Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

Two long interviews in this column: writer-director Gavin Hood talks about his Oscar-winning South African Tsotsi, and Eugene Jarecki talks about Why We Fight and its analysis of war, money and belief in the U.S. as well as his forceful reaction to a rancorous review by the New Yorker's David Denby.

Viva South Africa! Gavin Hood and Tsotsi

Tsotsi, an adaptation of South African writer Athol Fugard's novel, and this year's Academy Award-winning Best Foreign Language Film, is a powerful story about crime and redemption, crisply told, showcasing the vivid talents of actor Presley Chweneyagae and writer-director Gavin Hood.

Set in a Soweto shantytown, Fugard's 1961 novel (only published in 1980) tells the story of a nameless, orphaned 19-year-old, known only as "Tsotsi," [Sot-si] or "thug," who denies any trace of his past: he carries himself as the coldest, most unemotional of hard men. His only family is the gang of equally alienated criminals he travels with. In the movie's earliest moments, Tsotsi's angry present roils, and he and a trio of friends explode into violence; quickly after, a carjacking lands a baby in Tsotsi's lap. Despite the chance for horrifying sentimentality, Hood's third feature is an eye-opener, both visually and with Chweneyagae's intense performance, a compelling, suggestive story that's both lyrical and jagged. As he asserted with the Oscar in his hand, "Viva Africa!" The score, comprised mostly of "Kwaito" music, the best-selling South African variant of hip-hop, composed by Mark Kilian and Paul Hepker, is also urgent and infectious. [This interview contains a passage that describes the ending of the movie in detail.]

We spoke in Chicago, in a suite on a high floor at the Ritz-Carlton, with a view of the mid-portion of the John Hancock across the street from us and a line of bright blue sky against green lake a few blocks away. "What an extraordinary view!" the cheerful Hood exclaimed after we'd been introduced. "Hotels, you don't know where you are, you might as well just be in a room somewhere. You don't know where you are. So this is fantastic!

PRIDE: When did you finish Tsotsi?

HOOD: We finished shooting at the end of 2004 and then we edited through to the early months of 2005 and finally got it completed… in time for the Edinburgh film festival, the first festival it went to in 2005. But it was released very briefly in South Africa, rushed out as a release in September to qualify for submission to the Academy Awards.

PRIDE: So it wasn't a full release?

HOOD: No, no. It was like, ‘Here's the print!' Right out of the laboratory, into a cinema for a week to qualify and be out there and then they held back the release. It's now been on release, wide, we've just come out of our second weekend which I'm pleased to say it's breaking box office records and everybody's very excited and that's a big relief, that it's actually doing well, so that's exciting.

PRIDE: Tsotsi's your third feature. How did it come to you?

HOOD: I read the book while I was at film school at UCLA and thought, ‘Wow, this would really make a good movie' whilst not realizing what a struggle it actually would become. I don't know if you've had a chance to read it, but it's very much about what goes on in the mind of Tsotsi and this episodic nature of the various characters he encounters, and then the story stops and you go through all this wonderful characters, it's magnificently written. Yeah. I called up, I seem to recall thinking, who has the rights, thinking maybe… Well, of course, the rights were gone, they were optioned at that time, I think, by Harry Belafonte and David Picker. So I kind of put it out of my mind and went back to South Africa and started off making what we called educational dramas in the townships, making stories about HIV. I worked with the department of health, and we were writing stories around health issues that they wanted to be able to discuss with kids and so on. So I was working in these areas, but I wasn't making Tsotsi at all, I was working in educational television. And then I made a short film called The Storekeeper, which won the Silver Hugo here [at the Chicago International Film Festival], and that helped at a certain point get me finance for my first feature film, A Reasonable Man, which was a script I'd written at film school, set in South Africa. I struggled like seven years to get the money, finally we got the money for that. And that was made for like a million bucks in four weeks. And that was screened in the market, screening in Cannes, when we were trying to sell it. Peter Fudakowski, the producer of Tsotsi, saw it, and liked it, and so he gave me his card. But many people do that and you never hear from them again and mostly you toss the cards anyway because you don't remember who gave them to you and you move on! Anyway, about three years ago, there was this phone call from Peter, saying, "Do you remember me? I've got this book, "Tsotsi," I don't know if you know it." I said, "Sure I know it!" He says, "I really think it's powerful, I think the themes are really powerful, and I was wondering if you'd be interested. I saw A Reasonable Man and I liked it and I'm looking for someone to do an adaptation." That, in a nutshell is what happened and that's when I started writing three years ago.

PRIDE: There's a time capsule quality to the novel's publication: Fugard wrote in 1961 or so, tucked it away, and it was published until 1980 or so. How contemporary or how timeless is such a story, not in the particulars, which you've updated, but in its portrayal of the townships and of crime and other conditions? Watching the film, there are three, maybe four times, you have the big placards, "We are all affected by AIDS." That's the modern day. But then to see the opening killing, the gentleman with the tie, it could be 1961 or today, and you've practically used Fugard's descriptions precisely as storyboards.

