A Soldier's Story
Going to War with Stop-Loss Director Kimberly Peirce

It wasn’t that acclaimed filmmaker Kimberly Peirce wanted to wait nine years to follow up her Oscar-winning debut Boys Don’t Cry. It’s just sort of how things worked out. “I think it is just one of those things that took a while,” she states with a slight chuckle. “That’s somehow how it works when you’re making movies.”

Director and co-writer Kimberly Peirce and Ryan Phillippe on the set of Paramount Pictures' Stop-Loss

It’s a question she’s been getting a lot of late, the release of her new effort the Iraq War drama Stop-Loss prompting many journalists to wonder what the heck had happened to the director. Sitting down in a suite at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel in downtown Seattle I couldn’t help but have the same query, her searing look at soldiers returning from combat only to find a government unwilling to let them retire from service a blistering reminder of just how big a talent this woman is.

“I don’t know if most people know this,” she explains passionately, “but I started Boys Don’t Cry in film school. It wasn’t even supposed to be my graduate thesis project; it was in fact my second year film. I just fell so deeply in love with that character and the more I pursued [the project] it was almost as if the movie was asking me to make it bigger. It’s kind of unthinkable, then, that it was a graduate project that became a feature and then went on to do what it did. It was kind of like I left graduate school and suddenly had a Hollywood career.”

That “all it did” was nothing short of sensational, the film garnering breakout star Hilary Swank her first Academy Award, scored a nomination for costar Chloë Sevigny and brought Peirce herself countless accolades all over the world. “It was very exciting,” the director admits. “After that success I met lots of wonderful people who offered me lots of money to direct many different projects, some of which appealed to me.”

The one that appealed to her the most was a Hollywood murder mystery called Silent Star. She spent years on the project, even getting to the point she had stars like Hugh Jackman, Annette Benning, Ben Kingsley and Evan Rachel Wood. “The studio looked at the project and they loved it,” Peirce says emphatically, almost as if she was hearing the news yesterday. “And they thought it should cost $30-million, but they didn’t want to spend [that amount], they wanted to spend $20-million. I said that it was going to be tough, but that I’d try to do it as the project was really starting to mean a lot to me. That’s when they said they didn’t want to see the $20-million version, they wanted to see the $30-million version – they just didn’t want to pay for it.”

Oscar-winner Hilary Swank and Chloë Sevigny in Fox Searchlight's Boys Don't Cry

All of which was more than a little heartbreaking for the filmmaker. But she still remained undaunted, and as she looked for new projects to direct her attention to she wanted a film that would capture her attentions as much as the central figures of Boys Don’t Cry did. “Boys was personal,” she admits candidly. “It was slightly autobiographical, it was connected to my friends – when you’re dealing with some that is as important to one’s life as gender and sexuality it was like a dream come true to make that movie. It was like I came of age in an artistic sort of process, so I was looking to be moved that much by something.”

It was the dual events of September 11^th and of her brother subsequently volunteering for the Army that started Peirce down the path which would lead her to such a project. The idea of her younger brother enlisting in the military was somewhat devastating. None of her friends and family knew a single person in the armed forces and now they were a military family deeply invested in the struggles going on in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“I started getting very moved by the soldiers,” she says quietly. “I was in New York for 9/11. The Towers got hit and it was devastating for me just like it was very everyone else. What was unique for those of us who had lived there for a while, I’d been there for 15 years, it was like it was my city that was being attacked.”

“New York was in a state of crisis and mourning. There were people still looking for their loved one wondering, ‘Did he miss going to work that day?’ For us, we were in that state of mind and then, it was like, suddenly the country is going to war and I realized we were in the middle of a seismic change here. I became immediately interested why soldiers were signing up, what their experiences in combat were and what was going to happen when they got home. As I started thinking about all that as a movie, that’s when my little brother enlisted.”

“It wasn’t that I had a problem with him enlisting. I understood the whole patriotic response, the whole wanting to get the guys who did this. I was just very curious what the experience was going to do [to him]. My brother is significantly younger than me. I brought him home from the hospital as a baby. This was literally like it was my little baby and he’s pure innocence. Who is going to be? What’s he going to do?”

We talk a little while longer, the publicist giving us a five minute warning only to have Peirce shush her up and send the poor girl on her way out of the room. We speak about her brother and his experiences in Iraq and of my little sister, an Army medic who joined for many of the same reasons (and about the same time) as her younger sibling did. We talked about the countless text messages she’d receive from him while he was out in the field and I spoke about all the emails she sent me from inside the various compounds she was stationed at.

