War and Peirce (an interview with Kimberly Peirce)

Photographer: Belinda Rolland

Kimberly Peirce's warm radiant smile says it all: she is thrilled to be here. She's thrilled to sit down for a chat in the majestic State Theatre, thrilled to be a guest of the Sydney Film Festival, where her second film Stop-Loss is playing in competition, and thrilled to be in Australia, which she's visiting for the very first time.

The night before, introducing the international premiere of Stop-Loss to 2,000 locals at the State Theatre, Peirce, who surfs, had waxed lyrical about Sydney's gorgeous beaches. She'd also wondered whether Australians would embrace a film about Iraq told from the perspective of American soldiers. Twenty-four hours later, she's learned two new things about this country: Australians - while full of reservations about the war in Iraq, can relate to the plight of American soldiers and their families. And Bondi, Sydney's most famous beach, doesn't actually rhyme with Blondie.

In Stop-Loss, Ryan Phillippe plays a veteran soldier who returns to Texas after his completed tour of duty in Iraq, only to find his life turned upside down when he is arbitrarily ordered to return to field duty by the Army. Unwilling to return to the atrocities of the war, he is forced to question everything he believes in: the bond of family, the loyalty of army friendships and the value of military honour. The American film boasts a stellar cast of up-and-comers, including Channing Tatum, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Australia's very own Abbie Cornish.

It's been nearly nine years since her debut drama Boys Don't Cry propelled Kimberly Peirce to the front of the Hollywood queue. The low-budget film, which charted the troubled life of transgendered youth Brandon Teena, proved a hard act to follow, giving Hilary Swank her first Oscar and sweeping the board at awards ceremonies across the globe.

She talks with justified pride about making Boys Don't Cry in graduate school. "There was nothing commercial about that project, nobody thought it would make a movie and I was persisting down an avenue that I was not encouraged to follow. I'm so glad I did that at that age, it was the most satisfying experience of my life. I had made this piece of art that I loved, that reflected my community and my friends and my self, and then the world embraced it. That was extraordinary."

Suddenly Peirce had a Hollywood career and studios were offering her millions of dollars. But finding the right project wasn't easy. "I only learned how to be a filmmaker by surrendering to things that I love so much that I had no choice but to tell these stories," she says. "It had to be personal."

For the filmmaker, the story of the soldiers' experience - the need to enlist, the chaos on the battlefield, the challenge of coming home - couldn't be more personal. It all started the morning of September 11th 2001, when the director watched the towers fall from her balcony in the Lower East Side. There is gravity in her voice, and echoes of the fear and incomprehension she felt on that fateful day.

"I instinctively videotaped everything. I videotaped all my friends coming over - artists and academics living in Brooklyn - and recalling what their experience was in the moment when the planes flew overhead. We were terrified," she admits. "And then the Pentagon was hit. I would say as an American that was the first moment of true devastation. They ended up shutting down the city, so the bridges and tunnels were closed, which meant we were stuck there. And we thought ok, well if New York is being attacked, then I guess we're going down with the city."

She reminds us that New York was in a state of mourning and emotionally recalls her encounters with shell-shocked New Yorkers wandering down the streets holding pictures of their loved ones, wondering whether they were alive or dead. "We were really caught up in the horror", she continues, "all the people dying. Why would somebody attack us? We wanted to know. When America declared war it was a radical shift for New Yorkers. The movie in a way began then: I knew there was going to be a seismic cultural change, this was going to alter the world as we knew it for ever."

Peirce comes across as an woman who knows what she wants and isn't afraid to go out and get it. "If it wakes me up in the middle of the night, if it makes me spend my own money on research, if it starts to take over my life, then I know I've found something good," she argues. "I need to be this engaged with a project to fully pursue it". Her curiosity seems matched only by her determination to get answers. "I took matters into my own hands and picked up a video camera and started interviewing soldiers across the country: why they'd signed up, what the effect was on their family".

But it wasn't all intellectual curiosity. Out of the blue her younger brother enlisted, bringing the story very close to home indeed. "On one hand I was interviewing my brother and his friends on the internet their experience of combat. On the other I was talking to my mother, who said "you will never know what fear is until you've had a child fired at within a combat zone". She would just call crying hysterically, "I haven't heard from your brother, I don't know if he's dead or alive."

Authenticity was a top priority, and eventually Peirce hired her brother as a military advisor. "He read every version of the script, went over every piece of the dialogue. He made sure that the battle material would feel authentic to a soldier. He was one among a number of military advisors, working under Sergeant-Major Jim Deaver. We also hired Iraqi vets to run a boot camp for the actors and to work alongside them on set."

Peirce loves her war movies. She talks enthusiastically about her favourites - All Quiet on the Western Front, Battle of Algiers and the Vietnam films - Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Coming Home, Deer Hunter. While the war was at the heart of very personal family discussions, effectively deepening and guiding Peirce's approach of the story, it was important for the director to keep an even-handed outlook. And it was with that in mind that she decided to work with Mark Richard on the script.

Peirce explains: "my desire was always to have a balanced view of the war, but sometimes my heart and my sentiment take me in a certain direction... Mark is more conservative than I am: we would have arguments, and that was good. if you're going to tell a good soldier story, you're going to be inside the mind of the soldier, what he or she is fighting for Mark writes about military men, usually older men from Texas who drink a lot, who have a kind of brokenness or an anger about them. Here's a guy who's a man's man: there's no doubt that he buffed up the masculinity of the script."

Stop-Loss, like Boys Don't Cry, is a fascinating exploration of masculinity, something which has always held a deep curiosity for Kimberly Peirce. "There's something interesting about being the type of woman that I am when I'm with the boys", she says. "I had a curiosity about the physical things that they did. What do you do when you wake up? What do you eat? How do you fire your gun? Yet emotionally I could also be a very good confidante." They let me into their male space and I do think that most times it's a place they don't let women into."

Knowledge, as they say, is power. The best way Peirce found to retain creative control was to know more about the subject than everyone around her. "If any new knowledge or any new experience can help me become a better captain on this ship, then that's all I care about", she asserts calmly. Unlike with her first feature, Peirce had a reasonable budget to work with this time round, which didn't always make things easier. "With Stop-Loss, not only did I have to be a professional artist but I also had to be a business person at all times. More money means more people looking at your dailies, more people weighing in."

Making Stop-Loss has taught Peirce one very important thing: to do whatever it takes to protect the material. "As you move through the process of making a film like Stop-Loss what you're really fighting for - while managing everything else - is protecting the ability to have a personal vision and the privacy of your own creativity."

It is this same creative vision that sparkles in Peirce's eyes when we ask about her next project: "a classic romantic comedy with a total gender twist." It looks like she'll steer this ship to its destination with confidence and purpose. At first she had put the autobiographical project on the back burner: "it's too personal, it's too weird, it's too queer, it's too crazy."

Whether working on low-budget independent films or big Hollywood productions, one can tell Peirce will stick to the things that matter to her, however many studio executives she has to charm along the way. "Why not follow the stuff in your head that's totally nuts and totally personal, stuff about your own existence, if it leads you to something really interesting?" Why not indeed?

Stop-Loss opens in Australian cinemas on August 14th and is out on DVD in the US on July 8th. For more information, visit SoundOff, where Kimberly Peirce has begun collating video testimonies from American soldiers who have been stop-lossed. Big thanks to Scott Henderson for making this interview happen.