But there are other things that are striking. I love anything as bold as what you do with the tumult of weather, of the lightning storms over Cape Town, but to read the book, and find the phrase, "The torn and brooding sky." Well, that's what you're showing us. Then I'd like to talk about the final image. It's partly the geometry of it, you're behind Tsotsi with his arms upraised in surrender and it's really acute and low angle. You can't slot it instantly yet it has iconic grace and power. It's ambiguous. Over the weekend, finishing the book, Fugard's last image on the page talks about his head, but in a different circumstance.

HOOD: Yes, he's dead.

PRIDE: With a smile on his face, which, in your telling, we do not see.

HOOD: Well, you've done your homework more than most people. It's very interesting, thank you, but the struggle with—

PRIDE: I was struck by it as first because the acuteness of the angle is peculiar, low, beautiful in its own compositional right, but you can't immediately pin down or resolve what's happened in the climactic confrontation—

HOOD: Right. You don't want to be too "on" it, so it doesn't look too crucifix-like because that's the obvious way to do it. So you don't want to be square on it, because that's making it obvious, a kind of Christian crucifix and you don't want it to be a religious image, per se, but of course you're tapping into probably that iconography of surrender and giving over to your fate. And at the same time, being on his face, it's like, what expression should he have now? It's almost as if we have to back off from him and let him go on his journey on his own. And then other thing is that we do have an ending where he's shot, shot dead. It just felt like in updating the story, it was right, and I've spoken to Athol about this, it was right for him to die in the book, because things were becoming increasingly hopeless, segregation was being increasingly enforced, Sophiatown was demolished, as you see in the book. The bulldozers are there flattening what was one of the remaining mixed neighborhoods, and, and Athol said he struggled with the ending, what do I do? This kid's journey is over and this hopeless and the only way to release him is, he's gotta die. I don't know what to do, he said. Which is odd, because he struggled with it. And I said, well, if in the film, I've written an ending where he dies, and it feels all wrong, it feels melodramatic in the movie. Because the movie is now coming out of a country, that, for all of the problems it has, and there are many, we have our healthy constitution with a democracy and we have some hope. We didn't really, I think, deserve, or need to have this AIDS crisis to hit as hard as it has, and I think South Africa has been in complete denial as you know, didn't want to know this was happening as we had celebrated the victory over what we thought would never happen. Somebody got AIDS? No. This is not possible, not possible. But even with AIDS, at least the constitution is healthy, and there's a sense that… Killing him just felt cynical, in the new story, where it doesn't feel cynical to me, in the book, I don't know how you feel.

PRIDE: I think Robert Altman's the one who's always said of having so many movies where someone dies at the end, how the hell else do you put total closure on a story? Story goes on until you die.

HOOD: You know the main reason why? There are lots of reasons, one of which is that you want the audience to have something to discuss, and when you kill him, it's closed and there's nothing to discuss. Whereas now you get to make up your own ending: should he go to jail for twenty years? There's no death penalty [in South Africa], so do you want him to… Would you take him home and give him cookies and tea? Some people feel one, some feel the other, but I think the answer lies somewhere in between. So you get that. But more importantly, I felt that the biggest climax for me in the movie is [description omitted]. We don't want to give that away, so maybe you just, I dunno how you'd phrase it. ‘The big climax is the emotional exchange between the father of the child and him.' Who knows what happens? We know. That exchange where nothing is said and yet so much is said, you're really trying to tap into what it's really about, which is, to what extent can you get forgiveness and be forgiven? It seems to me that we are very willing to forgive as people provided we get an absolutely sincere apology, genuine remorse. And so that scene was always nerve-wracking to me, because Presley's performance, which, frankly, I think is so good in that moment, I feel like the challenge we had is that if he holds back too much and then he hands over the baby, then you feel like he's too cool. On the other hand, if he gets all weepy and tearful, and it feels melodramatic, we're fucked. The only way this works, I told Presley, is we have to work on this real thing, I'm going to hold you to it, and we're going to keep shooting. We're going to stand here until that emotional beat is reached. So actually, I shot for a long time, more than is… And then very carefully structured it to the moment where the tears come. And think, oh my god, am I being sentimental here? But that sort of breakdown, where he can't say I'm sorry, but we know he means it, and where the father can't embrace him but he's also not… he doesn't take the baby from him. He waits for him to give it. And almost insists that he does. That that act happens.

PRIDE: It's in the play of the eyes.

HOOD: Exactly. So, so then I thought, if that is real emotional climax of the film, odd as that it is, killing him is like cheating. It means we didn't pull that off. If we have to shoot him to make you have a breakdown and cry as an audience, then I've fucking failed through the whole movie in terms of bringing a genuine human emotion to this as opposed to, "Oh it's a bloody tragedy!" And also the father says, if you stay, I promise nothing will happen to you. So what do I tell all the kids at home, that no matter what you do that you're fucked? It just felt silly. It felt all right. That's why I finally decided to end it this way. And that ending shot? I remember saying, "How can you end on this specter?" They wanted me to go shoot the shot where you could see him from the front. Y'know what? This was a second unit shot that we shooting for when he turned to the copper, I would have used for the cut. There was something when we were shooting that made me say, don't cut. I don't know what it was. That image was fitting. We had the footage. That's the footage. That was a decision made in the editing room. There's a lot of the movie that was made in the script, but in my script? The original ending was, he died. I thought I had to be true to that catharsis, if you will, at the end of the book. And then the end, the more I sat there… Then you feel like you're undermining the scene with the father, then you feel like you're being cynical because the father said nothing would happen to him, and then you're stopping people having anything to talk about. Because it's over! I think it's the right ending. Do you think it's the right ending? Thank you.

