#i’ll never love anything the way the academy loves a middling to bad biopic

[marisatomay]

once again. action movies are not the enemy of horror. the academy hates them BOTH even though both, probably more than any other genres, tend to actually push the boundaries of what you can do with a camera, what you can put in a movie. the last action movie to receive a best picture nomination was mad max: fury road seven (7) years ago. an action movie had to be credited with saving movie theaters before the academy would nominate another one. top gun maverick literally invented a new camera, put six of them in a cockpit, and pioneered new aerial filming techniques that had never even been attempted before. action is not the enemy of horror. turn your ire towards biopics, dramas that may or may not actually exist, and whatever self satisfied shit ruben östlund insists on cooking up.

[letterboxd]

Leaking Secrets: The Gavin Hood Q&A.

“Does every person have to get to the end and succeed in overturning the evil empire? Life isn’t like that. Life is full of these small, difficult questions that cross our path.” Official Secrets director Gavin Hood on spies, lies and the scoop that made him feel like a journalist.

Keira Knightley yelling “It doesn’t make any sense!” at the television news is all of us, these days. The case for the invasion of Iraq, we now know, was based on non-existent weapons of mass destruction. There were many public servants who knew, even then, that the intelligence that was being gathered to make a case for Saddam Hussein’s overthrow was shockingly debatable.

Official Secrets, directed by Academy Award-winner Gavin Hood, tells the true story of one such public servant, Katharine Gun, a British intelligence specialist who worked as a Mandarin translator. In 2003, Gun leaked an NSA memo that sought Britain’s help to collect information that could be used to blackmail United Nations Security Council members into voting in favor of an invasion of Iraq.

As a spy tale, it’s not all cut-and-thrust action, foot-chases and explosions. The tension lies in Knightley’s performance as a furious and concerned Gun, wrestling with the decision to leak the memo, and in The Observer newsroom, where journalists (played by Matt Smith, Matthew Goode and Rhys Ifans) debate whether to publish it. Later, it turns courtroom drama, with Ralph Fiennes at the helm as Gun’s civil rights lawyer.

Some of the story’s details—as they often are in biopics—have been massaged for the big screen. In particular, a spell-check disaster by a young journalist on The Observer’s foreign desk is played out in front of a larger audience. And the film stops when the war starts, whereas Gun’s life continued to become more complex. Nevertheless, it’s rating well on Letterboxd for its taught and powerful portrayal of a small chapter in a huge and damaging political collusion.

South African director Gavin Hood won his Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film for 2005’s Tsotsi. He is best known for his work on blockbusters X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Ender’s Game, and helmed the political thrillers Rendition and Eye in the Sky. Hood worked on the script for Official Secrets with writers Gregory Bernstein and Sara Bernstein, who had been working on the story for over a decade when it appeared on The Blacklist (they share their story about the script’s development on The Blacklist blog).

We spoke with Gavin Hood in-depth about his role in bringing the political drama to life. (This interview with Hood contains spoilers for the film’s ending, but as it’s a true-life story, the details are all on public record, so proceed as appropriate.)

From left: former intelligence specialist Katharine Gun, director Gavin Hood and journalist Martin Bright. / Photo: Chris Ferenzi/National Press Club

What made you feel that now was the right time to tell Katharine Gun’s story? What compels this reflection on recent history? Gavin Hood: I’d like to give you an easy answer but part of it is that you struggle to get the film made—it’s been three years since we first started working on it. So, in some ways the timing felt right when I first heard about Katharine Gun, and then you think ‘oh my goodness, is the landscape going to change? Is politics going to change?’ and of course it hasn’t. If anything it feels more timely in this strange post-truth world.

It might sound odd to say that, but at the time [US president George W.] Bush and [UK prime minister Tony] Blair were spinning their lies for what they genuinely believed was some higher purpose. I think they at least would have felt a certain shame in being caught out in a lie. Certainly [former US National Security Advisor] Colin Powell did when he discovered that everything he said at the UN was a lie. He described that it was the low point of his career and he’s devastated by it and he’s apologized.

In the world that we live in now I don’t think certain politicians even care if they get caught out in a lie. What is truth? It doesn’t really matter what’s true. Say what you want to say.

What I liked about the story was the rather simple idea that truth matters, and certainly being true to my own conscience matters because what else are we in a democracy but a bunch of individuals? You have to make up your own minds and act on what you believe to be the truth.

That’s an easy thing to say but not always an easy thing to do. I like the fact that Katharine Gun was not some larger-than-life political figure, she was very ordinary in many ways. She’s quite like you and me when you meet her.

Katharine is not someone who seeks the limelight. She didn’t ever really think she’d be known around the world, and even now she tends to shy away from it. But what she had was a moment where something came across her desk at her place of work that she just felt was wrong and her conscience couldn’t live with it. That’s something that’s quite simple.

