He started with the beginning of the raid, with the Blackhawk helicopters arriving at the compound, and looked at four or five hours of dailies a day. “I’d mark and pick the pieces I liked, cut three to five of those, go on to the next day and do the next section and piece it together,” he says. “The first cut took a month.” The result: an assemblage of around forty minutes.
Goldenberg had to struggle with the tension between getting this pivotal moment in American history right, exactly the way it played out in real time, and giving it enough tension to keep people glued to their seats—even when they already know what happened. There was a temptation to do the more conventional action beats building to explosive climaxes, he says. “Action/beat explosion to explosion—that’s more exciting. Kathryn and I had to fight against that, saying to each other, ‘This is not a traditional action sequence. That’s not what this is about.’ ”
According to Goldenberg, Bigelow wanted to show how this is “what these guys do for a living, and not what you expect, like picking up briefcases and going to work. There were at least twelve other raids that night. ‘They methodically go in, it’s a wave of death,’ is how Kathryn used to explain it. These guys are killers. That’s what they do, professionals. Their job is to go into these raids and capture or kill someone. This happened to be a raid on bin Laden’s compound. It could have been any raid on any night.”
Goldenberg created a quiet raid with a lack of action highlighted by unexpected bursts of energy and sound. When a guy shoots through a door, he says, “we lull the audience . . . with sound, blasts, knowing they don’t know what’s around each corner, or if a person has a gun.”
They didn’t adopt the Paul Greengrass Bourne handheld point-of-view approach, either; we’re watching the SEALs from outside. Bigelow had to shoot everything twice for the different lighting situations and night vision, so that the sequence would resemble that pitch-black moonless night. “We wanted the audience to experience what that looked like,” Goldenberg says. “The SEALs lost in darkness, a sniper on the rooftop, cut to his POV with night vision, juxtaposed with what it was really like for the people in the compound without night vision.”
Then Goldenberg addressed the tracking of Abu Ahmed’s cell phone and finding the white SUV that led the CIA to the bin Laden compound. Just watching all the footage shot by four to six cameras from different angles took three days, he recalls. “It takes tremendous experience to figure the way to tell that story.”
The trick was to speed up the information by doing two things at once with sound looping and overlapping, while still keeping everything clear. Shots of satellite maps, call tracking via phone lines, and computer banks were added in postproduction to impart more information in fun visual ways. A sequence like this isn’t as straightforward as talking heads, Goldenberg explains. “When you have an enormous section that is free form, it’s more of a challenge to tell an exciting story.”
What was Boal’s role? “He did the best thing a producer can do. He stayed away. He’d come in to screenings and was able to maintain the big picture in his mind, and solved some big problems. He was able to have objectivity, did what a producer does: ‘This is your problem, here.’ ”
Bigelow and Boal make a great team, Goldenberg says. “Whatever happens with them, as partners the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Some magic happens between the two of them; they are destined to work together.”
Goldenberg also edited Argo. The two films are very different, he admits. Argo was more of a crowd-pleaser: “You leave Argo feeling exhilarated. Although it was a complicated ending, you feel when they get rescued a sense of exhilaration, so that you applaud in the theater. That’s an amazing feeling as an editor, when you see the movie and tear up. It still works after you’ve seen it fifty times at least. Leaving Zero Dark Thirty is more like being punched in the stomach. It’s a different animal.”
Predictably, as critics praised the movie’s disjunctive cutting style and organic reported drama—which do not hew to narrative conventions—as well as Chastain’s performance as Maya, they couldn’t resist comparing the director to her central character.
Casting Maya was key for Bigelow, because the actress “had to be able to handle with verbal agility the comprehensive and complex dialogue,” says the director, who had admired Jessica Chastain’s poised performance in Ralph Fiennes’s challenging Shakespeare film Coriolanus.
When Chastain left her theater training at Juilliard and started landing movie roles, she got a gift. For various reasons, none of the movies came out right away. The delayed openings meant that Chastain remained a hot actress—and a blank slate. Nobody projected her last movie onto what they thought she could do. She was able to be a chameleon.