PRIDE: It's an indelible image, it has the same ghostly resonance as the ending of Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter: there's something elusive that makes it memorable.

HOOD: The challenge of adapting this book, Athol writes very beautifully about the way Tsotsi is repressing memory and he's telling you what's going on in his head, you can't do that in a film without clunky voiceovers. And in which case, whose voice would it be? He doesn't speak. And you can't put an omnipotent narrator's voice in. The thing that I think helped me, and I've used this, it may seem like a strange analogy. With young writing students recently I went to give some guest talks, they say, how do you work the adaptation? And I said, you know what I found? If you think you have to turn the novel into the film, you get in trouble. You start trying to follow a plot. What most people remember about a great piece of literature is how it made them feel. They remember the emotional response, they don't necessarily remember the damn plot six months later or even one week later. They remember that there was an emotion that it generated in them. And that was because even if Tsotsi is a fiction of Fugard's, who knows, he may or may not have known this character, or a character like him. But let's assume he did for want of the argument, even if it's a fiction. Here sits the character. And he uses his medium of writing and of literary images to paint a portrait of this character. If I were to paint a painting, in two dimensions, of you, and my friend over here were to do a three dimensional sculpture, nobody would ask why this didn't look like this. They would ask, does this capture your essence? The criticism of the work would not be, why doesn't the sculpture look like the painting? It's a sculpture, it's a painting, it's a different medium! This is a book, this is a film. So it seems to me, what became my obligation, and I don't know, you'll be the judge of whether I discharged it, but was, can I capture that emotional essence and use different tools.

No, I can't tell you what's going on in his head, but I can show you, without shifting the camera around a lot, what he's thinking if I have an actor and I work the beats out and I keep the eyelines tight-to-lens so you're really given the chance to look behind the eyes as opposed to being off-angle on the facial shots. Most of my shots looking at him and looking at her, I sometimes had them with their heads up against the lens if they weren't on camera. I'd be saying to you, play to this eye, so you're a flick away from the audience. Which is technically heavy on a young actor. They're trying to bring emotion, and yet they're doing a lot of technical work. And the other actor is trying to be emotional but they're jammed in here. And so it's all what's happening in the eyes. I think I was blessed to find some young actors with this level or emotional range. And by the way? This kid has played Hamlet. This is a guy who comes from these areas, but from the age of 6, was going down to his community theater, community center where they did theater and just loved it. And his mum wanted to him because it kept him off the streets, that's how he tells the story. And he played, his first role was Jack in the Box in some pantomime. And my costume director saw him playing Hamlet at the State Theater in a production, said this kid is unbelievable. So you have this actor who's capable of coming to grips with flawed characters, characters with a certain amount of self-loathing, vulnerability. My role was just to help him transition that from theater into the film medium and let him trust his moments of stillness.

PRIDE: Do you have a theater background? You see to have a keen sense in your blocking of the stage picture and occasional bold coups de theatre.

HOOD: Yeah, I've worked in the theater as well.

PRIDE: The widescreen helps as well. There's a cut you have from one kid sheltering from the rain at night, nestled in a round cement culvert tile, and then you cut to the wider shot and there are so many more tiles, so many more kids—

HOOD: Right, and it's on the same axis. Boom, boom!

PRIDE: It's like a James Nachtwey photo almost, some of the images he's captured of children playing in wartime.

HOOD: Well, I'll tell you the weird thing. I have a stills background. I have the theater background because my parents were actors when they were young. But my dad's other passion was wildlife photography. Sometimes when I was young I hated it, because we'd be stuck in the heat in the car in the wilderness, waiting for some elephant to turn its head to catch the light just right in its eye. My father's point was always, the stills frame is about composition, lighting and grabbing an emotional moment. If you don't have that emotional moment, you just have a recording of something, you don't have a life, you don't have a soul. When you catch that moment, whatever it is, whether it be a lizard or an elephant or a human being that just catches you, that's what makes it. But included in that, you need a well-composed shot with good lighting that gives it its three dimensions. So I guess that's how I approached the movie. On the one hand, there's the proscenium arch approach from the theater, but on the other hand, there's this telephoto'ed look of tights and wides, when you back off and I like to go from these. I also like to shoot a lot from the point of view, almost, of the person, rather than some objective point of view. So a lot of times, y'know, you feel that you're seeing what the character is seeing and you feel that you're seeing the person he's looking at almost as if you were looking at him in your shoes. Rather than us documenting him doing his thing. Which is why I thought the widescreen might work, even though most ghetto movies, most people, the conventional wisdom was, a lot of people said, are you mad? Sixteen millimeter handheld, that's how you do these pictures! Didn't you see City of God? And I'm like, yeah, I saw it, it's brilliant, and I'm gonna look like a friggin' imitator and I'm gonna come up second. I've got to find my own way into this world and this my way and it's either gonna work or it's not. Fortunately, my producers thought it would work even at one point, one investor wanted to shut me down.

