Steven Spielberg Reveals Darker Film-making Following 9/11 Events

Steven Spielberg changed the direction of his moviemaking after the 9/11 terror attacks in America,

because the disasters inspired him to create "darker" films.

The director, whose latest film War Horse is released in the UK on Friday, is celebrated for family

friendly projects such as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the Indiana Jones franchise and Jurassic Park,

but he felt compelled to alter his style after the 2001 atrocities which left almost 3,000 people dead.

Spielberg tells the Independent newspaper: "9/11 changed a lot for me. It changed a lot for everybody

in the world. And my films did grow darker after 9/11."

He has made some lighter films following the tragedy, such as Catch Me If You Canwith Leonardo

DiCaprio, which has been hailed by some as his best film of the last decade.

But the filmmaker has predominantly concentrated on more serious topics and indepth storylines -

and he even makes a specific reference to the terrorist attacks in his film War of the Worlds.

He adds, "Minority Report was a very dark look at the future, and certainly War of the Worlds, which

was a very direct reference to 9/11. It was a real post-9/11 story.

"Not intended that way, but that's the way it turned out. So I think the world has a great impact on how

it colours my movies.

"I think that's a good sign. It just means I'm changing by being aware of what's happening."

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I’m here today to defend War of the Worlds, a movie that’s a minor entry in the Spielberg canon but that would be a major, career -defining work for almost anyone else. In 2005 it was a powerful reaction to the world post-9/11, but in 2013 it’s still a powerful

reflection of living in a world where anything can go cataclysmically wrong at any time. It’s Spielberg’s ultimate statement on life in the

21st century, about living in an America that no longer feels secure. While the imagery of War of the Worlds is explicitly 9/11 related - Tom Cruise coming home from the initial attack covered in grey ash recalls the hordes of New Yorkers stumbling from the dust cloud of the World Trade Center collapse - the emotions continue to resonate in a world of super hurricanes and 9.0 earthquakes. As the film goes on the Tom Cruise Hero’s Journey continues to be subverted. Instead of learning to be selfless, Ray learns the true meaning of selfishness, as applied to his family. The scene where Ray and his two kids, owners of one of the few working vehicles in the post-invasion landscape, drives right through a crowd of people

to get to a ferry is powerful on many levels. Spielberg, an expert craftsman, makes the scene cinematically tense and terrifying, but it also disorients in a fundamental way - we’re rooting for our hero to blow past (and possibly through) other human beings in order to save his own family. Later he’s able to get his family on the ferry, but almost callously leaves behind his neighbor and her child. Robbie, Ray’s son, is a stark contrast. He wants to join the army and ‘strike back’ at the Tripods. As the ferry takes off he runs to the ramp and begins to help people scramble aboard. Again and again he wants to make choices that would, in a standard action movie, be considered the heroic choices - but here they’re all the wrong ones. The image of Tom Cruise trying to hold Robbie down as he attempts to charge over the hill into battle is one fraught with years of pop culture weight - you’re seeing Maverick and Ethan Hunt trying to get someone to

play it safe. For once you’re agreeing with cinema’s most self-centered star - sacrificing yourself for others doesn’t make a lot of sense in this situation.

The Hurt Locker, review The Hurt Locker is not so much about Iraq as it is about war and addiction to danger. Link to this v ideo

By Sukhdev Sandhu

1:12PM BST 27 Aug 2009

Comment

Kathryn Bigelow; Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty. Rating: * * * *

The Hurt Locker has been talked up as that rarest of things: a film about the war in

Iraq that doesn’t preach or pontificate, that isn’t instant box-office poison. Directed

by Kathryn Bigelow, whose track record includes Point Break (1991) and Strange

Days (1995), it’s a super-sharp, nerve-shredding thriller that reveals more about the

realities of contemporary military conflict than most documentaries, is as fissile and

explosive as a Transformers movie, and delivers a powerful and often haunting

critique of American society both at home and as its faultlines are expressed abroad.

Written by Mark Boal, who furnished the story for another Iraq-based film, 2007’s In

the Valley of Elah, and based on his experiences an embedded Rolling Stone

journalist, it is set in 2004 and follows the members of an elite US bomb-disposal

team as they move across the debris-littered streets of Baghdad looking for

explosive devices to defuse.

After one of them is blown up, Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) arrives

on the scene. It turns out he’s something of a wild card, a fearless operator who

virtually runs to sites of maximum danger, not only disregarding the advice of

colleagues, but chucking away the handsets designed to let him hear their concerns

about his actions.

