Rassegna stampa di Kimberly Peirce

KIMBERLY PEIRCE talked at double speed and walked faster, cutting through a hotel lobby during an interview, huge strides belying her tiny stature. And yet, while she appeared to be trailed by those little horizontal stripes that indicate a cartoon character’s speediness, Ms. Peirce is slow at something: making movies. It has taken her nine years to follow up her much lauded feature debut, “Boys Don’t Cry.”
“Yes, I should have made a movie sooner,” she said with a deep laugh. “Yes, I should be a lot richer than I am. Mea culpa.”
After almost a decade in the Hollywood wilderness trying to find a project that would equal her first film, Ms. Peirce earned just a single directorial credit, for an episode of the television series “The L Word.” Now 40, she has a new film called “Stop-Loss,” opening Friday, about American soldiers who have served in Iraq. Since November she’s been promoting the movie on an extended road trip to colleges and theaters, hoping to generate buzz for a subject that has yet to seduce audiences, as producers of “In the Valley of Elah” and “Redacted,” among others, can attest.
“Stop-Loss” stars Ryan Phillippe as Sgt. Brandon King, a golden boy from small-town Texas who returns home after two tours of duty in Iraq, ready to begin civilian life. But after a hero’s welcome and a Main Street parade, he receives orders to go back.
He is a victim of a stop-loss, the controversial practice that allows the military to retain soldiers who have already fulfilled their terms of service. Sometimes referred to as a back-door draft, stop-loss is a result of a loophole in the contract soldiers sign upon enlisting that permits “involuntary extensions” in the event of a threat to national security.
Ms. Peirce learned about the little-reported practice from her half brother Brett, who joined the Army at 18, immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks. Speaking of her brother with palpable pride (and straightening her back when saying his name), Ms. Peirce recalled that during his tour in Iraq she would often wake in the night to beeping instant messages from him. When she would ask what he was doing, he’d type back: “You know, the usual: kidnapping, razing houses, stuff like that.” Ms. Peirce never knew how literally to take those missives.

By 2005 Ms. Peirce was working on a script about American soldiers, using the title “AWOL,” but when her brother told her about friends being sent back for third, fourth and fifth tours of duty, her vision for the project changed.
“We had been struggling because every time we went down the road with a soldier who was like, ‘I’m against the war, I don’t want to fight,’ something died in the script. Whereas if we could stay with a soldier who was severely patriotic and then had a change of heart, but was still conflicted, it was much more interesting,” she said. “It’s a very different debate than the people who don’t want to fight at all.”
In “Stop-Loss,” Sergeant King, who has seen friends killed and maimed under his command, goes AWOL. He hits the road for Washington, accompanied by his best friend’s girlfriend, Michele (played by Abbie Cornish, to whom Mr. Phillippe has been romantically linked in real life). Her fiancé, Steve (Channing Tatum), has returned with a case of post-traumatic stress disorder so severe that he digs a foxhole in his front yard. The film repeatedly circles back to the damaged soldiers’ rescuing of one another, in battle and at home.
“When I talked to a wounded soldier who lost his limbs and still wants to go back, he told me, ‘It’s not the war, it’s the men,’ ” said Ms. Peirce. “That blew my mind. There’s this huge desire for camaraderie and male bonding.”
That quest for intimacy is the only obvious link between “Stop-Loss” and “Boys Don’t Cry,” a love story based on the real life of Brandon Teena, a Nebraska woman living as a man who was raped and murdered in a grisly betrayal. A short version of Teena’s story was Ms. Peirce’s film school graduate thesis at Columbia in 1995. By the time she completed the feature in 1999, she had been researching Teena for five years. That indie, shot on a shoestring budget of $2 million, gobbled critical awards and turned Hilary Swank from a “Beverly Hills, 90210” bit player into an Academy Award-winner. It also propelled Ms. Peirce out of obscurity and into a realm of unmanageable expectations.
“I had given everything to that movie,” Ms. Peirce said. “I was exhausted, and I got offered millions of dollars, many different movies. But it’s like starting to run before you’re ready to run. You’re still the same. You’re looking for emotional truth in your directing, but you’re dealing with 20 times more people, 20 times more money. People are looking at every stage of your process. How did I make ‘Boys’? Well, I picked up a camera and just went and did it.”
Ms. Peirce’s first tangle with the complexities of success was “Silent Star,” a screenplay based on a piece of Hollywood lore about the unsolved 1922 murder of the actor and writer William Desmond Taylor. In 2001 she took the story to DreamWorks and began as a co-writer of the script. Two years later Evan Rachel Wood and Annette Bening had signed on to act in the film, but the deal with DreamWorks fell apart over budget issues, Ms. Peirce said.
Several other projects slipped away too: Ms. Peirce met with Dave Eggers three times in 2002 to discuss adapting his memoir “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” but it never got off the ground; for a while she entertained the idea of directing “Memoirs of a Geisha,” but no deal was struck.
“There was a sense of deep, deep longing before ‘Stop-Loss,’ ” she said. “ ‘Boys’ set the bar very high artistically for me. I wanted to be that much in love with my next character. I wanted to feel it was taking over my whole life. I was lonely when I wasn’t able to work on a movie at that level again.”