Then, in a flurry, seven films hit in the year 2011. She played a dramatic actress in Al Pacino’s theatrical Wilde Salomé, and in John Madden’s Mossad thriller The Debt, she was a tough-as-nails assassin. She earned raves as brassy southern blonde Celia in summer lit-hit The Help, for which she would become one of the five actresses nominated by the Academy for Best Performance in a Supporting Role. In Coriolanus, she stood her ground against both Ralph Fiennes and the magnificent Vanessa Redgrave. She portrayed a sweetly luminous idealized fifties mother in Terrence Malick’s mystical The Tree of Life, and the concerned wife of Michael Shannon in the ominously atmospheric drama Take Shelter.
When she was approached for Zero Dark Thirty, Chastain decided to ditch her role opposite Tom Cruise in the $120 million sci-fi adventure Oblivion to take part in Bigelow’s $52 million indie. At noon the day after she took her grandmother to the Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood (the Oscar went to her Help costar Octavia Spencer), Chastain was on a twenty-five-hour flight to Chandahar, India, to start shooting the movie that she described as her most difficult to date. They called her straight to the set, threw robes on her, and sent her into a bustling market with a cell phone. It was surreal, she tells me. “I remember thinking, ‘Yesterday I was at the Oscars with my grandma.’ ”
Chastain is adept at charming press. Even before the movie is screened, word begins to leak out to the Oscar blog community that she has a juicy lead role in this film shrouded in secrecy. Though no one in the media has seen Zero Dark Thirty, the on-the-rise actress is already a front-runner for an Oscar nomination, her second, although it is frustrating not being able to tell the press what role she’s playing. She later says when she was faced with speculation that she was playing a Navy SEAL wife, “every time I bit my cheek.” She couldn’t reveal that she was actually the film’s hero. “No, there’s this woman who is incredible! I did some long lead press, but ‘I can’t talk about the movie.’ ”
Released from her gag order once the movie is in preview, Chastain loves to talk about it. “I didn’t know women played such a central role in the hunt for Osama bin Laden,” she admits. “When we look at lead female characters in movies, they’re defined by men, as girlfriends or victims of the villain of the piece. Maya is not a victim, has no boyfriend. She’s a servant to her work, capable, she doesn’t have any mental issue, she’s a hero. She’s not messed up. She’s the smartest person in the room all the time, she was smarter than her parents and the other kids. She doesn’t have many friends. There’s a frustration that no one believes in you.”
“And yet she’s a woman, she didn’t have to become a man,” says Jason Clarke.
“I loved being a woman in a boy’s world, holding on to that, not becoming a man,” she says.
She did her homework. She had to learn the real meaning of the agency lingo, sitting down with Boal to go over every line. She discovered her character when she and a group went to tour a mosque. While the men were allowed in, the three women—Bigelow, Chastain, and producer Megan Ellison—had to cover themselves fully with balaclavas, exposing only a small slit of their faces. “I felt invisible,” she says. “It was not hard to leave this role. It was so intense making this movie.”
At the premi
ere at Hollywood and Highland, the movie’s assertive heroine seems to play better for women than men. Sony marketers are trying to figure out how to best position the picture for a public that was expecting a Navy SEAL adventure—an all-male TV ad actually played opposite network football—as opposed to a brainy and deliberate CIA procedural closer to Carlos and All the President’s Men than to Act of Valor. Thus they have to cover their target demos with different TV spots.
Because Bigelow and Boal purport to dramatize what really happened in the manhunt for the al-Qaeda leader, as soon as it’s screened in late November, Zero Dark Thirty generates controversy, with various interested parties questioning its veracity. Bigelow and Boal find they can’t have it both ways, dramatic freedom and perfect accuracy.
The main issue is the film’s presentation of waterboarding as a means to extricate information vital to bin Laden’s capture. Among the first to see the film at an early D.C. preview are former Connecticut senator Chris Dodd, now head of the MPAA, and California senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Feinstein jumps up and walks out after the early torture scenes; Dodd convinces her to return to the screening room.
