Picture Perfect

Talking with Brian De Palma about Redacted

by Sam Adams

interview

Brian De Palma is as mad as hell, and he's not going to take it anymore. While most of the fall's political movies struggle to seem nonpartisan, De Palma's Redacted lobs a live grenade into the discourse. The movie is inspired by a real-life incident in Mahmoudiya, Iraq, where four U.S. soldiers are accused of raping a 14-year-old girl and killing her and her family.

"I read about the incident, and I said to myself, 'This is Casualties of War all over again,'" De Palma recalls. The parallel to the incident behind De Palma's Vietnam drama pointed up differences as well as similarities between the two wars. Vietnam's atrocities inspired outrage, while Iraq's have largely resulted in resigned detachment.

In large part, De Palma blames the media for not disseminating images of the carnage. "I just remember from Vietnam, we saw the images," he says. "We saw our casualties, we saw their casualties. That's what got us out into the streets, and that's what got us out of the war."

Although De Palma was not allowed to use details from the original incident, he assembled a shadow version of the story, pieced together as he learned it: from YouTube footage, soldiers' blogs and other Web sites. "All these forms sort of started speaking to me from the Web," he says, "and I said, 'This is the way to tell the story, in this digital form.'"

De Palma closes the film with a montage of horrific images from the war zone. But in a supreme irony, those images have themselves been redacted, the faces of victims digitally obscured. The movie's distributor cited legal reasons, but Mark Cuban, whose HDNet financed the film, indicated he was personally offended by the montage, which caused De Palma to label any legal rationale "specious." That led to a press-conference shouting match between De Palma and Magnolia's Eamonn Bowles, although De Palma has since backed down.

The strange thing about the controversy is that the images in Redacted are available to anyone with an Internet connection. "What always astounded me was that everybody has a digital camera over there, they're on the Internet, and yet none of these images has ever gotten into the mainstream media," says De Palma. "How does that happen?"

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Redacted opens Friday at Ritz at the Bourse. See Cindy Fuchs' review on p. 43.