It’s understandable if members of his team, among them Sergeant Sanborn

(Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), treat him with the

same suspicion they regard every inch of the shredded, debris-littered alleys and

public squares they are meant to be looking after. Sanborn, as if to prove that race

and class are incendiary issues even for a squad unified by shared objectives, calls

him a “red-neck piece of trailer trash” and punches him out.

At one point, Sanborn and Eldridge even speculate about killing James, but over

time they develop respect if not admiration for his unconventional methods. When

they discover that he keeps parts of old bombs under his bed as macabre spoils of

war, it’s clear that he’s someone for whom the quotation that prefaces the film —

about war being the ultimate drug — is a truism.

Bigelow has always been strong on the psychology and dynamics of male bonding.

The scenes in which the men get drunk and start wrestling are captured in all their

muscular, playful, erotic intensity. When James feeds juice to Sanborn, wilting after

hours in the desert peering through binoculars at a distant combatant, he does so

with a delicacy that seems to be borne of more than camaraderie or necessity, from

a love that only men who have risked their lives together on a frontline can ever

truly appreciate.

The Hurt Locker excels though at making us feel that we are stranded alone with the

bomb squad in a landscape full of unknown and potentially infinite dangers.

Cinematographer Barry Ackroyd (United 93) makes telling use of grainy, often

handheld photography that recalls the jittery, verite pictures of this conflict that have

emerged through channels such as YouTube. It also conveys the nervousness and

paranoia the Americans feel when every passing butcher, DVD-vendor or taxi-driver

could be an insurgent-in-waiting.

Also of the highest order is Paul N.J. Ottoson’s sound design which renders an

unforgettable sonic portrait of Baghdad, a ghosted city full of eerie silences and

insidious whispers punctuated by military sirens, the stentorian roar of US soldiers,

and the noise of metal ripping through human flesh.

There are small roles for Guy Pearce and, almost comically, for Ralph Fiennes. But the

film gains from its lead performers not being A-list stars. Renner is a major find,

often recalling the young Russell Crowe in his brawny swagger and isolated

intensity.

The Hurt Locker has been criticized in some quarters for not being sufficiently

political. One could certainly make a case that it’s not so much about Iraq as it is

about war more generally. Perhaps its real subject isn’t even war, but about

addiction - to danger, to the company of tough men.

Whatever, the world doesn’t need another film belatedly tut-tutting about Iraq.

Bigelow isn’t opposed to commenting on America’s relationship to the Middle East;

a secondary plot about James’s fondness for an Iraqi boy called Beckham is handled

with black, brilliant irony. But the heart of her story lies in its visceral dramatization

of more timeless feelings: fear and loneliness.

"Zero Dark Thirty" has almost impercebtibly reframed the debate from what constitutes torture to whether

torture works

Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty" has inspired passionate debate about whether the waterboarding it depicts

really helped lead Navy SEALS to a secret Pakistani compound where they killed Osama bin Laden.

But the film has also — almost imperceptibly — changed our national debate about toture by illustrating

waterboarding for a mass audience for the first time.

The debate over the practice was largely tabled after

President Obama banned its use quickly after coming into

office in January 2009. But "Zero Dark Thirty" has revived it,

and the film has gained enough attention to land Bigelow on

the cover of Time.

Whether or not the film's depiciton of waterboarding is

accurate, Americans can now discuss the same set of images

instead of relying on their own perceptions of what it looks like.

And almost everyone who sees it, from the right and left,

agrees the version of waterboarding seen in the film looks like

torture.

At the height of the war on terror, Americans were deeply

divided on whether waterboarding was truly horrific or merely

another unpleasant indignity inflicted on people being

interrogated, like uncomfortable chairs or loud music.

Also read: 'Zero Dark Thirty' Hits the U.K.: Did Critics Zero

in on Torture Scenes?

A few years ago, varied perspectives on what waterboarding was colored the strikingly different perspectives of

what happened to prisoners at CIA black sites. A July 2005 poll of 1,500 people by the Pew Research Center

found that 43 percent were in favor of the use of waterboarding, with 53 percent opposed.

The next year, Vice President Dick Cheney went along with a questioner who characterized waterboarding as "a

dunk in water," saying the issue was "a no-brainer."

That was just one attempt by the Bush administration to reframe what opponents called torture, using phrases

like "enhanced interrogation techniques."

Years later, there is nothing resembling consensus on whether torture works. And "Zero Dark Thirty" has only

inflamed opinons on the subject.

But at least it has framed a debate.

"The torture debate certainly shifted as a result, with conservatives pointing to the end game (we got Osama)

and liberals shaking their fingers at how we caught him," Christian Toto, an editor and movie reviewer for the

conservative site Breitbart.com, told TheWrap. "Great movies provoke these kinds of discussions. Ideological

films, which Hollywood all too often delivers, tell us what to think."