Kathryn Bigelow And Mark Boal Discuss ZERO DARK THIRTY

Yesterday the New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC) named ZERO DARK THIRTY Best Picture. Wins also went to Kathryn Bigelow, Best Director and Greig Fraser, Best Cinematography. Here’s the latest clip from Columbia Pictures’ film.

The hunt for Osama bin Laden preoccupied the world and two American presidential administrations for more than a decade. But in the end, it took a small, dedicated team of CIA operatives to track him down. Every aspect of their mission was shrouded in secrecy. Though some of the details have since been made public, many of the most significant parts of the intelligence operation – including the central role played by that team – are brought to the screen for the first time in a nuanced and gripping new film by the Oscar®-winning creative duo of Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal.

Their account of bin Laden’s pursuit and capture, vivid yet faithful to the facts, takes the viewer inside the hubs of power and to the front lines of this historic mission, culminating in the special operations assault on a mysterious, suburban Pakistani compound.

But it is the lead-up to the raid that truly distinguishes ZERO DARK THIRTY from other accounts. The quest to find bin Laden was fraught with danger from the start, and not every U.S. operative survived. Some intelligence experts came to believe that the assignment was impossible to carry out, but on the ground a determined team of analysts and interrogators defied the odds and proved them wrong. For the first time, their struggle to find Osama bin Laden is told on the screen in electrifying detail.

The initial, self-imposed creative challenge Bigelow and Boal faced in developing Zero Dark Thirty was how to tell this multifaceted story in the compressed time frame of a motion picture.  The film encompasses sweeping events spanning nearly a decade, journeying across multiple countries and involving a precisely chosen cast of hundreds along with a devoted crew whose objective was to capture the on-the-ground reality of this mission as truthfully and viscerally as possible. To that end, it pulls no punches in documenting the moral lines – including torture – that were crossed. The intention was to create a cinematic work with the sweep and human emotion of a historical novel.

ZERO DARK THIRTY (the title is military jargon for the dark of night, as well as the moment – 12:30 a.m. – when the Navy SEALs first stepped foot on the compound) marks Kathryn Bigelow’s most ambitious production to date. Deploying the full arsenal of filmic art, from the naturalistic performances of an ensemble that includes Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton, Jennifer Ehle, Mark Strong, Kyle Chandler, and Edgar Ramirez, to innovative cinematography in extreme low-light conditions, to the painstakingly layered art direction, every facet of the production became a proving ground for Bigelow to make living history come alive on screen.

Director/Producer Kathryn Bigelow on the set of Columbia Pictures’ thriller ZERO DARK THIRTY. ©2012 Zero Dark Thirty, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

For screenwriter and producer Mark Boal, a trained journalist and award-winning dramatist, sourcing and reporting the story so that it could be told accurately and fully presented countless unique challenges. He made a commitment to his sources that he would chronicle not only their personal struggles, but also the details and the ramifications of this historic operation, while simultaneously protecting the identities of those he interviewed.  Through dialogue and scenes inspired by extensive interviews, Boal crafted characters that captured the essence of the real life people involved in the operation as well as other members of the military and intelligence communities.

At the end of the day, the filmmakers chose to tell the story through the eyes of a little-known participant in the intel hunt: Maya, a young CIA officer and targeter whose job is finding terrorists.  In a multifaceted performance by Chastain, the character of Maya, which is based on a real person, became Boal’s vehicle for dramatizing the individual’s role in the larger scheme. In some ways, the portrait of her development, from innocence to horror and grim determination, echoes the evolution of a nation struggling to cope with the ruthless calculus of terrorism.

Unlike Bigelow and Boal’s previous collaboration, THE HURT LOCKER, in which fictional characters were set against the terrifying real world of Iraq, ZERO DARK THIRTY is distinctive and singular in its approach. It is an amalgam of action-film and investigative reporting and drama, neither a work of fiction nor a documentary but an exciting hybrid that tracks closely what is known of the intelligence hunt, while shedding new light on the secretive, dark corridors of the war on terror.  It deftly depicts the mysteries of human courage and the ambiguities of a situation in which the usual moral rules no longer apply.

Cinematic story telling became the perfect means to relay the narrative. In staking out this novel territory, Boal’s inspiration was the New Journalism of the 1960s, when major American writers learned to apply the techniques of literature to the description of real events. In this sense, ZERO DARK THIRTY attempts to move the genre of literary reportage forward, offering the audience a unique kind of movie: the reported film.

At its core, ZERO DARK THIRTY offers a cinematic rendition into one of the most discussed but least known events of modern times from creative artists challenging themselves to push the limits of their craft. Events are recreated with a fidelity to the facts, including filming in Pakistan itself, embedding the viewer into the center of the action. The result is a film as profound and provocative as it is stunning and real.

©2012 Zero Dark Thirty, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

In the storied history of manhunts for international criminals, the quest for Osama bin Laden has no real precedent.

“It is the story of finding a very sharp needle in a very large haystack,” notes director Kathryn Bigelow. “Once bin Laden escaped from Afghanistan, he fenced himself in with a byzantine network that took years and years to unravel. And what I think is so intriguing about Mark’s script is the way it tracks all the minute steps, in a way that’s dramatic yet totally unsentimental, unsparing, and unsettling. This is a very raw account.”

Where would the breakthroughs come? What clues might give bin Laden’s location away? Could Al Qaeda operatives be turned?