PRIDE: What encouraged you to do the amount of digital work there seems to be on screen? There's the rust and smoke haze over much of the picture, and there's a shot toward the end, an extreme long shot, we hear a chorus, skyscrapers are in the distance, he's climbing an undeveloped hillside, the light is golden off his deep brown skin foreground left and there's almost like a shaft of light beaming on a chorus dressed in blue and white off to the right, mid-distance, and it's a dazzling composition. On one viewing, it looks like there are three bits of re-processing going on there. It's bold.

HOOD: Um. I suppose I wanted to create a sense, and again, you'll decide if it works, I didn't want to make a documentary, because there's something about this story that's kind of universally mythological. It's a myth. I felt like how could I combine a sort of magic realism, if you will, although it's not quite—How can I—I thought I could take license with the color palette, all designed to focus you in on this character. So the interiors of Tsotsi's shack are a really good example. Initially, the designers bring in [stuff] that's very eclectic, a lot of different colors. And I said, no, let's strip it down to what's the color in here. It's red, browns and oranges. You see the interior of the shack, hopefully, you're not aware that we've done that, someone like you will be, but most audiences, what it does, they can absorb the image rapidly and go back to the actor as opposed to finding a cluttered, busy image. Similarly, with that big wide? I desaturated… that's actually all live. Those people down there, him, and that city. That's where I was born. Right within a hundred yards of that tall tower in that part of the city. So I'm nostalgic about it. But then in post, what I thought then was, okay, I need to darken the sky. The sky's there, but I can just bring it down. I darkened some of that foreground building that was standing out too much, so I could keep the attention on him. And the people singing down there, that's where they come and do their church services. We just asked them if they would mind moving in. We had to pay a fee, but there they are. So the voice is almost coming from them. But of course, you desaturate so that the image is not too busy with too much color. It's only going to be on screen for four or five seconds so you just want it to sit like an image. We did the same inside the house of Miriam's, stripped the pictures off the wall and had these turquoise walls so the mobiles stand out, the things that are important stand out and you're not distracted by something on the wall that's really not important in terms of the story. So it is stylized in that sense, and all towards the goal of letting you just stay in, get inside his head. His wardrobe's the same, similarly styled, it's black with one red t-shirt and sometimes that little vest with a bit of orange. And the big guy is in blue, which is a receding color, red is a forward-walking color, so you Tsotsi the red t-shirt. It's more present. So we just focus on him and not wow, what wardrobe is he wearing? The wardrobe happens and it's gone. That's the idea.

Who's in control of the truth?
Eugene Jarecki and Why We Fight

Eugene Jarecki's documentary Why We Fight makes a compelling, incisive case for the perception that the U.S. economy requires perpetual war in order to survive. The idea for the film began with Jarecki's first encounter with President Eisenhower's 1961 farewell address to the nation, in which he coined the phrase "the military-industrial complex," warning of the potential of its gathering power to bulldoze democracy. "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex," Eisenhower said. "The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes." Coming from a former General of the Army, these are powerful, ringing words (also cited, chillingly, with archival footage of Eisenhower in the closing moments of George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck). Working with editor Nancy Kennedy, Jarecki painstakingly collects original material, both illustrative and interviews, drawing reflections from the articulate left (Gore Vidal) and the articulate right (Republican Senator McCain, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol). Aside from a brutal, snide review by the New Yorker's David Denby, who comes off as a clueless scold, the painful plausibility of Jarecki's case-making will be searing to most eyes. This is forceful and necessary filmmaking. We spoke the day after Sundance in the lobby of Chicago's Peninsula Hotel, as the Senate was voting to prevent a filibuster against the nomination of future Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito and a string quartet played loudly nearby. I suggest that Jarecki and Clooney had both made rich use of the Eisenhower speech, and that his historical long view resonates. Jarecki, who speaks in fluid, effortless paragraphs, agreed.

JARECKI: Eisenhower stopped me in my tracks. I had never seen a President talk as honestly about anything to the American people He was looking right at me and his eyes were extremely concerned and there was something about... it was immediately clear to me how much courage it had to take, to take your last few moments in office if you've devoted your entire life to being a soldier and a president, to take your last few moments and spend a disproportionate number of them on a warning of that gravity about forces that you, yourself were part of creating, an architect, not just a solider, right? So here he is, basically looking us in the eye, and saying, for many reasons, we've unleashed a kind of monster. What are we going to do about it? We've got to do something about it. There's a kind of vigilance needed to keep this monster in check, to recognize its strength. And also to recognize the capacity for danger. You can't watch something like that [Eisenhower's speech] if you're caring citizen, not run with it in some way, there's no way to ignore that. At least for me, there wasn't it. It was immediately clear to me that there was a film there. I would apply Eisenhower's thinking to today and try to understand to what extend his concerns were coming to pass.

PRIDE: I'm assuming it went in different directions after you got started. What do you take to someone like [BBC commissioning editor] Nick Fraser that gets them to let you pull the trigger and start doing this kind of exploration.

JARECKI: It's very funny that you ask it about Nick Fraser, because the idea for Why We Fight was first expressed in a conversation I had with Nick Fraser, where he basically asked me what every filmmaker has ever wanted to be asked, which is, ‘What do you want to do next?" And he asked it in a very encouraging way and therefore I felt at ease to tell him the most sort of off-the-top-of-my-head blue-sky scenario. And I told him, I want to make a film about the threat posted to democracy by our contemporary form of unbridled capitalism.

