Recorded at Hôtel De Vigny, Paris

02/01/2008

Romain Desbiens - Describe for me the first time you had the idea for making REDACTED.

Brian De Palma - I was in Toronto teaching a lab of young directors at the film festival, and somebody from HDNet came to me and said: Would you be interested in making a movie in high definition? We give you $5 million, and you can make it anything you want, unrestricted. And I said: That's an interesting idea, if I could think of something that would work best in high definition. And then I read about the incident, about the rape and killing of this innocent Iraqi girl, and it of course reminded me of CASUALTIES OF WAR. And I said: This is happening again, just like we're repeating Vietnam with the Iraq war. So I said : Well, I'll have to find a way to tell this story again. And when I went on the internet to research the actual incident, I found all these unique digital ways of telling a story that were completely original with the internet, whether there would be blogs, or montages of very sad casualty pictures, or soldiers wives' websites, or just rants from very impassioned people that felt that what these guys had done was so terrible and how they should be punished. And I said: Well, this is the way to tell this, in this form, because this is completely original to the internet.

RD - What are some of the advantages and problems with HD?

BdP - I'd say the only real problem we had when we made the movie is, you know, some of the cameras record on cards. The problem is that if you shot something and it's on the card, and you put it in the camera, it erases what that was. So that's the great danger of HD, is stuff can be erased and never recovered. Unlike film, there's a negative. In HD, if somebody makes a mistake, it's erased, it's gone forever. And that happened to us.

RD - It happens in REDACTED?

BdP - Well, fortunately, Eric had shot this stuff of the ants and the centipede, and he had to go back and reshoot it, because it had all been erased. That's the scary part. Everything else, I think it's quite amazing. And I think the resolution and the quality has gotten so much better over the years, that I find it quite amazing. I mean, when Eric shot all that stuff in Barrage, you know, using wide shots, normally in HD it kind of breaks up when you do wide shots like that, and they looked amazing. We had to use an extremely big camera. Eric had to use this really big camera to do those shots. And I was using more of a medium camera for Salazar's diary and the interrogation stuff, and the stuff where the trucks go in and out of the barracks.

RD - There is no big stars in REDACTED. How did you find the actors?

BdP - Well, this is a problem I had long ago when I made HI, MOM! and I created a whole black troupe for "Be Black, Baby". I had to go out and find people nobody had ever seen before, because you had to think it was a documentary. You couldn't think that they were actors playing a part. So I did the same thing, essentially. Unfortunately, they were young, in the sense that the squad had to be young. So we found a lot of actors that had not done television or movies so that you could believe they were actual soldiers.

RD - Did you carry the camera? Were you filming yourself? Because there are some shots in the film: one of the first ones I remember, Salazar is filming in the mirror, and first I thought that the (real) camera is his really really small camera. In fact, I think that the real camera was near the actor?

BdP - Yes, it was. No, I was never filming, no, but in that scene, Salazar is filming McCoy, and McCoy is filming Salazar.

RD - Just before I saw the movie, I was quite terrified because I was thinking: Will I be disappointed by your first HD movie? By the fact that there would not be any of your style. But in fact, no, there is your style. It was very, very strange to see it in a new way of filming, and very exciting to see you made a new form of cinematographical language. How do you react when the audience after the movie is angry, against this war. Maybe they understand more things because of this movie, things they don't know, and how do you react when you see other people are angry about your film?

BdP - Well, you know, the film, whenever I showed it, and I looked at the audience afterward, they were shocked. The audience was shocked. They don't know what to say. Well, that's very unusual in cinema. And sometimes they don't like being shocked, and they get very angry against the movie, and sometimes they're very moved by the movie. They cannot really process the experience, which is, I think, some of the greatest cinema, when you just you don't know what to say. You've been through something, and you don't exactly know how to talk about it yet, because you have to examine your own feelings, and figure out how I got to be feeling this, and what the movie did to make me feel this. That was what I always found with REDACTED, and it's hard to make a movie that does in fact impact an audience like that. You know, you never can tell until you actually get in front of an audience what its effect is.