While these were all essential questions, for Bigelow and Boal a more fundamental question loomed: who were the CIA operatives who refused to give up and stayed on bin Laden’s trail even when it went cold and the world was distracted by other crises? For the first time, a film focuses on the human dimension of that story, illustrating the internal struggle of the operatives and the overwhelming toll of the mission.

“The question for me as a filmmaker was, how do you tie all the pieces of this epic story together in a way that will be tonally united and all in the same register?” says Bigelow. “Mark’s research and script brought the breadth of it, from Afghanistan to Washington to Pakistan, to life. And then it became a kind of instinctual process, moment-by-moment, scene-by-scene, of telling the story with restraint at every level. It was both a massive undertaking and a very careful, subtle undertaking and there is no way I could have made ZERO DARK THIRTY without all the experiences I’ve had as a filmmaker so far.”

©2012 Zero Dark Thirty, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

The quest to tell the story of ZERO DARK THIRTY would eventually lead Bigelow and Boal into their own labyrinthine encounter with secretiveness and intense production challenges.  But it all started simply and quietly, six years ago,

“This thing is pretty hand made,” says Boal, “and it’s gone through two iterations. It began six years ago as a movie about the failure to capture bin Laden in Tora Bora. I spent a few years on that, researching and writing, and we were in pre-production of that film by 2011, with scouts in Romania. Then, more or less out of the blue, bin Laden was killed, and that film became ancient history. So I had to start again.”

“This story was always personal to me because I grew up in New York City, in the shadow of The World Trade Center and, after 9/11, I really felt I needed to understand more about bin Laden and the U.S. response to him,” notes Boal, who has reported on national security issues and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for magazines as diverse as Playboy and Rolling Stone. “The guy attacked my hometown, and the long aftermath of that day has defined my professional life as a writer. I can’t say I picked the topic. Writers, like children, don’t always get to pick their influences. It picked me.”

At that time, Bigelow was already drawing critical and popular attention as a director with her own uncompromising vision and affinity for meshing taut, involving action with human intrigue in features including NEAR DARK, BLUE STEEL and K-19: THE WIDOWMAKER. In the midst of Boal’s initial research on Tora Bora, he and Bigelow made THE HURT LOCKER, which would win her a place in history as one of the leading chroniclers of 21st Century warfare and as the first woman ever to win the Oscar® for Best Director.

Still, even with acclaim and awards on their side, the topic of bin Laden remained a non-starter in Hollywood and the filmmakers had to find independent financing to get the project off the ground. Boal and Bigelow joined forces with producer and financier Megan Ellison, who funded the picture through her label, Annapurna Pictures.

Director/Producer Kathryn Bigelow (left) and Writer/Producer Mark Boal on the set of Columbia Pictures’ thriller ZERO DARK THIRTY. ©Jonathan Olley

After the historic events of May 1, 2011, when news of bin Laden’s death stunned the world, Boal moved to Washington for several months, diving into 80-plus hour work-weeks, literally pounding the pavement and knocking on doors. He then travelled to Pakistan and other parts of the Middle East to follow the leads of the story.

“Public affairs at some agencies were helpful, and then a lot of the reporting was done the old-fashioned way, with shoe leather, and sourcing and luck,” explains Boal. “My intention was to get as many first-hand accounts from those who were involved as possible, and I was at the end of the day fortunate to be able to write a script drawn almost entirely from first-hand accounts of the people directly involved in the mission.”

“Obviously, unless you are making a documentary, at a certain point, you have to take off your journalist’s hat and put on your screenwriter’s hat to tell a great story. This is a movie after all. When you are detailing a ten-year manhunt and compressing those facts and that research into a two-hour movie, you have to tell your story efficiently.”

Boal’s approach synched perfectly with Bigelow’s vision for the film. “The public knows very little about what the unsung heroes in the intelligence community go through, which is as it has to be, but here you get a rare opportunity to have a first-hand look at the men and women at the heart of one of the most covert operations in our history,” says the director. “Mark didn’t just ascertain facts; he absorbed the subtle nuances permeating the atmosphere of this world – the personalities, the conflicts, the motivations, the uncertainties – and then brilliantly illuminated them.”

Bigelow concludes, “The ultimate goal for all of us was to bring people into this shadowy, yet vitally important, world that is seen only in the rarest moments, and illuminate its human face.”

Jonathan Olley ©2012 Zero Dark Thirty, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

ZERO DARK THIRTY has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for Strong Violence Including Brutal Disturbing Images, and for Language. The film will be released in theaters in New York and Los Angeles on December 19, 2012. In theaters wide January 11, 2013.

Columbia Pictures presents a Mark Boal production, a First Light production, an Annapurna Pictures production, a Kathryn Bigelow film, ZERO DARK THIRTY. Starring Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton, Jennifer Ehle, Mark Strong, Kyle Chandler, and Edgar Ramirez. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Written by Mark Boal.  Produced by Mark Boal, Kathryn Bigelow, and Megan Ellison. Executive Producers are Colin Wilson, Ted Schipper, and Greg Shapiro. Director of Photography is Greig Fraser ACS. Production Designer is Jeremy Hindle. Edited by Dylan Tichenor, A.C.E. and William Goldenberg, A.C.E. Costumes Designed by George L. Little. Music by Alexandre Desplat.  Sound Design by Paul N. J. Ottosson. Casting by Mark Bennett, CSA, Richard Hicks, CSA, and Gail Stevens.

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