We Got This Covered: The movie contains some unnerving scenes of suspected terrorists being tortured. Did you have a different attitude towards torture of this kind after having done this film?
Mark Boal: I think that it’s a gross misrepresentation of the film to suggest that it shows this intelligence operation coming out of any single piece of information. I understand those scenes are graphic, unsparing and unsentimental, but I think that what the film does over the course of more than two hours is show the complexity of the debate and the number of different ways information came into the CIA. It also shows that torture didn’t stop the attack that the characters were worried about and that the information that Jessica’s and Jason’s characters hear about occurs over a relatively civilized context of a lunch.
The film was a political chew toy before I even wrote a word, and I think that will unfortunately continue. People will bring what they want to see.
Jessica Chastain: I am the worst at keeping secrets. When I was cast in this I was so excited about this character of Maya. I found her to be really inspiring. The script was incredible and so eye-opening, but I had to keep it a secret and there was a lot of press coming out and people were speculating that I was a Navy Seal’s wife and all this stuff. I just had to really hold my tongue for a year. I’m very excited that people are now seeing this film and they’re realizing that it’s not a propaganda film and it doesn’t have an agenda. It just tries to show this moment in history as accurately as possible in regards to the difficult scenes these people found themselves in.
We Got This Covered: Jessica, what attracted you to the role, what did you like about the character?
Jessica Chastain: In playing this character I had so much compassion for this woman who really sacrificed so much for this mission. She becomes a stranger to herself at the end of the film and I just loved her from the moment I read what Mark created. He took the dry facts of this manhunt, the greatest manhunt in history, and what he was able to do with them was to create this amazing arc and really put the light on the people who work so hard and never get the acknowledgement for it. So I have an enormous amount of compassion for everything they dealt with.
We Got This Covered: Glenn Greenwald recently wrote that the movie’s trailer shows it to be pro-torture, but that’s clearly not the case. What was the discussion like beforehand when it came to showing enhanced interrogation? Did you consider not including it because it is such a touchy subject?
Kathryn Bigelow: I know nothing about the article. All I can say is that personally those sequences were very difficult to shoot. I wish it was not part of our history but it was.
We Got This Covered: Kathryn, how did you work with your creative team to create the look and tone of the movie?
Kathryn Bigelow: Well I had an extraordinarily talented crew. I think it was very important to us and certainly from the script to really give the audience a sort of “you are there” feel to this piece and kind of peel back the curtain of the intelligence hunt and get a glimpse of what it might be like to actually try to find a very sharp needle in a very big haystack, and to do it in a way that sort of feels like its unfolding in real time in front of you, around you and inside of it especially with the raid itself.
The raid was the most challenging logistically because we had to shoot in low light conditions to replicate a moonless night and then no light conditions to use the night vision goggles which were real night vision lenses that we adapted to our camera lenses, and they only work in a zero light condition. You have a hundred crew members and about twenty-two Navy SEALS traipsing around a pitch black rubble strewn set which was kind of interesting.
We Got This Covered: Jessica, how would you say Julliard prepared you to do a movie like Zero Dark Thirty?
Jessica Chastain: I spent four years studying Shakespeare and iambic pentameter and all that, and to be honest this text was more difficult than that. Not only has Mark taken the facts of what happened, but he’s also created a subtle character arc within it, and you find the humanity within what he’s created. So Julliard absolutely helped me when preparing to speak very complex language and it gave me the tools for the research I would need to do in order to be believable as a CIA agent.
We Got This Covered: Jessica, what was it like on set shooting the film, was it a good experience?
Jessica Chastain: This is the first film that I have ever done where I had no idea what it would look like when it was finished. The experience of making the film was incredibly intense. There was a lot of guerilla style filmmaking, we were always on our toes. We didn’t have a lot of time for things and there was a lot of material that we had to shoot very quickly. It’s almost having like a three month blackout that someone tapes and then you watch it and go “oh, that’s what happened.” I’ve seen the finished film only once but I’m going to see it again with an audience and I’m really excited for that.
That concludes our interview but we’d like to thank Jessica, Mark and Kathryn very much for talking with us. Be sure to check out Zero Dark Thirty, in theatres this Friday.