PRIDE: There's a big topic.

JARECKI: Yeah, that's what he said. He said, "That's a big topic, how are you going to do that?," that's exactly what he said. And I said, "Well, nowhere are the friction points between capitalism and democracy more clear than in the mechanics and impact of the military-industrial complex. So I'd like to make a movie about that." And he said, "What do you want to call it?" And I said, "Well, on a separate note, I've always wanted to make a movie in the spirit of Frank Capra's When We Fight movies. So I dunno, maybe I'll just call it Why We Fight and I'll have that speech from Eisenhower, that military-industrial complex speech be one of the voices heard in terms of a kind of partial answer to that larger questions." I kid you not! That's literally how articulate the conversation was! Because I guess it was Nick letting off a head of steam that I'd built off over a long period, recognizing that I had been murmuring about a lot of different things related to this, but that they hadn't coalesced into a pitch of any kind and by asking me in the way that her did with the kind of loving, he's a wonderful commissioning editor, he's the man. He's the classic, he's really the classic artist's benefactor from Renaissance times. If he were living in the Renaissance, he's one of these guys who'd be supporting a bunch of people that nobody else understood. And then later, you'd hear of them, and if it weren't for him, they wouldn't have a roof over their heads. He does that with a lot of us, and he did it that day with me by reaching out a branch and saying, what do you want to do with this?

PRIDE: Socratic commissioning instead of Socratic questioning.

JARECKI: Yeah. Yeah, it is. It's a great thing, he'll love that, too. What happened at that moment was that Nick allowed me, Nick is a kind of ...he's a Brit, and he's lived a lot in America and he loves America, he had said at that time, I'm fed up withal these people making movies that are critical about America, because that's all I seem to show [on BBC] and I think he recognized what I was going to do was a kind of tough-love portrait of American at a crossroads at a time of great and critical importance in which our future is being shaped, for good and bad. The far-reaching qualities of the film, and the film's capacity for warmth alongside analysis, and for, y'know, suspense alongside revelation was something that spoke to him cinematically and spoke to him philosophically. Thank God!

PRIDE: It's wonderful to see a lot of the historical and contemporary strands of Why We Fight in an articulate way. But another thing is noticing the women who are in your film. I find them even more compelling the gentleman whose son died… these warm, round, open faces—

JARECKI: Yeah—

PRIDE: —Of women who had been believers. There's a level still of hope and not jadedness that you see in their faces.

JARECKI: I learned a lot of things about America's military family and one of the things that I learned about the family is that there are a lot of women in it. A surprising number of women working in arms factories, working on defense assembly lines, working behind the scenes and on the scene in many capacities. That, like many other things I learned, is one of the things that shook many of my preconceptions about military life, about the life within the military-industrial complex and about how Americans think about war at a time of conflict. Because, y'know, yes, we would meet people like the women in the film who says she would rather be helping Santa make toys. We would meet people who were the most ordinary people in the world and who would have to go to work every day and reconcile their belief in basic values of decency and humanity with the fact that they are producing tools of destruction all day. Many of them don't have any problem reconciling that because they truly believe in America's greater cause and that the weapons are only used occasionally and sparingly in the service of that greater cause in which they believe. That's a very understandable way to go through your life, and I would argue that their sacrifice, the sacrifice that those people are making on those assembly lines on those frontlines, is disrespected when policy makers take for granted their belief and their commitment to the system and make decisions about war that are less defensible than that, decisions that are perhaps driven by forces to which those everyday people [don't agree with].

PRIDE: Having grown up in a poor part of Kentucky, I'm always torn by small town stories like that of Jessica Lynch, this petite woman in West Virginia who wanted only to teach children but could only afford to go to school to become a schoolteacher by going to war. She couldn't get a job in Palestine, West Virginia.

JARECKI: I think that you're touching on something of great importance, which is that Americans today live in a kind of misplaced comfort, that things have not gotten bad enough yet in Iraq for us to have a draft. When we see a draft, on the street, when we see people lined up at Selective Service offices, that's when we know that the bad stuff has really come. That ignores that there is a kind of backdoor draft in this country that is compelling young people to go to work because they have few other options. So, in a way, the pointing finger of Uncle Sam, which once pushed people off to war, has now become the invisible hand of Adam Smith. Basically, young people are being ushered by that calm little invisible onto the ships, onto the planes off to fight in wars that are dangerous to them and others. They are doing so because of exactly what Eisenhower warned us about. Eisenhower's warning about the military-industrial complex is, after all, al warning about the way a society can change, and it can shift so that before long, in the vain pursuit of perfect security, you can end up creating a garrison state, a state in which you have taken resources away from crucial elements of your national life, like healthcare, education, infrastructure, and diverted those assets disproportionately into the military expression of national power. The armed forces.

