By John Anderson
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
LOS ANGELES -- Don't try to tell director Kim Peirce that her new movie "Stop-Loss" is about the Iraq war. "It's not," she says. Case closed.
It is, however, her first feature film in nine years -- since her Oscar-winning debut "Boys Don't Cry" -- and considering its obvious influences ("The Best Years of Our Lives," "Coming Home" and, most pronouncedly, "The Deer Hunter"), it's a postwar movie made before the war is over.
While "Stop-Loss" is opening in a marketplace that seems to recoil from anything vaguely associated with Iraq, what Kimberly Peirce is really after in her film is a timeless phenomenon -- the camaraderie of men at war, thwarted by an inability to protect their comrades.
"I wanted to tell an emblematic story," the 40-year-old director says over morning coffee, wearing a T-shirt under her suit jacket that advertises an L.A. motorcycle shop. "If there are 650,000 troops who fought, I didn't want to tell a story that had happened to 1,000. I'm looking for the universal. Actually, the idea of 'stop-loss' came very late to the process."
In his review, Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers suggests Peirce has found what she was looking for with her latest movie: "The emotional battlefield on which Peirce paints her canvas strikes a universal chord that transcends politics and preaching."
While Peirce seems adamant about not criticizing the mission -- she uses the word "patriot" to refer to any soldier who enlisted after 9/11, and her younger brother went to Iraq -- the message of the movie is not exactly Rummy-esque. "Stop-loss," originally a financial term, i.e., a brokerage order that keeps one's account from hemorrhaging money, helps keep the U.S. military from hemorrhaging troops. What it means is extending a soldier's enlistment beyond the terms of his contract.
" 'Stop-Loss' is a movie about guys who signed up after 9/11 for all the right reasons -- protect your family, your home, your country," she says. "And they have this experience that every soldier told me soldiers go through. It's about protecting the soldier to your left, the soldier to your right, being willing to die for them and being challenged by the nature of this conflict, the nature of urban warfare. So many soldiers said to me, 'They're putting us in impossible circumstances.' "
And those circumstances include stop-loss: In the movie, a soldier who thinks he's being discharged (Ryan Phillippe) is told he's got to go back to Iraq. He refuses. Interstate flight ensues. But this is in large part a narrative device -- so is Iraq, to a degree: Peirce is far more interested in what war means to men in a larger sense, how it provides them "an arena where guys can be guys . . . a space to be together in a way they truly love. And which they can't have anywhere else."
In interviews she conducted in places such as Paris, Ill., and throughout base towns in Texas (where the film is set), Peirce talked to vets, AWOL soldiers, soldiers who had fled to Canada. The subjects formulated or confirmed a great deal of what Peirce thinks about men, role-playing and gender politics. The process took a year, and if that seems like a long time, there is that fact that it's been nine years since Peirce's last movie, which also questioned the so-called nature of the sexes.
"Boys Don't Cry," which won a Best Actress Oscar for the previously unknown Hilary Swank, was based on the story of Brandon Teena, a Nebraska transsexual who was beaten, raped and murdered in one of the more notorious hate crimes of the 1990s. The movie's message was more than timely: Although entirely unconnected to Peirce's story, the 1998 murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard occurred just a year before the release of "Boys Don't Cry," throwing another shaft of harsh light on America's struggle with homophobia and intolerance.
"I sort of willed it into existence," Peirce says of "Boys Don't Cry," which she co-wrote with Andy Bienen. "But then the culture enabled me to continue making it."
"I think she was just very passionate and articulate about what her vision for the movie was," says "Boys" producer Christine Vachon, whose New York-based Killer Films has been behind the innovative filmmaking of Todd Haynes ("I'm Not There"), Mary Harron ("The Notorious Bettie Page") and Todd Solondz ("Storytelling"). "I was able to get a strong sense about what she was going to do . . . I think she just conveyed a sense that she really knew her story, and she'd do something magnificent with it."