Though Ms. Peirce is a forceful, locking-eyes kind of listener and talker, she is also conscientiously private. For all the good will she garnered in gay circles after “Boys Don’t Cry,” Ms. Peirce demurs on the subject of her own sexuality, saying only that her partner is going to be a professor of gender sociology and Turkish literature in California.
Born to teenage parents in Harrisburg, Pa., in 1967, Ms. Peirce said she got an early taste for the drama of youth. Her parents “were very young and beautiful, and even though they were working class, their charisma and their good looks, as they always do, elevated them in a certain way,” she said. “I think that obviously plays into my desire to work with actors and tell stories, because I keep telling the story of beautiful, charismatic young kids who keep getting in difficult situations.”
Her parents’ split led to a peripatetic upbringing that took her to Pennsylvania, New York, Puerto Rico and finally Miami. After stints in Chicago and Japan, where she began to experiment with cameras and film, Ms. Peirce settled in as a student in New York, where she stayed for 15 years. Last year she moved to a small house on the water in Malibu, Calif., but is quick to add: “I’m still a New Yorker. I feel like a New Yorker.”
Wanting to make sense out of 9/11 Ms. Peirce began traveling the country in 2003, interviewing military men and women and recording homecoming parades for a potential documentary about soldiers from sign-up to return. Then when her brother returned home on leave, he brought reams of video made by soldiers, often with cameras mounted on guns or Humvees, shot mostly for posting online. Some were romantic homages to patriotism backed by Toby Keith songs, others pure gore, with bodies piling up and heads splitting open, set to rap and heavy metal.
“I have to admit I would get adrenalized watching,” said Ms. Peirce. “We’ve never gotten this close to the soldier experience before. We’re literally seeing it, feeling, hearing it, and they’re cutting it, so they’re seeing their fantasy of themselves. I just knew a movie had to be born from that kind of representation.”
So she abandoned the documentary and decided to write a fictional version inspired by her research, and to do so while bypassing the studio system as long as possible by writing on spec, a task for which she enlisted Mark Richard.
The two first met in 2005, when Ms. Peirce was thinking about adapting Mr. Richard’s novel “The Ice at the Bottom of the World.” The project didn’t pan out, but Ms. Peirce and Mr. Richard hit it off, and she called him when she had finally made the decision to turn her documentary into a feature. He had been working on his own film about the Korean War, and they agreed to try to merge the projects.
After weeks of working together on weekends and evenings Mr. Richard quit his job as a producer on the television series "Huff."
Within 10 weeks Mr. Richard and Ms. Peirce wrote a draft and sold it to Paramount, an unusually fast process. But they were massaging the script right up to, and during, filming in Texas. Mr. Richard estimates they did 65 drafts, moving toward a political balance that should satisfy red and blue states.
“I’m this Southern conservative, she’s this incredibly intense liberal, but I think by the end of the process, the scales had fallen off both our eyes,” Mr. Richard said. “I’ve always respected soldiers’ sense of honor, duty, service to the country. Stop-loss abuses the faith of these guys. You can’t keep sending them back and chewing them up.”
The film doesn’t shy away from the story’s visceral horror, showing one hospitalized soldier’s burns and stumps in lengthy close-up. A drawn-out raid in a housing complex in Iraq is ear-shatteringly loud and look-away bloody.
“We shot the sequence in Morocco during Ramadan, which made me uncomfortable,” Mr. Phillippe said in an e-mail message. “We were storming real homes and real neighborhoods, and at times I felt like a monster.”
But for Ms. Peirce the violence was imperative: “You put it in because you want to implicate the audience. If you don’t, it’s not morally complicated enough.”
Most of the scenes set in Iraq are presented as a soldier’s home video: short clips of guys hanging out in the macho haze of the war zone. Violence explodes at their eye level, set to a testosterone thump and song lyrics with phrases like “Let the bodies hit the floor.” But — and perhaps this will work to Ms. Peirce’s advantage at the box office — such footage is ancillary to the larger story that unrolls at home. Despite its experimental flair, “Stop-Loss” is a portrait of a soldier.
“The idea of this one guy, this troubled patriot, just kept coming back to me,” Ms. Peirce said.
The film’s Web site has generated hundreds of postings on the subject, and MTV, which is presenting the movie, has been promoting it heavily on television and elsewhere.
In the end, for all her efforts to open up a discourse on stop-loss and Iraq, it appears as if the movie is being sold as a flick for teenagers, complete with a poster of good-looking young people shown sullen and sexy on the hood of a car. Ms. Peirce sees this rock ’n’ roll treatment as a perfectly fine response to the nagging question: How do you sell a movie about Iraq?
“This war is a very young experience, and our film speaks absolutely to youth,” she said. “No one else is giving these guys a voice.”
Correction: March 23, 2008
Because of an editing error, an article about a filmmaker on the cover of the Arts & Leisure section this weekend misspelled her surname in some instances. She is Kimberly Peirce, not Pierce.
Da The New York Times, 22 Marzo 2008