It's like a bodybuilder, developing the right arm, but letting the rest of the body atrophy away to nothing. You end up with a tilted society. In that tilted society, it is tilted toward militarism, because the military looks like, and indeed is very often, the best solution to the problems we face. So that a young person like Jessica Lynch or a young person like William Solomon in my film, they're going into the military because it can provide social services that are no longer available [to] the mainstream public. Education, y'know, you go to the military to get educated because we took the money out of schools and gave it to the military and now the military promises to educate you. Likewise, when you see the streets of Katrina, of New Orleans under water, why? Because we took money away from our basic infrastructural commitments and put it into the military. So when the floods come? Send in the Guard. Before long, you start to see a military solution to every problem, and that is at the heart of militarism.

PRIDE: There were analyses I read in late January that suggested that the VA, that Veterans' Affairs, is in fact, the most efficient embodiment of socialized medicine on earth.

JARECKI: That is one of the things that really is Eisenhower's genius. And I‘m sorry to always harp on him, but he has so much to offer. Eisenhower understood that national defense is about more than just bombs. There are a lot of components to national defense, and one of them is education, because you cannot defend a country if people are too dumb to operate the machines you want them to operate. Healthcare—

PRIDE: —recognition of mental health needs for returning veterans—

JARECKI: Absolutely, that's on the reach-around end, where now the folklore coming back from war no longer inspires recruitment. When that happens, when you don't take care of your returning vets, the stories they tell to young hopefuls are not inspiring. Eisenhower saw this at every end of the pike. He understood that to allow the forces of corporatism to be let loose in our democracy, they will threaten so many areas of national life, that for example, you'll see a situation like Katrina, where the public sees that their government has forsaken them and they see that something is wrong at the heart of the country. When they see that, they lose their capacity to rather blindly be willing to die for that country, because too much of the country stands for is in doubt. So now that we shrinking recruitment figures, the danger is that those chickens are coming home to roost. What you're having is Eisenhower's warning bearing itself out now on the new issue of a crisis of confidence. He was very aware, as a man who understood troop morale, he understood how you motivate people to go to war and he understood the necessity that America would have to maintain her ideals, that the country is at its best and at its strongest when it sets and follows an example. When it fails to do so, it opens itself up, not just to moral and ethical challenges, but to national security challenges as well.

PRIDE: When Capra made his When We Fight films, he drew from Axis sources—

JARECKI: —He drew from Axis sources, and he also filmed his own stuff. He collected a group of artists together to make the films. He brought Mel Blanc, he brought Chuck Jones, Dr. Seuss, John Huston, Irving Wallace, Anatole Litvak. He brought a lot of artists under one roof at that time to create indoctrination films for the troops of one kind or another. Some cartoons, some live action, and he incorporated original material with archival.

PRIDE: What I'm moving toward, and I don't want you to respond specifically to this. I assume that you read reviews. You seem like the sort of person—

JARECKI: Yeah.

PRIDE: I'm not asking you to respond to this specific review, but I was floored by the incredibly jejune review that David Denby wrote in the New Yorker of Why We Fight. This is merely a collage film; this guy went in with a point to make; this is not true filmmaking. Does that trouble you when a reviewer is so obstinate, so resistant to what you've made?

JARECKI: I think it's a form of unfortunate elitism where the reviewer probably does not have sufficient experience sitting in an audience and feeling the way people are affected the movie. So their review reveals more about the rarefied world in which they watch films than about the way those films actually impact the public. In the particular case of that review, I think Mr. Denby literally didn't realize that most of the film he was watching was original footage. A lot of the shots that he referred to as being stock or archival were shot by… We had 21 cinematographers who worked on the film, some of whom were in combat for many, many months. Many of them were very, very, very hurt and very pained by what Mr. Denby wrote, and actually kind of disillusioned by it because one would have hoped that a reviewer of his credentials would know the difference between original material shot on hi-def, for example. Particularly if he's going to take a position by which documentary makers should operate. He often invokes the name Marcel Ophuls in the review. I daresay, I think Marcel Ophuls, wherever in this universe he is, was an artist who would not have thought that a critic should set parameters by which artist should operate. It's just a tragic closure of the American mind, and thankfully audiences have not seen the film the way Mr. Denby did. I think if he had seen it with an audience, with the public… Also, I didn't really know what he meant by having a point of view. I mean, there are 24 people in the film, 20 of them are Republicans. And of the people in the film, there are many with whom I agree, and many with whom I disagree and all of them challenged my conceptions about life. And actually Marcel Ophuls himself said that all films are subjective, but his goal in his films was to show how difficult to come to the perceptions that he has.

That's what I try to do in making my films. I agree with that part of Ophuls' philosophy. I do go out of my way to find people who disagree with whatever impulses I have when I start. Mr. Denby would probably not recognized that I had never met Wilton Sekzer before making my film, so I could never have gone on the journey with him that was only Wilton's to go on. I'm not exactly sure what that meant. It's not like these are stories that one creates; one follows them as they unfold. I'm happy for you to write anything you want about David Denby. I honestly believe that David Denby has hurt too many filmmakers by writing things in the mainstream press that are vicious, that reveal a too-great distance from the creative process. If that makes me unpopular with David Denby, I think that any artist should be unpopular with any critic who sets tyrannical parameters about art. I also was angry at the insult he dealt my cinematographers, my crews. To call what they're doing stock footage ignores their work, it ignores the commitment they made to time in the field. They wrote a note about this; they were extremely upset about it and co-signed it, 19 of them. It's a big deal. And it sends a shock wave. It's kind of like, I guess, the way Mr. Denby would see the world, you're either with him or you're with the terrorists.

