there commenting on this particular situation.

Do you think that movies, generally speaking, did more to comment on Vietnam when it was at this stage?
Maybe not, but there was so much of it on television, on the news, and there were documentaries.
[With Iraq,] there’s no pictures. We’re all so inside the Green Zone on this war. It’s all outside somewhere. What we see of it is all carefully presented to us in very positive terms, even though the reality is so horrible that they can only cover it up so much. Obviously, the reality has gotten onto the Internet. And that’s where I got all the material for my movie.

Has the news media deteriorated a lot since it was covering Vietnam?
Yes, the media has basically been co-opted and made rich. If you’re supposed to be a watchdog for corruption, and you’re a part of it all. . .

You’ve been doing media criticism for practically your whole career. Have you taken a lot of heat because of that?
I’ve never really been part of the establishment. I’ve always been critical of the establishment in all forms. We need a critical press, a watchdog press, but instead they present things as a sort of fait accompli, like, “this is the way it is,”
and that doesn’t make any sense to me.

But their arguments are very cleverly packaged and argued, with educated and sort of sophisticated people presenting them to you. They come up with things like “Weapons of Mass Destruction”; who came up with that?
It sure sounds scary! And having lived through the Cold War, where they basically kept you scared for thirty years, with all those missiles pointed at our hearts, and any moment somebody’s gonna hit the button and we’re all gonna be liquefied, I think I got a little annoyed at the idea of keeping us scared all the time. And then when the Bush administration did it constantly — “We’re in the green, in the red, in the purple zone, we just stopped another terrorist attack and we can’t tell you where or how or when, it’s all classified.” You just go, wow!
And because I’m a director, I’m very aware of how things are manipulated through television and imagery.
You try to find a venue to show that to your audience.

How did you choose what to include in this mosaic of competing viewpoints? For instance, the video blog post showing this left-wing young woman just ranting about the soldiers. . .
Strange you should bring that up. That was the one thing I could actually purchase. Everything else I had to fictionalize because nobody would give me the rights to it. I couldn’t use the news stories, I couldn’t use the things that were actually said by the real people. But that thing that you bring up was an actual blog by “Wild Bill”, and I just basically took exactly what he said; I may have changed a little but, I don’t think I changed it much. That was a written blog, and I just gave it to an actor to say, and the best person to do it was that girl. I had guys read it, but she just did it with such brio!
I was always amazed. What you see in this movie, it’s my way of saying, I can’t believe it myself. There was something that I wanted to put in, from a website, “Lego Fest”. They had the whole murder and rape illustrated with Legos.

Oh-kay.
And I said, if I put this in, nobody’s gonna believe it. But I did try to buy it, buy the rights.
And of course, I couldn’t, because the guy who did the site couldn’t sell it to us because then Legos would sue us.

What’s going to happen with the “Collateral Damage” section?
I’ve fought every conceivable way to keep it from being redacted, but I’m sort of nailed by a legal technicality. I fought it from the time I got the dictum right up until about thirty-six hours ago. I think it’s terrible, but I can’t fight the insurance companies. These are all war photographs. We know the photographer who took then. I mean, I could have fictionalized, could have staged those photographs! The last photo is staged. I could have staged them all. From my viewpoint, I think it’s terrible to take the faces away from these people. They’re suffering; they want these pictures shown.