Brian De Palma: 'Apparently, I'm a left-wing wacko traitor who should be horsewhipped'

[Demeter]

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/film-and-tv/features/brian-de-palma-apparently-im-a-leftwing-wacko-traitor-who-should-be-horsewhipped-785254.html


Few directors outrage audiences like Brian De Palma. But even he was shocked by the hostility that greeted 'Redacted', his latest film about US troops in Iraq

By James Mottram
Sunday, 24 February 2008

Far more raw than other recent Hollywood examinations of the conflict, say Lions For Lambs or Rendition, Redacted is closer in tone to Nick Broomfield's Battle For Haditha. Shot for just $5m, using a cast of unknowns, Redacted is a fictionalised account of an abhorrent real-life event, concerning the rape of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl and the murder of her family by US troops. "I couldn't use too much of the real material," De Palma explains. "I had to fictionalise it, because there are continuing prosecutions. You get a large book of things you can't do from the lawyers."
Filmed on High-Definition Video in Amman, and made to look like a "dossier" of internet uploads and camcorder footage, Redacted, says De Palma, is meant to echo the way he found the real-life event on the internet. Much of the material in the film originates from a soldier named Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz), who is hoping to make a documentary to get him into film school. In part, this consists of conversations with other members of the unit, including the two men who lead the night-time raid on the Iraqi home in question.


Watch a trailer for 'Redacted'
Courtesy of Optimum Releasing at link


According to De Palma, the pent-up anger of the US forces in Iraq is worse than that of the troops who served in Vietnam, there, he says, at least US soldiers had brothels to visit in order to let off steam. "This is not the way the army likes to see itself portrayed," he adds. "They want to be seen the way the administration portrays them: valiant people over there creating democracy – all that mumbo jumbo." More importantly, De Palma sees the film as a critique of how American audiences are fed propaganda by the US news media. "They sit there and watch their television screens, and see these embedded reporters and infomercials from Iraq, and how well things are going over there, and they think that's the truth."

The end result won the 67 year-old De Palma the Silver Lion at last year's Venice Film Festival, one of just a handful of awards he's won across a 40-year career that has frequently irritated the Moral Majority. In content at least, Redacted recalls his 1989 Vietnam film Casualties of War, which starred Michael J Fox as a soldier who looks the other way as his fellow grunts perpetrate a brutal rape. "The similarities are striking," De Palma notes.

As far as Redacted goes, De Palma claims there's nothing in the film that you won't find in cyberspace "if you are curious". Yet De Palma encountered opposition from an unlikely source. At a heated debate after a New York Film Festival screening of the movie last October, he expressed his dislike of the decision by the film's production company to edit certain images for legal reasons. Specifically, De Palma is referring to the film's final montage of "actual" photos from Iraq, many of which now show the faces of war victims blacked out. "I'm very unhappy with the way the photographs have been redacted ," De Palma says, arguing the images are already in the public domain on the internet. "I think it's a crime to make these people – who are suffering – faceless." Arguably as a result of this spat, the film was given a limited release in the US, where it took a measly $65,000, echoing the other poor box-office showings of recent feature films about Iraq. De Palma sees his problem as a mirror of what US war correspondents face. "If you talk to journalists who have been covering the war you always get their frustration because they can't tell the story that they see. Nobody really wants to hear it. You can't take pictures of any fallen GIs. You can't show funerals. We don't want to see any of the collateral damage at all. It doesn't get into the mainstream American media."

De Palma cites "the effectiveness of the Bush administration" in keeping the true horror of the Iraq war away from the American people. "This is why you haven't felt this huge surge in anti-war protests," he says. "The pictures are what got everybody into the streets in Vietnam. There'd be these huge pictures in Life magazine and you'd go, 'My God, what are we doing over there?' We don't have that now." That said, Redacted is following a well-worn path: Paul Haggis's In the Valley of Elah also features soldiers capturing brutal acts on a camera-phone.



'Redacted' opens on 14 March

[proud2BlibKansan]

1. This is a great film

Very graphic but well done. And an extremely important story.

[DS1]

2. It's a tough movie to watch

[tomreedtoon]

3. People preferred DePalma's old rape movies.

His films like <i>Carrie</i> and that imitation Hitchcock piece of crap whose name I have expunged from my memory are all about killing women in the most bloody fashion possible. A real crowd pleaser. Such a man should never be allowed to approach any film subject close to reality. Let him film his dreams of dildoes with spring razor blades that pop out in use, and let him run his films with the dreck Tarantino makes.

[cyclezealot]

4. what is important

portraying what Bush has done to push our troops 'over the edge,' should not make us anti troops. But, anti Iraq war. The American people should come to terms with the realities of some wars.

[Doctor_J]

5. The Bush Fascists have invaded every aspect of American life

Newscasters, film makers, TV producers/writers, newspaper reporters, professors, judges, and ordinary citizens are either too terrified to say anything that might be construed as anti-right-wing that they censor themselves, or they've pushed the envelope and have been edited or terrorized. American fascism - just like Stalin, only quieter.