lions for lambs

After the end credits for "In the Valley of Elah," an anti-war drama starring Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron, a visibly moved Iraq war veteran stands to address a hushed audience in the dim theater light.

"When I first went [to Iraq], I didn't necessarily agree with the reasons I went to war," says Ian LaVallée, a member of the organization Iraq Veterans Against the War.

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Fielding a question at the Kendall Square Cinema during a discussion after the film, he says he believes his fellow veterans died for the wrong cause.

"For me," he says, "this movie resonates with some of the feeling I had coming back."

As sympathetic audience members wake from Hollywood's spell, the film's message about America ignoring the war's psychological effect on soldiers starts to sink in. Here in the so-called "People's Republic of Cambridge," opposition to the conflict is palpable.

But how will "Elah" and several other Iraq war-themed films opening this fall -- "Grace is Gone," "Lions for Lambs," "Redaction," and "The Kingdom" -- play elsewhere in America?

On the heels of powerful documentaries such "No End in Sight" and "The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends" comes this spate of "message" films laden with stars such as Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, Jamie Foxx, and John Cusack. Hollywood is on a mission to bring the war home. But critics, pundits, and the filmmakers themselves wonder if audiences might be indifferent to the war, fatigued by it, or not looking for films to engage them in serious topics.

"The challenge for these films is whether large numbers of Americans want to see [them]," says Owen Gleiberman, film critic at "Entertainment Weekly." "People are more apathetic now. It's easier to bury your head in the sand, bury your head in the entertainment."

Times have changed since the late 1970s when audiences, yearning to come to grips with the Vietnam War, flocked to social-protest cinema such as "Coming Home," "The Deer Hunter," and "Apocalypse Now." But those films didn't appear until after the conflict had ended. By contrast, movies released during the fighting tended to be pro-war.
Living in Seattle I don't always get the chance to get the huge names in the industry. Rarely do A-List actors and directors visit and we check out only a handful of press junkets a year, but that doesn't stop our phones from working and with the upcoming release of Universal's The Kingdom I jumped at the chance to talk to screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan, one of Hollywood's hottest writers at the moment.
Today I bring you part one of my interview with Matt as he was kind enough to stay on the phone with me for 45 minutes. What could we possibly talk about for that long? Well, his first Hollywood produced film The Kingdom hits theaters this Friday; his script Lions for Lambs directed by Robert Redford starring Redford, Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep hits theaters November 9th; his script State of Play starring Brad Pitt and Ed Norton goes into production this November and his brother Joe Carnahan (Narc, Smokin' Aces) is getting ready to begin casting Matt's adaptation of James Ellroy's novel White Jazz. An impressive resume for a newcomer eh? Well he opened up about all of it.

After his brother kicked down the door for him in 2002 with a small film for Radar Pictures called Soldier Field he caught the attention of director Peter Berg who came to him with the idea for The Kingdom, a film revolving around a counterterrorist detail sent to investigate a terrorist bombing in one of the compounds that houses Western workers in a Middle Eastern country. Pete wanted Matt to take a stab at the script and before he knew it he was in Michael Mann's office sharing ideas with Pete and Michael and his journey into Hollywood script writing began as does our interview:

What was it that Pete came to you with? What exactly were you working off of?

Matthew Carnahan (MC): To my recollection, it was a broad, nebulous idea � there was a two-and-a-half hour meeting between Pete, Michael Mann and I...

Now that's a room!

MC: Yeah, exactly! Here it is, I've been doing this work for less than a year at that point. It was my first taste of, My God, I might be able to do this for a living. If I am in Michael Mann's office I might be doing something right. It felt as if I broke into the place and it was only a matter of time before security comes and escorts me out.

We just tried to figure out a compelling and political story in the Middle East and have it centered around an attack and the follow-up FBI investigation. The idea was, if this attack happened in the United States it's a pretty rote and standard investigative process that you have seen a thousand times, but if this crime happens in a land that is as alien to the United States as say Mars, then that could be some compelling framework to tell a broader story about the state of affairs in that part of the world relative to us.

