Roadblocks abounded for De Palma's 'Redacted'

TORONTO - Brian De Palma's controversial Iraq war film "Redacted," comes to town today, preceded by a war of patriotic words between Bill O'Reilly (who hasn't seen the film) and billionaire Mark Cuban (who produced it).

The Daily News spoke with De Palma in September at the Toronto International Film Festival at a breakfast celebrating the film and his 67th birthday.

Q: How did "Redacted" come about?

A: I was here [in Toronto] looking at movies and a representative of HDNet came over to me after a dinner and said, 'Would you be interested in making one of our $5 million movies? You can do anything you want but you have to shoot it on HD.'

I thought it was an interesting idea, particularly if I could find something that could work in this medium. Then I saw a very interesting Bruno Dumont movie called "Flandres," which dealt with a squad in what looked like Afghanistan, and what they went through.

And then I read about this [wartime] incident which was eerily similar to "Casualties of War" and I said, 'This is happening again.' But when I went to search for material about the incident, I came up with all these new expressions on the Internet and I said, 'This is the way to tell the story. It's right here.'

Q: When you say expressions, what do you mean by that?

A: Blogs. Posted videos. Web Sites. Rants. News stories. It was all there.

Q: Were you concerned that any of the material about the case you've adapted could be providing bad information?

A: The facts of this case are indisputable. That's all been reported in many news sources. My problem is that I couldn't use any of the exact facts because the soldiers were being prosecuted. And because of insurance and all kinds of stuff I had to fictionalize everything. I couldn't even use direct quotes, which is unfortunate.

Q: Was the film scripted or improvised?

A: In this case, because I had to write audition material for [the actors], I ended up writing most of the material. First they rehearsed it and auditioned it and then they would improvise all of it. The movie was shot in two sections. There was the checkpoint section that my associate Eric Schwab shot.

I said to Eric, 'I need to slow the movie down, I need to show how boring and repetitive what these guys do at the checkpoint is. I want you take a lot of beautifully composed shots and make everything extremely slow. Make it appear boring without it being boring and I can show all this information out about the statistics around these checkpoints.' So the guys went to boot camp for two weeks and then they went to the checkpoint.

In the process they bonded together like an army unit at a checkpoint. They're surrounded by military guys and one of the actors in the movie is an Iraqi veteran. They had all this time to experiment, improvising things, so by the time I got them, they had done these things over and over again and they could take them in any kind of direction. And that's what sort of exciting about it. There are a lot of things in the scenes where something happens and they go right with it. The cinematographer just follows where the scene goes.

Q: The photographs of the collateral damage of war at the end of the film are tough to look at, even with the faces blackened out . . .

A: The irony of "Redacted" is that all the real photographs were redacted because of legal means. It drove me crazy.

I got all the photographs that nobody would print and then I got redacted. . . . I said, 'You cannot redact these people's faces,' and they said, 'Well, there might be a lawsuit from the relative of a dead Iraqi baby,' so they come up with all this mumbo-jumbo and I was like, 'That is ridiculous.' And they said, 'Well, there's a certain amount of liability here.' . . . I didn't redact those faces, the lawyers did. And I said, 'OK, if you're going to redact them it's going to be your heavy black pencil across those suffering people's faces and let the whole world see what you've done.'

The movie was submitted to all these film festivals un-redacted but it's somehow more horrifying that the faces are redacted. It really upsets people. *