Film Q&A - Stop-Loss: A Q&A with director Kimberly Peirce

With her own brother a combat veteran of the Iraq war, director Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry) was uniquely attuned to the challenges faced by returning soldiers. Her second feature, Stop-Loss, centers on the military loophole that allows soldiers to be sent back to battle in Iraq even after their contracts have ended.

Ryan Phillippe stars as Brandon King, a vet whose plans to re-enter civilian life are upended when he is stop-lossed. King is torn between a sense of duty exemplified by gung-ho army comrade Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum) and a desire to challenge an unjust system. Traveling to Washington, D.C., to bring his case to a senator’s attention, King is joined by Shriver’s girlfriend, Michelle (Abbie Cornish), who’s wrestling with her own fears about being a military wife.

While sipping green tea at Peachtree Street’s Gold Star Cafe and Bakery, an intense, on-message Peirce spoke about her desire in Stop-Loss to honor Iraq war veterans and show the soldier’s view of war and homecoming.

Can you pinpoint anything that makes a film dealing with war unique when it’s made by a woman?

That’s a good question. I think probably the focus on the emotional life of the characters. But again I don’t want to say that a man can’t do that, because I’m a huge fan of all the great war movies, and if I was to name a few I would say All’s Quiet on the Western Front, Patton, The Best Years of Our Lives going into The Deer Hunter, Coming Home, Apocalypse Now, Born on the Fourth of July, Platoon, all the Kurosawa stuff.

So certainly men make emotional movies, but I think what people are responding to in this movie, and I don’t know if I bring this to it because I’m a woman, but they love that it’s emotional. They love that it’s about the guys being connected to the other guys. It’s about the camaraderie, it’s about coming home, and it’s about reassimilating with their families and with the women who’ve been waiting for them.

I was very interested in the Abbie Cornish character who is Michelle, because I was interviewing soldiers’ wives and what they went through and the fact that it’s this amazing stoicism. They have all this responsibility at home: They take care of the children, they take care of the house. They’re told by the FRG – the Family Readiness Group – if you have a need you can’t tell him. He’s at war. If you have a miscarriage, if you have to go to the doctor, if you have to take care of the kids, you can’t burden him. And those women take pride in not burdening their husbands or their lovers and that to me was so compelling. So I think maybe as a woman there was a sensitivity that I had to telling their stories because I don’t think their stories have been told.

War films do deal with the men’s emotions in a way that isn’t so easily disparaged, whereas people are constantly talking about chick flicks, which deal with the lives and emotions of women, and those films are so often disparaged.

It’s also that combat and the military creates a space for men to be emotional and be really connected to one another and interdependent. I feel like men can get that in other places, but they certainly get it in the military. And then they’re able to heroicize it: “I love him”; “I’m willing to die for him.” Men say that their relationships in combat are the most intense relationships of their life. That’s the healthy part of it.

There have been so many films about the difficult adjustment of soldiers returning home. You mentioned The Best Years of Our Lives and The Deer Hunter. How do you think the experience of Iraq war veterans returning home might be similar but also might be unique?

That’s an excellent question. And its actually one of the questions that I asked myself because I’m such a fan of great war films, and I said I need to understand what the people who’ve made these movies before me have learned and what they’ve expressed. I need to capture that universality in whatever I do. And yet, if I’m going to make a movie about this, I need to capture what’s unique, like you say.

So one thing I did was I interviewed soldiers across the country. I went to Paris, Ill., where 1,000 soldiers came home from the 1544 Transportation Company. They had the highest rate of casualty and the highest rate of combat hours. We met them when they came back. We interviewed soldiers, we were at the town parade, so we were trying to figure out what was emblematic of this generation. We also got a hold of soldier-made videos, and that’s in the movie. That’s where they put their camera on the ground, or they put it on a sandbag or they put it on a Humvee or a gun turret and they just filmed their experience unadulterated, unfiltered, came back and cut it to rock music or patriotic music: Toby Keith, AC/DC, Linkin Park, Drowning Pools; “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor.”

So that’s the way that we delve into the specifics of what’s going on with a generation. A number of things are different. One – and this is coming from soldiers – there is not a Green Zone in most soldiers’ eyes. In most wars you had an area that was considered safe and then you went out and fought and you went back. They don’t feel they have that now. So their Forward Operating Bases are right near cities that are launching mortars at them. Many of the soldiers feel that they are stressed day and night. The second thing they feel is, like we have in the movie, they went over there and they thought the enemy was going to be there. But they didn’t find the enemy they went looking for.

The second thing is, they thought the enemy would be in the desert. They had sort of exoticized it in that way. As they say, the enemy was in the streets, he was in the hallways, in the bedrooms and the kitchens of people’s homes. He was in communities – he or she – which meant that when the soldiers go into these situations their job is to protect themselves, the other men and not kill innocent people. But it’s totally compromising to be put in these situations because they don’t know if it’s going to be a person with a gun, a person with a bomb, a person who’s got an IED. So that’s another thing about this war: The challenges of urban combat, which is virtually unwinnable. So the men say to me, “I feel like a sitting duck. I don’t know how to do my job and my men are getting killed and this is breaking my heart.” So that is very different from any other war. And it’s the YouTube generation. This is the generation that films themselves, films their friends and puts it on the Internet.

