Kimberly Peirce
Almost a decade after 'Boys Don't Cry,' she comes back to the director's chair, by way of Iraq
Kimberly Peirce's complex nature is right there in her name - the soft and the sharp at disarming peace with each other. The filmmaker whose two movies feature a roiling heartland and men named Brandon - 1999's "Boy's Don't Cry," with Hilary Swank and "Stop-Loss," which opens here Friday, with Ryan Phillippe - seems at peace with herself. The gap between her first movie, which won Swank an Oscar, and her second, about soldiers forced back to Iraq, is mysterious and impressive - Woody Allen has released 10 movies in the intervening years.
What happened? Bad luck? Her own high standards? According to Peirce, a little of that and none of it. The bitter, jaded punk-rock grad student you expect to show up for a hotel interview never arrives. Although she does look the part: black jeans cut low, looped with a studded belt, black blazer, matching vest, all over a purple T-shirt printed with a dude riding a chopper ("Glory," it read). Chicly rock 'n' roll. Deceptively gorgeous. The latter you don't notice (high cheekbones, great blue eyes) until, of course, you do.
For several months, Peirce has been operating a website for "Stop-Loss," answering many of the hundreds of posts on the site's message board. There are notes from soldiers, soldiers' wives, long-lost family members of Peirce, people grateful that someone has taken on an under-reported consequence of American military service. In an interview, she explains her relationships with American soldiers, the arcane process of stop-loss, and why a sophomore effort took nine years. She is direct but eloquent throughout the conversation.
Q. I guess we have to bring up the burning question about you? Why has it taken so long for a second movie?
A. Let's see if I can put it as simply as possible. I was in grad school when I made "Boys Don't Cry." That was supposed to be a 10-minute movie. That project willed itself into existence. I fell in love with Brandon [Teena, the film's real-life protagonist] and fell in love with the story. It was the most perfect experience. . . . And I got a Hollywood career out of it. It all happened very quickly. I'm in Hollywood. They're offering me movies and millions of dollars. The problem was I was looking for something I cared about as much as "Boys Don't Cry."
Q. Did that surprise you?
A. Not really. But I like thinking about "Boys Don't Cry." It answered fundamental, human questions for me. I just want to move on to the next project and have it be core to my life. It's also really fun to bring a movie into the world that's core to me because it ends up being core to other people. Obviously, I want to make a movie much more quickly next time. If I could have made a movie more quickly I would have.
Q. Do you find yourself in a quandary about whether to keep working in that system or to just work around it?
A. Artists are not going to have access to 30 or 40 million dollars. You might if you're Coppola. He was so cute when I first started talking to him after "Boys," and he's like, "Don't you want power? Don't you want control?" And I said, "Nope."
Q. Well look what it did to him.
A. Well that's the thing - well I'm not going to say what it did to him. But if you can develop independently, you should. If you can get into a studio situation where exactly what you're doing is exactly they want to be doing, then do it. Take their money and let them help you.
Q. Do you have to be totally obsessed about something in order to shoot it?
A. Totally obsessed? Yes. But that can probably take different forms. The world is an interesting place right now. I've been reading Hollywood scripts, and there's a lot of interesting stuff. I'm interested in doing a great political thriller - "3 Days of the Condor," "All the President's Men," "The 39 Steps." But it's going to take me a while to find the next life-altering thing. I've dealt with gender. I've dealt with war. Now I'm going to take other people's curiosities because if they have a script that's ready, I want to move quickly.
Q. What's changed about your filmmaking in these 10 years?
A. It's funny, I was at my stepmother's house and I was there with my partner and we were looking at these videos of me talking about "Boys," and I was really radical. I was all, "I wouldn't do this, and I wouldn't do that." I've just grown up.
Q. What happened to that movie about the cover-up of a 1920s Hollywood murder you were working on?
A. "Silent Star"? I'm still going to make that movie. I got it to the point where it was cast. I had Ben Kingsley, Evan Rachel Wood, and Hugh Jackman. Everybody wanted to go forward. The studio did their budget. $30 million. [They told me,] "Problem is we don't want to spend $30 million. We want to spend 20 [million]. But we'd like to go to the movie and see the 30 [million] version." And it was a lesson for me. I said I won't make a period piece right now. I'll make something very accessible about something now.
Q. Why a war drama?
A. It started for me after September 11th. Right around the time we declared war [on Afghanistan] I knew I wanted to do a project on soldiers, why they were signing up, what their experience in combat was, then their coming home. And right about that time my little brother signed up. And he was like, "I wanna go fight." His enlisting raised all those questions for me. When he came home on leave, he brought me something that wound up being incredibly valuable. It was these home movies that soldiers were making. They were cut to Toby Keith or "Let the Bodies Hit the Floor" [by the metal band Drowning Pool]. It was obvious they were fighting, but the camera was set on a sandbag or a gun turret. Or you would just see feet running. And it was amazing to be in it. You weren't in it the same way you are in combat in a film. This was like being inside the mind of a young man. And these videos by different soldiers had different personalities. And I thought any movie I make needs to be born from this.
Q. Isn't it interesting the way the Internet and video cameras and blogs have revolutionized the way we see the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Brian De Palma tried to get at that in "Redacted," how some of the filters have been removed.
A. Oh that's amazing. It used to be letters home, right? But essentially once you post a blog it's like a letter to the editor. It's a letter to a society at large. When I started getting interested in this, I spent hours upon hours taking all this stuff in, and you just can't read everything. It's so immediate.
Q. Why not make a documentary?
A. It started that way. At some point I knew I wanted to make a movie about a guy who was a young patriot named Brandon King. He was going to sign up after 9/11 for all the right reasons, protect his home, his country, his family. He was going to sign up with his best friend. He was going to be from Texas. He wants to go over there and lead his men. And his whole notion of being a leader changes when he hits a mission that's pretty challenging. What happens when you kill some innocent people and your men get wounded and some of them get killed? He wants to come home and put it all behind him. Then when he gets stop-lossed, his opportunity to go on with his life is challenged. It then becomes a story of where his commitments lie. Is it to the comrades he fought with? Is it to being home with his family? Is it returning to war? To me the story exemplified what so many soldiers and so many families are going through.
Q. At what point in your research had you heard of soldiers being stop-lossed?
A. At the end of '04. After Vietnam, when we had the draft and the military was able to get soldiers from all ranks of the society and America basically said no more draft, the military basically had to come up with something they could rely on if we ended up in a war or a national emergency . . . so they came up with the term "stop-loss." One soldier I talked to called it a backdoor draft; 81,000 have been stop-lossed, but the ones I interviewed didn't know about it.
Q. What's this doing to morale?
A. It's not good. These are people who want to protect the integrity of the military. And they think having stop-loss hurts the integrity of the military. It's like having a job where you're all trying to work together and somebody keeps mistreating the employees. A lot of these third tours are deadly. Guys are getting worn out. Wives are leaving their husbands. There's only so much these women and these families can sustain. The movie's not about stop-loss. It's about these soldiers and the bonds between the men and coming home. Stop-loss just intensifies everything and what happens when they think they're done.
Q. How high up the chain of command did you go?
A. Certainly up to a sergeant-major, which is pretty high. I've talked to soldiers that were even up in Canada. I've talked to their lawyers. It's like an underground railroad of patriotic Americans. I don't want to make this anti- or pro-war. But these people don't want to be there anymore. 