During the George W. Bush administration, which sanctioned torture in the post-9/11 era, U.S. foreign relations around the world were seriously damaged. While Obama publicly backed away from torture and his reluctance to use it is depicted in Zero Dark Thirty, Feinstein is appalled that the movie failed to explicitly condemn the practice. For her part, Bigelow studiously avoids taking political stances in her films. Yet, she says in a Time magazine story, “I think that it’s a deeply moral movie that questions the use of force. It questions what was done in the name of finding bin Laden.”
Within days after the film opens on December 19, 2012, three U.S. senators—Feinstein, Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin, and Armed Services Committee ranking member John McCain—issue a statement decrying the depiction of torture in the film as not accurate, expressing “outrage” over the film’s scenes that imply “enhanced interrogations.”
CIA acting director Michael Morell states that the film “takes significant artistic license” and “creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and interrogation program were the key to finding” bin Laden. But, he says, “that impression is false.”
Rather than espouse the use of torture in the hunt for bin Laden, the movie establishes that it took place—and makes the audience experience its horror. The Senate Intelligence Committee begins a review of the contacts between Zero Dark Thirty filmmakers Bigelow and Boal and CIA officials to determine if inappropriate access to secret information was given.
On December 21, respected documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, who won an Oscar for the torture documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, lays out his case against the film in a damaging article in the Huffington Post. He writes that “the film conveys the unmistakable conclusion that torture led to the death of bin Laden. That’s wrong and dangerously so, precisely because the film is so well made.” He states that old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting, not torture, led to the capture of Bin Laden, which is suggested in the movie, and criticized the filmmakers for a “lost dramatic opportunity” because “no main characters in the film ever question the efficacy or corrupting effects of torture.” The filmmakers’ access to certain CIA sources may have colored their take on the story, adds Gibney in a phone interview, but Bigelow and Boal “walked into trouble by saying, ‘This is true,’ instead of saying, ‘This is based in reality.’ ”
Liberal actor Ed Asner approaches Gibney by e-mail asking him to join a protest against the film’s depiction of torture. Asner, Martin Sheen, David Clennon, and others ask Academy members not to vote for the film, eventually issuing a press release that states: “One of the brightest female directors in the business is in danger of becoming part of the system.” Gibney declines the invitation. “They were coming from a political place,” he tells me on the phone. “They didn’t expect the attack to come from the left.”
“The information that Maya gets that leads her on the trail is not from torture,” Chastain tells me. “It comes from sitting down over hummus and tabbouleh. To say the film says that torture is necessary is absolutely untrue. Mark’s stance is that the most important thing is that they tell the most accurate story possible, and unfortunately that’s part of the truth.”
Gibney scoffs at this, saying, “That’s a stupid argument. That’s not how torture works. You don’t answer questions when you’re gurgling with water.”
Feminist writer Naomi Wolf goes so far as to compare Kathryn Bigelow to Nazi propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. “In a time of darkness in America,” writes Wolf in a column in the Guardian on January 4, 2013, just weeks before the Oscar nominations are announced, “you are being feted by Hollywood, and hailed by major media. But to me, the path your career has now taken reminds [me] of no one so much as that other female film pioneer who became, eventually, an apologist for evil.”
Boal and Bigelow go on the press circuit explaining how they reported the movie. Boal hires lawyers, scared that he’s being targeted. The Christmas break, however, creates a dead zone in Hollywood and Washington that makes it difficult to move quickly to counter the attacks. But the season also creates a box-office boom. Controversy sells. Curiosity about Zero Dark Thirty drives audiences to check it out, as they did back in 1976 with All the President’s Men. The movie opens at number one when it goes into nationwide release on January 11, 2013.