So all of that became clear; that there was a generational movement here, that they were fighting a different type of war, that it was having a different type of emotional toll.

If Vietnam was the generation that was drafted, this story is totally different. They’re not drafted. They sign up after 9/11. So their feelings of betrayal, their feelings of patriotism, they’re skewed a different way. So then the boys come home, and this boy wants to get out: He’s like, “I’ve done my time. I’m a war hero. I’m putting it behind me.” They break the contract. But he’s like, “Wait a second, I volunteered. I was the first in line to defend my country. This can’t be happening.”

So you thought “stop loss” was emblematic of the Iraq war, that this bureaucratic entanglement was the crux?

The camaraderie is the heart and soul of the movie, and that runs through the entire movie. But I thought the circumstance of stop loss, it took everything that was a challenge about war and it just totally intensified it.

I have a website [[http://www.stoplossmovie.com/soundoff|www.stoplossmovie.com/soundoff]] and I’ve got people writing in saying, “This is our life story; my husband’s been stop-lossed and now he’s missing the birth of our child.” Or a guy saying, “I’ve been stop-lossed and I don’t want to blame stop-loss but I’m now getting a divorce and I have a child.”

What it’s doing is it’s taking an already difficult situation and it’s multiplying the difficulty of it. It’s dramatizing it. But the movie’s not about stop loss. Its about the people.

Can you talk about that: Why you decided to do the website and have that give and take between you and people, soldiers or soldiers’ wives? Did you feel that in making a film like this you run the risk of being accused of being unpatriotic? Is that part of the reason why you wanted that kind of exchange with real soldiers and that forum?

No. It wasn’t to prove my patriotism. I certainly see that it could be used that way, to acknowledge that obviously she’s a patriot; obviously she’s pro-soldier.

I was already traveling around the country interviewing soldiers, and the soldier videos are so amazing. The whole movie was born from those videos. I wanted to give cameras to soldiers. But I hit a crossroads where I needed to spend all my energy writing the script, hiring the cast, making the movie and I couldn’t continue on that project. So the minute I stopped shooting, I said to the studio, “I’ve always had this passion to give cameras to soldiers, because I want to hear what they have to say.” So we gave cameras to soldiers and their families and then we post their videos. It just all naturally evolved and was, again, a continuation of the Internet generation. What does this generation do? They put their videos up and then they talk about it. It’s just letting that generation speak.

The other thing is, this is a section of the population that doesn’t necessarily feel that it always has a voice and that’s really important to me, and on top of that, military wives. When are they encouraged to tell their stories to the public? They want to be heard, they want to be emotional, they want to talk.

I think there’s a misnomer that there’s two Americas. I say that as a person who mostly lives between New York and L.A. but who makes movies in the middle of the country and who goes to the middle of the country to research. My mother was just as scared of my brother dying or being injured as every mother who I interviewed was. There was no disconnect; I was feeling the same things that every sister was feeling because I had a brother in combat in Iraq. So my feeling is Americans are actually much more similar than people like to think. There are regional differences ... but we don’t have different value systems.

Because you do incorporate those soldiers’ videos, the rock music, the young actors, do you see it directed more specifically to the YouTube generation?

Who was the audience I was making it for? First and foremost I fall in love with subject matter that I don’t fully understand but that I have a sense of. So I was interviewing soldiers and their families. I needed it to play first and foremost to them. I wanted them to go to the movie and say, “You told our story. It’s honest.” Because I feel like once you get that, then everyone else can come. Because everyone else is curious: “Oh, if it’s authentic, then we want to come.”

Then I think it appeals to everybody. We tested it and it appealed to old and young, men and women, particularly in terms of the youth. Young people are fighting this war so I wanted it to come from their experience.

How was your brother affected by the war?

I want to respect my brother’s privacy, so I’ll say that I think my brother was matured by it. I think he saw things that he never expected to see. I think he was sensitized to certain things. I think he felt some of the frustrations echoed in the movie because I was interviewing him and other soldiers, particularly about feeling that the way they were fighting it they couldn’t win and they couldn’t protect themselves, and that was powerful for me because I didn’t want the movie to feel like a statement – it wasn’t for me, it was for the soldiers.

He got out on a medical injury, so that he was no longer what they call “combat fit.” He’s reassimilating and dealing with what he experienced there and with coming back.

I know my mother and my sister were very affected. I feel more comfortable talking about them, because I feel protective of him and I feel like his privacy is important. It’s important, as a military family, you wouldn’t want to put out to the world that this happened and that happened because that’s their deal. But I know that my mother was terrified by having him in combat. I would get phone calls where she was crying and where she would say, “You’ve never known fear until you’ve had a child being fired at in a combat zone.” She wouldn’t come home from work at night, because she said, “If he gets killed, I know they’ll have to tell me in person.” So those were the things that hit me in the gut.