PRIDE: Among documentary makers I've encountered in the past decade, a great generosity and a genuine curiosity seems to prevail. Like I.F. Stone used to say, it's more important to know what the enemies are writing than your friends are saying. And he'd read primary documents, which is a far cry from journalistic handouts and taking the morning fax of talking points and stand-ups in front of public buildings and cocktail parties. There's curiosity and passion, and little guardedness, it seems.

JARECKI: Yeah… And I think, y'know, the one thing is that anybody who tells you that these things are objective is lying. They're subjective. What you try to do when you set out is try to be very aware of your own inclinations and to challenge them. To keep them in check. You do that by confronting yourself with experts with whom you don't agree. They're either experts because of firsthand life experience that is irreplaceable or they're experts because they've made whatever the subject is their focus of study for a lifetime. Those are the people I go out to. Those are the only people who appear in my film. I'm a changed person for knowing them and the film is a changed film for including them.

PRIDE: Why is that?

JARECKI: I do that because that's how the audience can be invited into the dialogue I am hoping to promote. If the audience comes, and what they see on screen is simply a paint-by-numbers along ideological lines, they're going to walk out, and maybe they'll find it short-term entertaining, but long-term, they won't feel it respected their participation in the dialogue, because it was one-sided. Because they wonder later on why they didn't hear the other half of the story. I'm no dummy. I want people to think about this for a long time to come. So I ask myself, if I see something that might appear simplistic, what can I do to include greater texture around this subject, what can I do to complicate this subject? Where can I go and find primary subjects that will support what I am saying, where can I find primary subjects that will challenge what I am saying? And go to find people who are experts on both sides and let them talk, let the viewer come to his understanding based on the information he is being provided. John Maynard Keynes has a wonderful expression where he says, he was once accused of having his views be inconsistent, and he said, "Well, when I get new information, I change my views. What, sir, do you do?" I trust the audience to be able to take new information and to evolve. I often go out and find figures who do that. That was one of the most disconcerting things about that review, [it stating] that our film is dominated by people whose stories unfold and their personalities change over the course of my film. Eisenhower goes from being a hawkish general to being a contemplative president in the autumn of his life. Wilton Sekzer goes from serving his country with blind faith. He's a Vietnam vet, a New York cop and, after losing his son Jason [on 9/11], goes from intense desire for revenge to a higher place in reflection and self-awareness. It's that very capacity for change— Karen Kwiatkowski lives her life in the military and then has a revelation around the Iraq war. These people come to revelations, and by the way, their revelations are different. It doesn't matter what the content of their revelation is. For me, what's important is the capacity for change they demonstrate, because we are all living in a time where we don't see the prospect of change. We feel very frightened and disillusioned by the systems that we see in place, and we see as insurmountable and unchangeable. To see characters who themselves see themselves and their world as works-in-progress is terribly inspiring.

PRIDE: There are places where you could have scored points, from footage that's available, that could have characterized the President and those around him.

JARECKI: I could have made, if I had wanted to, the material exists in the world that makes the collage film Denby is talking about. And I'm not sure what film he watched. But if we had wanted to make that film, we would have disproportionately used television archives in the film and we would have used the mountain of material that exists in the world to take potshots at one political or another and make a very shallow, contemporary point. But instead, we rejected that in deference to human stories, which are all live-action. The six characters in the film and their entire stories are filmed by us, by a group of inner city kids who are camera people, they filmed the story of William, by a group of other hardworking camera professionals, who traveled all around the world, including in war zones, to film the rest of the material, including in 25 American states. That, we did, to get away from the unfortunate tradition that Mr. Denby notes, which is that television is infecting much of our society, and television is a collage of shrill, simplistic collisions of images put together with little respect for the viewer and a compromised sense of journalistic responsibility. Thankfully, we avoided that.

PRIDE: A moment I'd isolate is a remarkable cut at the end of the picture, from William being shoehorned into a small car on his way to war and then making a straight cut to another traveling shot, this with an army vehicle making its way in the desert. That's a swell coup de theatre. Coup de cinema. Straight cut: Kid gets in the car, now he's in the war.

JARECKI: Yeah. Things happen. That day, the idea that that recruiter puts him in a car and drives him away shows so much desperation by the armed forces at a time of diminishing recruitment, they've gotten to the point of scraping the bottom of the barrel where they are literally driving these kids in solitary car pools off to the front lines.

PRIDE: Solitary, the recruits don't speak among themselves…

JARECKI: It's that, and it's also that there aren't enough of them to fill a bus. That's what astonishing, that it's so valuable to get a recruit, that you'll burn gas mileage to drive him there in one car. Don't you find that amazing? When that happened, I knew he was about to take off, and I was like, where is the bus? And ultimately he's getting in this tiny little thing, it's like the joke in that Woody Allen routine, where he has a dream and all these guys think they're fire trucks and run around New York City and the cops pull them over, and the cop says, the cop is trying to arrest them because they've all been hypnotized or something, and he laughs because the cop wants to put this fire truck into a little Chevy. I was like, 'You've got to be kidding me, you're going to put this kid in this car, this is the end of my movie?' What happened to the bus and all of the recruits and the Star Spangled Banner? And then I [thought], 'That's exactly the point. 'Those are the kind of buses you fill when men are eager to go off and fight for their country. But this is the little car you fill when what you're doing is having people go off, who have nothing better to, because something's wrong with the country.