Sony cochairman Amy Pascal’s statement supporting her filmmakers soon follows: “Zero Dark Thirty does not advocate torture. To not include that part of history would have been irresponsible and inaccurate. We fully support Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal and stand behind this extraordinary movie. We are outraged that any responsible member of the Academy would use their voting status in AMPAS as a platform to advance their own political agenda.” By the time Bigelow and Boal fight back by speaking at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards and planting essays in the Los Angeles Times and other publications, the damage has been done. The superb film reviews are undermined by the bigger debate about the use of torture as a weapon in our fight against terrorists, and by criticism of the filmmakers for not disapproving of its use in their storytelling.
The question asked by many in Hollywood: who orchestrated this Beltway campaign against the movie? The timing is too perfect. Rumors and speculation fill the air. Is Connecticut resident Harvey Weinstein, who hobnobs with Dodd and Feinstein and other prominent Democrats, pulling strings to eliminate a potential rival for the Oscars he was seeking for Django Unchained and Silver Linings Playbook? (Gibney says that Pascal wrongfully assumed that he had been put up to his Huffington Post article by Weinstein.) Or are Steven Spielberg and David Geffen working their many Washington contacts in favor of Lincoln?
On the weekend of the Golden Globe Awards in mid-January, Weinstein approaches a chilly Bigelow at the annual tea party hosted by the British Academy of Film and Television (BAFTA) saying, “I’m not the anti-Christ!” He then goes up to producer Kathleen Kennedy and promises to “leave Lincoln alone.” And yet, it is remarkable when a Connecticut congressman suddenly figures out that Tony Kushner made some errors in his abridging of the final state-by-state votes on the Thirteenth Amendment in Lincoln. Connecticut voted for it, not against it, as the movie portrays. Many believe it’s a Harvey leak.
The mogul is well-known for his heavy-handed Oscar campaign tactics, from the successful Shakespeare in Love assault against Spielberg front-runner Saving Private Ryan to his smear campaign against Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind in an attempt to favor In the Bedroom. One Weinstein spokesman insists that for those reasons, Weinstein carefully kept his hands clean this time.
But Weinstein was openly upset that he had failed to acquire a piece of Zero Dark Thirty when Ellison was not favorably disposed toward him after the release of The Master did not go
well. Sony was partnered with Weinstein on Django Unchained, handling the international release. He had wanted to land the foreign piece of Zero Dark Thirty, which went to Universal instead. When he was rebuffed, Weinstein joined forces with producer-financier Nicolas Chartier, who had mortgaged his house to help pay for The Hurt Locker but had since fallen out with Boal. Chartier had been interested in working with Boal and Bigelow on the bin Laden film, and when they turned him down, he spitefully rushed through a low-budget quickie production by B-movie director John Stockwell called SEAL Team Six: The Raid on Osama bin Laden, which was shown on the National Geographic Channel before the presidential election—to dismissive reviews. For their part, Bigelow and Boal felt strongly that Zero Dark Thirty should be held under a cone of silence and released well after the election had come and gone. There was no comparison between the two films.
As the various critics groups and guilds make their picks during the award season leading up to the Oscar nominations, Zero Dark Thirty is in the fray. It comes out of the box strong with two of the earliest critics groups, winning Best Picture, Director, and Actress from the National Board of Review and Best Picture, Director, and Cinematography from the prestigious New York Film Critics Circle. Critics rave, from Time to Entertainment Weekly to the New York Times. The movie lands a Producers Guild nomination, Boal lands a Writers Guild nod, and Bigelow is nominated by the Directors Guild. But clearly, it’s one thing to award a top-notch woman director an Oscar for a small indie film like The Hurt Locker that never grossed much at the box office; it’s another for her to play in the big show. And despite the accolades, she’s getting slammed.
Sony may have gone too far with marketing this movie as a true story. Yes, Boal is a bona fide journalist who reported in the trenches alongside newspaper staffers and nonfiction authors. But as he said during his and Bigelow’s interview on Charlie Rose, he didn’t have to lay out his sources and back up his quotes. He was writing a fictionalized account, as many Hollywood writers have done. This one was much closer to recent history, however, and therefore carried political baggage. As Bigelow and Boal found out the hard way.
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