RD - A lot of people are criticizing the movie. It's a very tricky thing to do a movie because first we have to find the investors, we have to find the actors, it's very very long. And after that, a lot of people don't like the movie. Where do you find the energy to make another film after reactions like that?

BdP - Because I feel even though, you know, they don't get it at the time, or they say all kinds of things about it that don't make any sense to me, I find that it's what I have to believe is true, and what makes sense to me. And I've made many movies which came out, and people criticized for all kinds of reasons, and years later, they said: Well, wait a minute. Uh, maybe there was something there that I missed before. I've had similar reactions to movies I've seen initially that threw me off, and I wasn't exactly.

I remember the first time I saw BARRY LYNDON, I did not like it. These zoom backs, this slow music, I couldn't figure out what the hell Kubrick was doing. And years later, it's come to be one of my favorite movies. So, sometimes it takes your own education and involvement to understand it. Sometimes the times have to catch up with the artist. He's out there doing stuff that people don't quite recognize until years later. And this is certainly the case in this movie. They don't know how to process how they feel about it. And the form in which it is told is so new and exceedingly experimental, they go: Whoa! What is that? I don't like it. 

The first reaction always to something you don't quite understand is, it's not like the conventional form, so something's wrong with it. It's bad, the actors are overacting, it doesn't make any sense. It's fragmented. You know, they go down the laundry list. And it's just because they haven't been able to really. I'm sure the same things happened when people first looked at cubism. They go: What is that? Non-representational painting. They said: Well, it doesn't look like the landscape. It doesn't look like the cow that he was painting. Why is it so strange looking? I think that's the case here...

RD - After the war, maybe people who don't like the movie now will understand it more... Is it as easy to make a movie today as in the seventies, in terms of money or...?

BdP - Well, this is a very unique situation. I mean, they just handed me the money and said do anything you want. My problem was, and I had to ask my producers all the time, Can we do this for $5 million? Let me know, because if we can't do it, we should stop right now. And they who had made inexpensive movies in Canada said, Don't worry, we have enough money to do this. And so I put it basically in their hands.

RD - I know you wanted to make a film about Howard Hughes. And there was a Martin Scorsese movie about Howard Hughes.

BdP - Yeah. THE AVIATOR.

RD - You liked it?

BdP - I think it's a very skillfully made movie. But we had a whole different story.

RD - It's not finished. You can still make the film?

BdP - I think it's pretty much finished. You know, those are very expensive movies to make, and they're set in a period. We had a very good idea, but you know, two movies have come out sort of about Howard Hughes. THE HOAX, the one, you know, dealing with the Clifford Irving creation of the phony biography. And then Marty's movie, THE AVIATOR. So I think the subject is kind of done. David Koepp and I developed a very good script that Nic Cage was supposed to do. But, you know, we never could get it on, so consequently, it was never made.

RD - Ridley Scott said that he can imagine the coverage, the camera angles as he's in a room. And I think it's the same for you...

BdP - Yeah. You go to different places and see different locations, and you get different ideas.

RD - Do you know what will be your next project?

BdP - No, I don't really know. I'm working on another movie that has something to do with Iraq and deals with this form again. That's one possibility.

RD - Is that difficult now, because in America a lot of people criticize your last movie?

BdP - It depends. If the movie does well over here, I don't think it makes any difference. Movies, if you make them cheap enough, you can get your money out. And then, you know, I'm still trying to get THE UNTOUCHABLES together. You know, still trying to get that cast together. That's still going on. And then you know, BLUE AFTERNOON, we're still trying to get that cast. The William Boyd book. And I've got some other projects I'm just starting to work on. So that's basically what's going on now.

REDACTED

on the Internet :

Interview of Brian De Palma: 

Why called it "Redacted", 

Mark Cuban, the tragedy...

Trailer with French subtitles

Thanks to Brian De Palma, Maggie Cohn

and Geoff Beran for transcribing.

Romain Desbiens.