PRIDE: The movie is deeply sad, making it seem like the old apothegm is wrecked: the first time was tragedy, the next time's tragedy, hey, it's tragedy again, where's the comedy repetition? Fahrenheit 9/11 and Michael Moore notwithstanding, there's not the awareness for there to be comedy, the laughter of outrage. Where's that groundswell?

JARECKI: I think Jon Stewart is servicing that. I think The Onion is servicing that. I think Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock are servicing that. I applaud people who can find humor in the challenges we face, because humor is a tremendous tool for helping us all find our common ground, because we all finally laugh at similar things, and when we laugh together, we can do other things together. So I'm a huge advocate for comedy as a tool for political change. I am not necessarily particularly good at it, because I find it hard myself sometimes to get past the depth of anguish in what I see and the way that I get past is by reminding myself of the power of the human spirit. That, again, is not funny so much as it is emboldening. It can be funny and what is so important about comedies about politics is that being able to laugh at a situation is the first step in being able to take something lightly and to see it in contrast and to not let it bury you. I think people will look back at Jon Stewart, and not just because I was on his show, but they'll look back on him and say this was a guy who in many ways got them through these years and helped keep the fire burning for the hopes of a better world being possible. Because his irony about the unraveling of the world we live in was a reality-check, that it was unraveling but let that not be mistaken for the way it has to be. Our generation will owe Jon Stewart an enormous debt of gratitude for having kept us sane during a period of compromise of national and human standards.

PRIDE: Give me the names of figures other than Ophuls who you think handle large subjects capably.

JARECKI: I look at, just for example, I look at Leon Gast told the remarkable story of When We Were Kings, capturing so much about America and so much about the man, Muhammad Ali and so much about the human spirit in a couple of hours. I look at Werner Herzog and his creativity in portraying truth and employing fictional devices to go deeper, to a more basic truth than the condition he calls "the accountant's truth." I think that's a very savvy distinction.

PRIDE: He's looking for his "ecstatic truth."

JARECKI: Ecstatic truth is the deeper one. That's right. That he wants to go deeper, to the ecstatic truth that lies beneath the accountant's truth. I like that very much. I don't myself, I tend to be more fact-based and I tend to be less inclined toward fictional elements, but I think we are all juggling the demands of entertainment value against the demands of truth-telling where increasingly the public is looking to the documentary to provide information that is truthful and reliable because people have experienced a crisis of trust in mainstream journalism. They experience that crisis of trust right at a time when the world is becoming more complicated and they need better access to information. Likewise, I think what my brother [Andrew Jarecki] did in Capturing the Friedmans was very admirable, and I don't just say this because he's my brother, and by the way, David Denby loved his film so he's not always wrong. I think that my brother did an extremely good job of really reminding the public how important it is to think independently and to understand the danger of, sort of the contagious nature of misperception and how quickly ideas can spread in a media-driven society and how much the public mind can be a victim of those forces, until it's very hard to know who's in control of the truth. That's a hard thing to get across in a film because the film is all by itself wrestling with that issue. I thought it was a very interesting sort of internally relevant film for that reason. So at least Mr. Denby and I agree with that.

PRIDE: What are audiences teaching you?

JARECKI: We've had incredible experiences with audiences in this country that goes a long way to challenge what a couple of critics have said. I read a recent criticism of the film that wondered if it was "preaching to the choir" and I was reading that from the library at West Point where I'd just shown the film. We've shown it to military audiences across the country and we've gotten an incredible reception to the film. We're going back to West Point to show it a few more times. Y'know, one of the most interesting things is just to see, that we've been taught to think that people are unengaged, whether they're in the military or outside the military. As far as the military goes, the military is far more engaged in these issues than people think they are. After all, they're living and dying around these issues. They have a lot of engagement the rest of us don't have. And the public, as I've been taught to think, is apathetic and disinterested. And I don't find that at all. And I travel around this country enough, day and night now, to tell you, that every audience dispels that rumor more and more. What I learn is that people aren't apathetic, they just feel helpless. They don't know in contemporary life, which is busy and complicated, how to get a handle on this massive structure of a society, which, if it has flaws, is very hard to fix and it's hard to know where to start, and it's hard to know where to get a handle on things. That's what people are feeling. They're not feeling apathetic. That's very emboldening to me. Showing the film to audiences has given me a window into an America that's possible, driven by the aspirations of its people for something better than what we're settling for.

PRIDE: So it's both sides wanting something better.

JARECKI: One thing to keep in mind is that for someone like myself who is committed to nonpartisanship, when I go to show the film to military audiences, I meet people, who, like me, have taken a pledge of nonpartisanship. So in fact, there's a tremendous amount of shared understanding between myself and military audiences. My film does have a party agenda and neither do they. They are there serving whoever is in power. I am there, challenging whoever is in power, to make sure that the decisions made by the powerful that put our men and women in harms' way do so with validity, with legitimacy and in a spirit consistent with our traditions of republican democracy.

March 14 , 2005

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