You had to build suspense from these small actions with most of the dramatic implications offscreen. How do you ensure a dialogue-driven film like this has the weight you need it to have to make its impact? The challenges you’re suggesting did give me pause. She doesn’t ever—as one studio executive said to me—“when does she ‘don her cape’ as the hero?” Are we really in this ‘don the cape’ world where every story has to be about someone saving the world or otherwise it doesn’t count? Does every person have to get to the end and succeed in overturning the evil empire? Life isn’t like that. Life is full of these small, difficult questions that cross our path. We make moral and ethical decisions of big and small kinds every day and that’s what gives us our life.

This isn’t a story about a person who changed the world, it’s a story about personal conscience and those little moments that suddenly, in her case, turned into a huge story. When it came out in The Observer newspaper, it was a big story, but what was sad about it was—and please excuse my choice of words—what trumped it 24 hours later was a bigger story.

What was that story? It was the story of us invading Baghdad. All of a sudden the news media—quite understandably from a purely commercially journalistic point of view—is not looking at how we got into the war because what do we want to see? Video footage of the bombing of Baghdad. Everyone was glued to that, and then it was about the embedded journalists with the troops and the almost Hollywood movie stories.

How we got there, the reasons for it, and whether we were lied to, took ages to come around again after they didn’t find the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that they suggested [were] the reason they had to go in. As you know, the reason they had to come up with the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ argument was because they needed a legal reason to go in.

Under international law there are only two ways you can legally justify invading another country; one is that you have a UN resolution and we all go in together to stop a genocide—which is what they were hoping to get—but Katharine’s leak thwarted the plan because these non-permanent members refused to vote after it was discovered they’d been spied on. They never got that UN resolution which would have given them perfect cover.

They had to rely on the second legal justification for war in international law, which is self-defense and that was that they had to show that [Saddam Hussein] is a genuine threat to all of our safety. “He's so bad that he could launch chemical weapons on London in 45 minutes” was the Blair claim, and it turned out to be absolute nonsense.

The desire for a regime change and the belief that they would create a lovely, flowering democracy in the Middle East was their, I think, naïve agenda, but it allowed them to lie to us and then they got caught in the lie. Katharine is an ordinary person who’s part of the story of how those lies came about.

Keira Knightley as Katharine Gun.

Since this is recent history, you had the opportunity to talk extensively with many of the film’s subjects. What values did those discussions have that you could not get from the source book, The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War? The book mostly focused on Katharine’s journey and the politics around the time. After I read the book I asked if I could meet Katharine Gun myself, and [producer] Ged Doherty flew me to London. I spent five days with Katharine and some interesting things came up in our conversations that I hadn’t found in the book.

I did the same with Martin Bright [journalist at The Observer, portrayed by Matt Smith] who was not covered extensively in the book. I got a great deal of information from him. He referred me to the other journalists, Peter Beaumont [portrayed by Matthew Goode] and Ed Vulliamy [portrayed by Rhys Ifans], who told me a great bit about their sources, and then I went to speak to Ben Emmerson [Katharine’s lawyer, portrayed by Ralph Fiennes] and with him I got the most significant information that was not in the book.

I’ll give you two examples. First of all, he very carefully described how he came up with the defense of necessity that he used. He was going to call for these documents that he knew would show that the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith had consistently said for over a year that war without a UN resolution would be illegal under international law.

Three days before the war, Goldsmith changed his mind and came up with a bizarre idea that the 1991 Gulf War, which had been authorized by a UN resolution, had never really ended and so they could still use that. It was such a crazy fringe idea because we hadn’t won that war and the motion of that war was nonsense in the end.

I said to Ben, “How did you know when you called for those documents that you’d get what you needed? How could you be so sure that Goldsmith said what he said?” There was this pause, then he said to me, “Well you know [his Deputy Attorney General] Elizabeth Wilmshurst has resigned, right?” I did know that, but she never said why.

Well, he called Elizabeth and asked if he could come round and have a cup of tea with her. I said, “Wow, that’s never been in the press.” I ran back to Martin and told him how Ben told me the contents of the conversation that he had with her, which is depicted in the movie [Wilmshurst is portrayed by Tamsin Greig] and I asked him if he knew about this. He said, “Gavin, you’ve got a scoop!” and I replied, “Jesus, I feel like a journalist!” I’ve never made a movie where the people are still alive. I normally make up fictional people, but journalists do this every day.

The other example was that Ben told me about the conversations he had with the director of public prosecutions Lord Ken Macdonald, who’s a member of the House of Lords. If you’re in America, that’s like saying a senior senator is involved. Ben told me that they both had beach houses in Norfolk and they have known each other for many years, and Macdonald arrived unannounced at Ben’s home and started chatting to him about the case. It was very uncomfortable, and Ben said how it’s not appropriate and they can’t be talking about this.

At the coda [of the movie], Macdonald comes to Ben and says, “It wasn’t me who chose to prosecute,” and this interaction actually happened. I discovered with a bit more research that the director of public prosecutions in England has great autonomy to decide who to prosecute and who not to prosecute without any influence from any member of the government, except in cases involving the Official Secrets Act. It turns out that in order to prosecute, the director of public prosecutions must get the permission of the Attorney General.