That was the impetus, that big broad idea. Thankfully Pete and Michael appealed to the student in me and said now go research and let's set this in Saudi Arabia because the western housing attacks in May 2003 were still pretty fresh in everybody's mind. They sent me on my way to research the hell out of the thing and Michael has a phenomenally great resource in a woman who just finished a career at TIME magazine, she was on their FBI crime beat, Elaine Shannon. He made the introduction between Elaine and I and then Elaine proceeded to take me around D.C. for a grand total of three weeks time over several months and introduced me to the kind of contacts who you would never get in to see were it not Michael Mann providing the key. I ended up with the FBI's Head of Counter-Terrorism and he was holding that post on September 11th. I met with the FBI's Chief Bomb Technician and he had been to the Middle East more times than he can count and just to get that color and that flavor and figure out how they talk and how they act is just a world class opportunity and I relish that stuff. I relish getting into those types of worlds and trying to approximate it as close as possible in a script in a way that might be entertaining.

Speaking of the student in you, you went to USC and have a degree in international relations and political science, it's rather telling of where your stories come from.

MC: Oh yeah, absolutely, I've been fascinated with politics as far back as I can remember. We grew up a poor Irish, democrat family from Michigan so the politics seemed to kind of run in the blood. I have early memories of talking politics, talking about Jimmy Carter's presidency at the dinner table. My dad the republican and my mom the democrat, I have always had this abiding love of government, politics and the idea that someone can remain true and heaven forbid, even righteous, and still be able to navigate the treachery or our system. Again, it's a school boy look at politics, but I love the idea of it and I think that's the thing that's kind of always made me want to study it. I just love the subject matter, all throughout high school and even now.

Along the lines of subject matter, The Kingdom must have been a bitch to write. How hard is it to keep with reality with how much dialogue is in the early goings of this movie, and how talky it is, building up to the action packed ending?

MC: You hit it dead on the head, it was a bitch to write. My proclivity is to try and make it more political and more talky and Pete is more like let's forget it, we need action, we need something to keep an audience engaged here. So, over the course of two years, he and I butting our heads constantly in order to forge the movie that you see.

Several early drafts, you thought what you saw was talky? Early drafts made Syriana look like a shoot 'em up movie.

That's one thing I love about this movie though, it seems as if you could easily watch it as a double-billing with Syriana and have a great double feature.

MC: Exactly, all credit to Pete, he is a savant at knowing what an audience wants and when they want it over the course of the running time of the movie. I really think he's got such a pulse on what people want and need in order to keep them engaged from one section of the movie to the next. I think he did a masterful job of taking what could have been a fairly dry and political movie and making it not only accessible, but a blast to watch. On top of that, heaven forbid, you have people walking out a little more familiar with a part of the world that is absolutely intrinsic in this War on Terror and the current state of affairs in this country.

What do you think of the Kingdom's opening title sequence?

MC: The opening title sequence I think might be one of the best things in the movie. It was a really long, we struggled with it for months - you know the plane ride? There was this long back and forth between the characters during the ride over to get to Riyadh from Andrews Air Force Base. In that plane ride we laid out the history of Saudi Arabia and of Saudi and American relations. Everybody loved it, but everybody said you can't have this seven page scene with people talking and describing the world. Real FBI agents wouldn't talk about the fact that Saudi Arabia was founded in 1932 and they were looking for water and found oil. All these great little bits that I would argue the vast majority of Americans don't know, but Pete found a way to open the movie with this mini-documentary
Director Robert Redford has picked London and its half-century-old film festival for the world premiere of his latest movie ``Lions for Lambs,'' starring himself, Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise.

In a coup for the audience-oriented festival, ``Lions for Lambs'' will get an Oct. 22 red-carpet gala premiere in London, with the stars attending, before its Nov. 9 U.S. release. The film tells the story of two young men who, egged on by an idealistic university professor, decide to do something with their lives, and join the battle in Afghanistan. Their fate soon lies in the hands of a senator who is preparing to deliver an explosive story to a television journalist.

Why is Redford premiering the film in the U.K. capital? ``I guess he likes London, the timing is good, and I think they trust us to give the film a strong profile,'' said Sandra Hebron, the festival's artistic director, who said the October date was a convenient one ``if they're hoping for award nominations.''

The Times BFI 51st London Film Festival also will provide a roundup of the top crop from the world's major film festivals, such as Cannes and Venice.

Moviegoers who book ahead can watch winning films from the just-ended Venice Film Festival: Golden Lion winner ``Lust, Caution'' by Ang Lee, a graphically sexual thriller based in 1940s Shanghai; ``I'm Not There'' by Todd Haynes, six portrayals of Bob Dylan including one by Cate Blanchett that won her the best- actress trophy; and ``The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,'' directed by Andrew Dominik, which led Brad Pitt to win the best-actor prize.

