From truth to fiction

Documentary filmmaker, who got his start in Boston, tries hand at feature

NEW YORK - Director Joshua Seftel paces the VIP room nervously, flipping pages in a pocket-sized notebook. "This will only be the second time I've seen the film with an audience. You never know how they'll react," says the filmmaker who made his mark in Boston working with documentary and news projects.

The film is "War, Inc.," a trenchant satire about a Blackwater-like military contractor, and Seftel is about to introduce the movie to a near-capacity crowd at the Tribeca Film Festival in lower Manhattan. As he reviews the notes for his introduction, Seftel receives a text message on his cellphone that says Michael Moore and Harvey Keitel will be attending the screening. (At the film's world premiere three days earlier, stars of the film, including Hilary Duff, Marisa Tomei, and Montel Williams, were joined by Haylie Duff, Chazz Palminteri, and John McEnroe.)

Finally, a Tribeca official fetches Seftel and they walk together up to the stage. As they mount the stairs, a portly man dressed entirely in black emerges from a nearby men's room. It's Keitel. "He's given some great performances," Seftel whispers admiringly, like a star-struck fan. After the screening, Keitel, who had been sitting about five seats down from Seftel, walks over to shake the young director's hand. "You're a great filmmaker," he says.

The journey that culminated for Seftel this month at Tribeca began in 1989 at Tufts University, where Seftel, a senior majoring in French and pre-med, borrowed a video camera and made a documentary about his mentor, Seymour Simches, a professor of romance languages who was retiring that year. It was Seftel's first time behind the camera. Another Tufts professor saw the documentary and showed it to her husband, who was starting a foundation to help the thousands of Romanian orphans living in squalid conditions under dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Seftel agreed to travel to Romania and shoot a documentary about the orphans, which ended up playing on PBS, earning Seftel an Emmy nomination, and launching his filmmaking career. His plans to attend medical school put on hold, Seftel went on to direct documentaries for WGBH, HBO, and CBS News, produce news segments for Bryant Gumbel and Dan Rather, contribute stories to "This American Life" (both the radio and television versions), and pen articles for Salon.com. Although he moved from Boston to Manhattan in 2003, Seftel still follows the Red Sox with his MLB cable package and visits Boston about once a month to see friends.

Seftel's long-overdue Hollywood break came in 2003, when director Alexander Payne ("Election," "Sideways") saw Seftel's short film "Breaking the Mold: The Kee Malesky Story" at the 1 Reel Film Festival in Seattle. Impressed by the film, Payne introduced Seftel to John Cusack and his writing partner Mark Leyner, who were trying to make a film based on Leyner's comic novel "Et Tu, Babe." Although that project fell apart, Cusack and Leyner remembered Seftel when they received the green light for another joint production, this time inspired by a 2004 Harper's magazine article by Naomi Klein, "Baghdad Year Zero."

"It was hard to get this film made," Seftel said, relaxing at a bar after the screening. "If you remember, just a few years ago people were not criticizing what was going on in the war. So when John and Mark started writing the script, it was pretty cutting-edge stuff."

"War, Inc." stars Cusack as a hit man hired by Tamerlane, the world's largest military contractor, to assassinate a meddlesome Middle Eastern oil minister. Cusack travels to the fictional country of Turaqistan to assume his cover as Tamerlane's trade show representative, which requires him to organize the wedding of pop star Yonica Babyyeah (Hilary Duff). While waiting for his chance to kill the minister, Cusack falls in love with a left-wing journalist (Marisa Tomei) who forces him to question his allegiances.

As Seftel's first feature film, "War, Inc." presented different challenges than the documentaries he's been making for the past 18 years.

"When you make a documentary, you have to pretend to know nothing," Seftel said. "When you're making a feature, you have to pretend you know everything. You can't possibly know everything, but you have to act like you do, because it makes people feel more comfortable."

To help Duff feel more comfortable, Seftel asked her to keep a diary in the voice of Yonica and arranged pole dancing lessons for the 20-year-old actress. According to Seftel, the hardest part was making Duff look sleazy enough to play the conniving Yonica.

"When we first were creating Hilary's character, we got together photos of the trampiest pop stars - I won't name names," Seftel said. "So we printed them out and laid them on the table and picked out the worst aspects of each photo - those hair extensions, that eye makeup, that horrible bustier. So then we started working on Hilary, putting on the hair extensions and the makeup. But no matter how much make-up and hair extensions we added, she still looked cute and kind of wholesome. So we had to just slather it on, and finally we reached that tipping point where she began to look trampy. But it wasn't easy."

Creating Sir Ben Kingsley's character was as easy as creating Duff's was hard. In the film, Kingsley plays Cusack's former CIA boss, a hard-bitten Machiavelli who walks like a marionette and talks like Colonel Sanders. The accent was Kingsley's idea.

"[Kingsley] came on the set the day before we started shooting and was like, 'This is what I'm thinking,' and he just started speaking in a Southern accent," Seftel said. "None of us had even thought of that."

Release dates for "War, Inc." are still being finalized; it opens in New York and limited other cities Friday, and there are plans to bring it to Boston later this summer. Meanwhile, Seftel has recently shot PSAs for Truth (the anti-smoking campaign) and PETA, is working on a feature film about Ethiopian Jews, and has three features and two documentaries in the pipeline. Would Seftel consider casting Keitel in one of his upcoming movies?

Seftel looks into space for a moment.

"I'm thinking about what part he could play."