She did, many agree. Roger Ebert called it "a worthy companion to those other masterpieces of death on the prairie, 'Badlands' and 'In Cold Blood.' " And yet getting a second project on screen has been a struggle.
"Look, it's hard making movies. It's hard even for the people that it's easy for," Vachon says. "Finding that combination of the story that you want to tell, and having it align with the elements just right -- so you can actually get it done -- it's crazy."
A little crazier for Peirce. "Boys" brought her to the attention not just of Hollywood, but the Academy (co-star Chloe Sevigny was also nominated, as Best Supporting Actress).
"It was the greatest experience of my life," Peirce says. "It was my gender, my sexuality, my friends. My friends were screaming, 'You said the words 'lesbian' and 'transsexual' on the red carpet!! Oh my God!' -- we had the big cellphones back then, and they were like, 'Whoooooaaaa, you said that to Joan Rivers!! Whooaaaa!!' "
Hollywood started throwing money at Peirce. But she had her eye on one story: The 1922 shooting death of film director William Desmond Taylor, which, coinciding as it did with the equally sensationalized Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle sex-murder case, led to a crackdown on Hollywood immorality.
"King Vidor tried to make a movie about it," Peirce says, referring to the late, great director. "So did [screenwriter] Robert Towne. It's Hollywood's greatest unsolved murder mystery, and the whole thing was covered up. Completely covered up, white-glove coverup, by the government and by Hollywood, to save Hollywood and America's innocence. That's my take."
So Peirce says she solved the murder ("We did! I'm a big researcher"), wrote a script and got her film cast with Annette Bening, Hugh Jackman, Ben Kingsley and Evan Rachel Wood.
"Then the studio [DreamWorks] runs the numbers," she says. "They love it, but they say, 'We've run the numbers and we'd love to see the $30 million version, but we only want to pay for the $20 million version. And we don't want to see the movie we want to pay for."
"Being a director for me is about being a realist, so it's like, 'Okay, that's how the ball rolls,' but I'd lost a lot of time. That was the end of '03, which would not have been terribly long, but literally the next week I said, 'I can be massively depressed, but screw it: I'm gonna do it differently.' " So she took off with her then-intern Reid Carolin. ("He had just graduated Harvard and came in saying, 'I'll do anything for you, I'll go anywhere, I want to make movies with you.' ") "He was from a military family, I was from a military family, so we picked up our cameras, I paid for everything, and we flew to Paris, Illinois."
Peirce, whose grandfather fought in World War II and whose 19-year-old brother served in Iraq, had an automatic connection with the soldiers and the families of the 1,000 soldiers at the homecoming in Paris. Less so with the "industry."
"As the project was developing, I would have conversations with people from the various studios and tell them about the film," she recalls. "They'd say, 'That's amazing! That's amazing! Do you want us to develop it with you?' "
I said, " 'No.' Not to put down executives, but I don't want an executive looking over my shoulder saying, 'Is that interesting? Is that necessary? Do both of you need a plane ticket?' I was like, 'I can spend $800 and do what it would cost $10,000 to do in the studio system, because I'm gonna just do it.' "
Ryan Philippe says Peirce's personal involvement -- the interviews she'd done, the research, the fact that her brother was there -- was essential to the success of the filming.
"Knowing it came from such a personal place for her, and having seen the research she did, and that she was going to these homecomings, and watching hours upon hours of soldier videos, all that passion, that was important to me," he said.
He found it strange, however, when he realized she was the first female director he'd ever worked with.
"That is shocking," Phillippe says, "because I've made about 30 films, and it's a strange commentary on this business. We need more female writers and more voices, and that's one thing I've been encouraging Kim about -- don't wait another nine years to make a film. People need to have that kind of inspiration she can provide."
On the other hand, he says, gender had very little relevance in regards to making the film. "She's tougher than a lot of the men I've worked with," he says. "Tougher than Eastwood or Altman."
View all comments that have been posted about this article.