Cannes Winners

This year's Cannes newsmakers also get play. The Palme d'Or winner, Romanian abortion drama ``4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days'' by Cristian Mungiu, will be screened. So will Michael Moore's health- insurance film essay ``Sicko'' and Julian Schnabel's ``The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,'' the true story of a magazine editor stricken with locked-in syndrome, which won Schnabel the best- director award at Cannes.

The festival will open Oct. 17 with David Cronenberg's ``Eastern Promises,'' starring Naomi Watts, and close Nov. 1 with Wes Anderson's ``The Darjeeling Limited.''

Writer Matthew Michael Carnahan makes a living pounding out movie scripts, where flights of fantasy and retreats from reality are the daily stock in trade. But a couple of autumns back, while speeding through TV channels in search of a USC football game, he had an epiphany.

"I was living in Chicago and I flipped past this report about a Humvee (in Iraq) that had flipped, and four or five soldiers had lost their lives. I thought, `What an awful way to go,' and I couldn't change the channel fast enough to find the game," recalls Carnahan, 34. "Then I thought, `Here I am, the first to complain about the government and yet here I am, part of the problem, looking for pablum instead of the real stories.'"

So was born Lions for Lambs, the Carnahan-penned, Robert Redford-directed film about politics and the war in the Middle East that stars Redford, Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise and Derek Luke. "It's my way of exorcising the sense that I was part of the problem, not doing my share to acknowledge what's going on," Carnahan explains.

He's apparently not alone. Lions for Lambs is just one of several major Hollywood films headed to multiplexes this season that deal either with the war in Iraq, its fallout or related issues such as terrorism.

In the Valley of Elah, directed by Paul Haggis (Crash) and starring Tommy Lee Jones as a dad whose son disappears after returning from Iraq, opened Friday, as did The Hunting Party, which features Richard Gere and Terrence Howard and chronicles the search for a Serbian war criminal who slaughtered Bosnian Muslims. Loosely based on a true story, the movie ultimately invites comparisons to the search for Osama bin Laden.

Opening this Friday is The Kingdom, which revolves around anti-American terrorism in Saudi Arabia. It stars Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman and was also written by Carnahan.

These films will be followed by: Rendition, starring Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard and Streep again, about a woman whose Egyptian-born husband is detained; and Grace Is Gone, featuring John Cusack as a dad who takes a road trip with his kids after his wife is killed in Iraq.

Two of the most controversial films are based on real events. Brian De Palma (The Untouchables, Scarface, Mission: Impossible) made Redacted, based on the case of American soldiers who raped an Iraqi girl and killed her family, while in Battle for Haditha, Nick Broomfield (Kurt & Courtney, Biggie and Tupac) revisits an alleged 2005 attack by U.S. Marines against two dozen Iraqis believed to have planted roadside bombs.

Coming in early 2008 is Stop Loss, which stars Ryan Phillippe as a soldier who returns home to Texas and refuses to go back to Iraq.

This wave may seem unprecedented, but it was perhaps predictable. Fall is the time when, after a summer of killer robots and wacky pirates, studios haul out their serious, would-be Oscar contenders. These films went into production at different times, so it may be an accident of fate that they're all coming out now, though the trend also might reflect a larger reality.

Richard Allen, professor of radio, TV and film at Texas Christian University, says it's taken a few years for the movie industry to absorb 9-11, and that's why the ripple effects are now percolating through pop culture. "There's the shock, and then it becomes part of the culture and it becomes the thing to do. ...... Filmmakers are trying to be as contemporary as possible as they deal with issues like terrorism. It's an age-old thing. Think of the 1950s Cold War and how it inspired science fiction."

Can war sell?

But it remains to be seen whether Americans will flock to see entertainment about a current military conflict involving the U.S. After all, most of the notable movies about Vietnam - Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Coming Home, Platoon - came out after the end of hostilities, while some of the most talked-about anti-war films that came out as the war raged (M*A*S*H*, Catch-22, Johnny Got His Gun) were set in previous conflicts.

The quick 2005 cancellation of the critically lauded FX series Over There, which followed Army soldiers on their first Iraq tour of duty, and the dismal showing for the US$16 million A Mighty Heart - the film about murdered journalist Daniel Pearl that has grossed just over US$9 million in the U.S. since its June release - doesn't augur well for the onslaught of Iraq-themed films.

Other recent dramas about American involvement in the Middle East have fared better - Syriana (2005) cost US$50 million to make and has made that back domestically, while Jarhead (2005) cost US$72 million and has earned US$62 million domestically - but they were hardly blockbusters.