“It’s like you’re involved in it every single day, isn’t it?” she asks me. “You’re waiting for that email, that text message. In the case of my brother, it was so cute; he would keep me on IM forever. He’d get me up at four in the morning and then he’d be like, ‘So what did you do today?’ And I’d be like, I had lunch with this person, I went and saw this movie, stuff like that, and he’d be like, ‘what else?’ Literally, he just wanted to know more details, and this would go on for hours, but I would still try to keep the IM’s going just to keep him entertained.”

Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Paramount Pictures' Stop-Loss

All this talk of family brings me to the first time I saw my sister after she returned from Iraq. I didn’t know what to say to her, didn’t know what to ask or do. All I knew was that I wanted to protect and hug and hold her like I had never done before, something the filmmaker couldn’t help but relate to. But, after that was done, the next thing that interested her about his return was the unique footage he had to show her.

“He came home on his first leave and he brought soldier’s homemade videos,” states Peirce. “It was shocking. It was like anthropology. It was like archeology. It was discovery. It was Thanksgiving 2003 and I was in my bedroom and I heard, ‘Let the bodies hit the floor, let the bodies hit the floor.’ Came out the door to pounding rock music to see my brother just sitting there, staring at these images.”

“First of all, he was like totally connected to the images. It was like he had to be watching them. Then when I looked at them they were these roughly shot images that had clearly been shot by soldiers. Cameras were put on sandbags; they were wired to the Humvee. They were wired to the gun turret. And the filmed whatever their experience was, and he had like 20 of these homemade videos. From that moment forward, it was completely clear that there was a movie to be made and it was going to be completely from the soldiers’ point of view. That was the story that needed to be told. Not only the relationship between soldier to soldier, which is profound, but also the relationship between the soldier and their family.”

It is here where our conversation turns and we began to talk about the controversial government mandate Stop-Loss, a way for the military to keep soldiers from leaving even after their tours have expired. Suddenly our conversation turns more candid then ever, and almost like it were some twisted cinematic therapy session I start revealing things about my family and she starts speaking about hers in ways I was never quite sure either of us meant to be doing. It was cathartic, in a way, and while I’m not going to disclose the intimacies of the conversation (my little sis would kill me) the conclusions we came to were absolutely unavoidable.

“It’s so interesting when people ask if the movie is about stop-loss,” states Peirce. “No, the movie isn’t about stop-loss. The movie is about people. The movie is about relationships. The movie is about the guys and girls that fight and the relationships they have with their families. Stop-loss is just interesting because any issues that are present – families missing families, soldiers having issues with the war, people struggling to strengthen their relationships – stop-loss is just going to amplify all of it. You’re unfairly sending people back to a combat zone when they feel they’ve already been a [patriot], they’ve already done their time.”

As our time together slowly trickles towards its end, I ask the filmmaker to assess the commercial prospects for her picture and her face immediately contorts into a not-so happy position. The sad fact is, films even remotely about the Middle East, Iraq or the war on terror have done pretty badly at the box office, and as much as I want people to tune into the director’s sophomore effort part of me thinks they’re going to still do their utmost to keep avoiding the subject matter.

Abbie Cornish and Channing Tatum in Paramount Pictures' Stop-Loss

“This is a movie about relationships,” opines Peirce proudly, “and I don’t think it like any of those other films. I think it is from the soldiers’ point of view. It has a very young aesthetic. I looked at the World War II films, I looked at the Vietnam War films, and while I loved [those] films I realized that this [Stop-Loss] was a different experience.”

“While we are in Iraq for about twenty minutes, which I think you need to be, this is a movie about coming home. This is a movie about the guys with their guys and the guys with their families. I think it’s already completely different. Over and over at the screenings what I get from the soldiers and what I get from civilians is, ‘Thank you for making an emotional movie.’ That’s what they wanted. They wanted a movie about relationships. They wanted a movie about people.”

I can’t help but agree with her assessment. Still, a part of me can’t stop from thinking people aren’t going to notice the difference and I can tell that, no matter how hard she wants to hide it, Peirce almost silently wonders the very same thing. “People don’t probably want to see Iraq war movies because I think they don’t want to be stuck over there,” she states coldly. “It’s scary. But that isn’t what we’re trying to do. This is about a young man’s journey. This is the story of what happens when he comes home, and that’s the story I think anyone, civilian or soldier, can relate to.”

Additional Links:

-  Stop-Loss Theatrical Review by Sara Michelle Fetters

-  Stop-Loss Theatrical Trailer