That means Ken Macdonald must have asked Lord Goldsmith to get his permission to prosecute Katharine Gun, which was obviously given because they charged her. And then they must have said, “Lord Goldsmith, they’re asking for your documents, what do we do?” So, what we don’t know from a journalistic point of view is why did they drop that case? Our film ends with the case being dropped. Was it because Lord Goldsmith got a fright and didn’t want to show his documents?

I think it’s highly likely, because it took until 2010 when those documents were finally released to the public and showed exactly what they [had] suspected and what Wilmshurst said they would show. There’s an opportunity for a scoop here; for a journalist to go press Lord Goldsmith on this case. I think some have tried and he gives no comment. But what is the truth?

What is interesting is that although Katharine and Ben were relieved that she wasn’t going to prison, they actually felt they had a strong defense. Both of them to this day feel they never got their day in court, when they actually wanted their day in court. That is why Ben jumped up as the prosecutor was dropping the case and said, “Surely my client is entitled to know why, indeed the public is entitled to know why this case is being dropped.” He said to me he just had to get that on the record because they were shutting them down.

So this is an interesting thing, because as a piece of normal narrative filmmaking it just won’t fit into the box of ‘the hero is wronged, they go about overcoming the antagonist and set the world right’. Real life is seldom like that, and so the question became ‘is the real-life story still worth telling?’ and I think yes because the story isn’t over and we’re just a tiny part of an ongoing understanding of that war.

Martin Bright has said it’s both a film—because it’s performed by actors—but it’s also in some way a piece of journalism. I hope that we’ve discovered things that weren’t in the book, to answer your question. Maybe someone will pick up [where we left off]. I think that when it comes out in Britain, more so than America, where it’s far more personal to the British, there’s some significant questions Lord Macdonald could be approached [about] and asked why he really dropped that case.

Matthew Goode and Matt Smith in ‘Official Secrets’.

Katharine yelling at the news on TV was refreshing; a reminder of how frustrating it was in 2003. Things remain complex in world politics. What’s your advice for staying invested in politics while not getting exhausted? We are exhausted, and the danger of us being exhausted with the seemingly endless bitterness between both sides of our democracy—certainly here in America—and the flagrant disregard for truth by our current president, it’s easy to become jaded and give up. The problem with authoritarianism is that it relies on people giving up.

I grew up in apartheid South Africa in the ’70s and ’80s. I know what it’s like to watch a country get worse and worse in terms of its security legislation, especially in the ’80s with the state of emergency that literally had laws saying “you can be detained without trial indefinitely, without a right of access to a lawyer”. That’s how bad it got. It’s almost inconceivable to most people.

It’s very easy to get exhausted, stop focusing on our world, and stop voting. I think our greatest obligation is to do our little part. We don’t think it’s a big part, but if each of us plays our part that’s the only way our democracy works. The minute we’ve become exhausted, we’ve given up on the only system that works. Democracy is messy but it works in our favor as citizens. When we give up on it, we give way to tyranny. It sounds dramatic but I think it’s true.

I think we have to accept the frustration. We have to say “yes, it’s frustrating, it’s never suddenly going to be fine, it’s always going to be messy and require debate”. We have to embrace the messiness of it all and not give up and say “I have to do my job—I don’t have to be politically active every day, but I do have to be a good citizen, apply my mind to what’s out there, and vote”. That’s the only way our democracy survives.

There’s something interesting about what the Australians do in their voting system. They don’t actually say “you have to vote” but they do say every citizen has to go to the polls. Some people interpret that as everyone has to vote, but in fact you can abstain at the polls. You have to mark across the line that says “I don’t vote for anyone on this list”. At least for a moment every citizen is compelled to make a statement about what they think.

Lastly, what film made you want to be a filmmaker? I grew up very disconnected in South Africa. I never saw a TV set because there were none in the country until 1976. It was part of the government’s desire to not allow the outside world in. What I used to do with my parents was rent movies on 16mm, projected onto a sheet hanging in the living room. For me, every movie I saw was fascinating because it gave me a glimpse into the world overseas, but they were always about the people from overseas.

One day when I was about ten years old, I went to the cinema with my friend to watch a little South African movie called E’ Lollipop [also known as Forever Young, Forever Free, released in 1975], about a little white boy and a little Zulu boy who are friends. I remember being white-knuckle glued to my seat. It wasn’t because it was a thriller, it was because it was a story where people spoke with my accent and were telling a story about where I came from.

I’d never seen anything like it and it spoke to me. “Oh wow, films can be made about us— I can make a film about anything!” It doesn’t just have to be about something that people from overseas do. And I think that’s when the bug bit. I haven’t told that very often, thank you for asking.

‘Official Secrets’ is in US theaters now and plays at the London Film Festival next month.