Ironically, the movie with one of the best returns is United 93 (2006), which cost $15 million and took in US$31 million in the U.S. - hardly Transformers numbers, but not bad for a film some thought would be too much of a downer for an American audience. Less successful was World Trade Centre (2006), which cost US$65 million and has brought in US$70 million in the U.S.

"These films are going to have a hard time," says Jeff Bock, an analyst for Los Angeles-based box-office tracking firm Exhibitor Relations, who notes that war movies in general face a steep climb these days. "Clint Eastwood, with his double shot last fall (WWII films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima) sealed that. They had critical acclaim and together they didn't even do US$50 million."

He thinks the productions' attempted immediacy could also be their drawback in an era of 24-hour news networks and the Internet. "We have a plethora of information and soldiers' blogs. These outlets are more influential and up-to-date than these films could ever be."

Not everyone is quite so pessimistic. "Something might break through to the mainstream, like The Kingdom, because it is action-oriented," says Jeremy Devine, marketing vice-president of the Dallas-based Rave Motion Pictures theater chain and the co-author of Vietnam at 24 Frames a Second: A Critical and Thematic Analysis of Over 400 Films About the Vietnam War. "But as far as an introspective piece on the root causes of the war or what's really happening - (something) that's not a great adventure movie - I think it's a little early. It's early to get historical perspective, and it's just too controversial."

That's one reason why The Hunting Party director Richard Shepard doesn't really want his film lumped in with the others. "Those movies are all political movies and, at the end of the day, my movie is an adventure movie," he explains. "This movie is for a good time on a Friday night. If (audiences) think about things at the end, that's not bad. But none of us wanted to make a message movie."

Some observers are taking a wait-and-see attitude, not about box-office take, but about the political messages in these latest Iraq films. Jim Hubbard, director of the conservative, Dallas-based American Renaissance Film Festival, which just staged its first Washington, D.C., festival, has not yet seen all of the new films but is afraid they will represent a singular, liberal point of view.

"A lot of them deal with the tragedy of war and, for lack of a better term, moral relativism. Where's the John Wayne movie?" he asks. "To use an example, with The Bourne Ultimatum, people like it but the good guys were American agents and the bad guys were American agents.. ..... I have no problem with any of these films coming out, but there should be films from every perspective. In the Vietnam War, there was at least one film that was taking the side of the American as hero. At least you did have The Green Berets.

"It was a propaganda film, and I'm not saying we should return to the 1940s and 1950s where everything is glorious. But there is no balance."

"I think it's interesting that films are taking a look at this," says Sameer Zuberi, communications coordinator for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group, but he is concerned about the portrayal of Muslims. "I hope they're not doing this in a stereotypical manner."

Writer Carnahan makes no bones about the fact that he approaches the topic from a personal perspective, especially in Lions for Lambs, and that he thinks the Iraq war is a mistake. "I'm sure people are going to say that I'm anti-GOP, but I tried to make (Tom Cruise's conservative senate character) as upfront and honest as I knew how and, I gotta tell you, some of the better arguments of the entire movie come from him. ...... (But) the (current) Republican leadership is pretty awful. I'm not going to turn away from that opinion to make (the movie) as apolitical as possible."

If these films don't perform well at the box office, it might be difficult to get politically oriented material up on the big screen, at least in the near future. "There's a little of that toe-in-the-water aspect, and if they all do poorly, you can retard the process for another four years," says Rave's Jeremy Devine. "But, if one breaks through, bar the doors, because you'll have plenty (more)."

"Hollywood goes through ups and downs," says The Hunting Party director Shepard. "A series of political films doesn't do well, but then one will do well. I always looked at it as making the movies I want to make and telling the stories I want to tell. To me, we were never making a political movie.. ..... I don't know if audiences will burn out, but, personally, I don't want to see six different Iraq movies. That's why I didn't make one."

"If it's not a good movie, people don't care about how topical you are," sums up TCU professor Allen. "Relevance is not high on most people's list of why they go to the movies."

For Carnahan, whose chance stumbling across the death of American soldiers on TV sent him to his computer keyboard, it's a tense time. "I'm waiting with bated breath to see what happens with my two movies," he says. "There are (popular) movies, like The Bourne Supremacy, that are wonderful action movies but have undertones of what America has become post 9-11. I think there are ways to walk the line and not mimic the (real-life war) horror you see on CNN - when they're not doing obesity-in-America or celebrity reports.

"I think very quickly we'll be able to suss out which movies in this glut are the ones worth the money in your pocket. I do hope mine are in that mix - but you never know."