Conversations: Brian De Palma

In this interview and podcast, the legendary director discusses his upsetting new film, "Redacted," and rape as a metaphor for the Iraq war.

By Stephanie Zacharek

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Nov. 13, 2007 | Brian De Palma's "Redacted" -- the title is a reference to the act of alteration, of editing or removing sensitive or confidential information -- is the messiest, most confounding picture about the Iraq war that has yet been made. It's also possibly the most direct, and the most potentially upsetting. "Redacted," a fictional story based on real events, wasn't even a germ of an idea when a representative of HDNet films asked De Palma if he'd be interested in shooting a film on high-definition video. De Palma was intrigued, but wanted to make sure he could first come up with an idea appropriate to the medium. He found his subject after he read about the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi, in Mahmudiya in March 2006 -- an incident that recalled, to an eerie degree, the subject of De Palma's 1989 "Casualties of War," which was also based on a true story (recounted by Daniel Lang in a 1969 New Yorker piece).

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De Palma has said that essentially everything he has put into "Redacted" can be found on the Internet: The director trawled the Web, examining pictures, videos and journal entries made by soldiers, looking at Islamic fundamentalist Web sites and, perhaps most significantly, locating numerous photographs of Iraq war victims -- many of them children -- that would never show up in the mainstream press. "Redacted" consists largely of re-creations of the images, videos, testimonies and blog entries De Palma found on the Web. But with the exception of the very last image (a re-creation of al-Janabi's corpse), the photographs that close the movie are the real thing. In these pictures, some of which are graphic and all of which are disturbing, the eyes of the subjects have been blacked out -- in other words, the images themselves have been redacted. (Eamonn Bowles, president of Magnolia, the studio behind "Redacted," has claimed that the alterations were necessary for legal reasons because the subjects had not signed releases. De Palma has publicly decried the alteration of the pictures in interviews and at the movie's New York Film Festival press conference in October.)

De Palma, 67, has built a career making movies that remind us we can't always trust what we see. With "Redacted," a very personal and very angry film, he goes even further in exploring our experience of what we see -- or don't see. I spoke with De Palma in October in New York, where he discussed the similarities between "Casualties" and "Redacted," talked about the failure of the media to tell us what's really happening in Iraq, and explained why he thinks Americans at home have been "living in the Green Zone." (To listen to a podcast of this interview, click here.)

As you know, because you've seen a lot of them, there have been all these Iraq documentaries: "No End in Sight," "Iraq in Fragments," "The War Tapes." And all the conscientious people on the left either have seen these movies or haven't and said that they have. It seems to me that you're trying to do something different with "Redacted," to get people to respond in a more immediate and emotional way.

Yeah, by the very nature of the drama. The great documentaries, like [Albert and David Maysles'] "Salesman" or "Grey Gardens," the ones I remember seeing in the '60s or '70s -- when documentaries have a real dramatic line, that can be devastating. But when you fictionalize things, obviously you can make connections that you can't make in documentaries. This [story] had all the beats that "Casualties of War" had. I mean, it was almost spookily similar.

That's part of what drew you to it.

That's exactly right. Plus, I think it's a great metaphor for these quagmire wars, where the guys get over there and they don't know why they're there. McCoy [one of the characters in "Redacted"] says, "You'd better have a very good reason to have your buddy die next to you." To go out and kill people, you've got to have a very good reason. When they get over there, it's like, "Why are we here?" And it's an environment they don't understand, a culture they don't understand. The people are not speaking a language they understand. They can't tell the insurgents from the al-Qaida, or whatever sect they're fighting. And they band together -- that's the only thing they can hang onto -- and then one of their buddies gets blown up or shot. And they take all their anger and frustration out on the people.

Next page: What the architects of the Iraq war learned from Vietnam