CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 3/28/08

A Soldier's Story:
Stop-Loss's Kimberly Peirce

By peter clines

A filmmaker looks back at half a decade of war and the soldiers fighting it to tell the story of a young man who volunteers to fight for his country…and then isn't allowed to stop.

Until recent years, stop-loss was a little-known clause added to the back of military contracts after Congress ended the draft. In times of war, this clause allows the government to retain or reinstate any soldier deemed important to the war effort, sending men and women back to the battlefield for months, or even years, past the stated terms of their contract (to date over 80,000 soldiers have been stop-lossed for the Iraq War). Writer-director Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don't Cry) first heard about this "back-door draft" while talking with friends of her younger brother, who signed up with the Army shortly after the events of September 11. The concept gelled the idea of a story she had been working on for several years.

In Peirce's film, Staff Sgt. Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) has served two tours of duty with his childhood friend, Steve (Channing Tatum), and now they both look forward to getting back to their small Texas hometown and resuming their lives. Upon returning to base, however, Brandon discovers that, rather than receiving his honorable discharge from service, he's being sent back to Iraq under the stop-loss terms of his contract. A moment of instinctive reactions sends him running from the base, and now the young sergeant is on the move, traveling across the country with his best friend—and Steve's fiancé—Michele (Abbie Cornish) while he tries to figure out his next move. As the days go by, Brandon and Michele slip into a world of AWOL soldiers living on the fringes of society, a world where people have given up homes, their country, and their very identities rather than be separated from their loved ones again.

The day before Stop-Loss opens nationwide, Peirce sat down at the end of a long press junket and talked to CS Weekly about modern-day soldiers, leadership, and camaraderie.

Do you write to tell the stories, or do you write to give yourself something to direct?
Yeah, I do. If I could just be constantly directing, I would be. I certainly love writing, but I love being on set with the actors.

Now, you got the first idea for Stop-Loss from your brother, yes?
Actually, I got it a little bit before, because I was in New York for 9/11. I, unfortunately, saw the towers fall. I'd been living in New York for 13 years, so that was like living in a small town that got hit. I went to vigils for the victims. Then, when America declared war, I knew I needed to make a movie about the soldiers. I was already starting to think about how to do that when my little brother signed up. He went over there for about a year. He is back. So I was interviewing him, my mother, but also soldiers across America, because I really wanted to tell the story of this generation.

When you pitched it to the studio, did you get any resistance because of the subject matter?
No, it's actually really interesting. What I did was I paid for all the development on this. I developed it outside the system. I paid for all the research and this screenwriter, Mark Richard, and I, we co-wrote it together. He quit his job—he was working on Huff—and we wrote the script on spec. We turned in a script, and we had a five-minute trailer we'd cut together with footage shot across America of soldiers, as well as these soldier-made videos that I'd been collecting. It was amazing to me, collecting them, that they would just put them on gun turrets or a sandbag or inside a HumVee, and they would just film their experience. That was the first time we were ever seeing combat literally from the soldier's point of view. Then they would go back to their barracks and cut it to all kinds of music, whether it was patriotic music or rock music. We were really seeing their narratives, their fantasies, and their ideas of how their experience was. I knew the movie needed to be born from these interviews with soldiers that I was doing, as well as these images they were making.

What we gave the studio was a script we were willing to move forward on for production, as well as this five-minute trailer. We said, if you buy it, you make it. The wonderful thing was, we gave it to them on a Friday, and by Sunday morning we had four studios and two financiers who not only wanted to buy the screenplay, they wanted to green-light the movie. So I didn't hit resistance, but that's because I took it as far as I could take it, and by the time I presented it to them, they saw that it was a commercial idea, because it was about a "band of brothers" and that camaraderie.

You mentioned Mark Richard—had the two of you worked together before?
We had met through Charlize Theron. He had a script he wrote based on one of his short stories called "Ice at the Bottom of the World." She wanted me to direct her in that, so I came in, we had a great time, and I hit it off with Mark. She ended up not being available to shoot the movie, and Mark and I stayed in touch. Just hanging out with Mark it's pretty obvious he's very brilliant, a novelist, from Texas—y'know he's just got that masculine quality. So when I was thinking about writers, he just seemed like a really good writer to go to, and it really worked out great.

There've been a lot of recent war movies recently, all getting very wide responses. Is it harder to write a script on such an obviously divisive topic?
The thing is, because my brother was fighting and I was interviewing real soldiers, I started working on this before any of these other movies came out. First of all, other movies really aren't a concern for me when I'm making a movie, but in this case, I was so deeply involved in traveling around the country and talking to people that I wasn't even paying attention to what movies might be out there. And none of these were even out. So for me, it wasn't an issue. I was just trying to tell the best version of this story of this generation who signed up after 9/11, who were willing to die for their country, their family, their homes, and who had this profound experience at war—that nearly every soldier I talked to had—which is it's all about the camaraderie. It's about protecting the soldier to your left, the soldier to your right, and bringing your men home safely. So telling that story was kind of timeless.

Do you think a lot of Brandon's decisions are consistent with the character of a veteran soldier?
I think it's very consistent. His life's goal is to be a good leader, to protect his men. When he's over in urban combat, it's very difficult to protect his men, because you don't know what's going to come out of that door. You don't know what's going to be in that room. Is it going to be somebody with a gun, somebody not with a gun? So when he comes home, he's like the gunslinger who says, "I was a leader, but now I'm going to put that up and go live my life." But every move he makes in the movie is about his men. When he's going across the country, what he's doing is trying to find a solution. It really puts Brandon right at the heart of the conflict of, what does it mean to be a great leader? What does it mean to have these men under your charge, whether you have the uniform on or not?

There are a bunch of scenes between Brandon and Michele throughout the film that seem like classic movie romance set ups. The dance. Doing tequila shots. Sharing hotel rooms on a long road trip. Was it awkward or challenging to make these not be romantic?
It's so interesting how many audiences have said to me, "Thank you for having that stuff in there, but thank you for not having them have sex." People have overtly said that. I think they were providing something for one another that was necessary. As she says, "I can't go another a year without Steve touching my face." Here's a woman longing for companionship and love from her mate, and she can't get it when he's absent so much of the time. Brandon doesn't have a girlfriend. They both rely on each other as friends. What was interesting to me was that these two people are helping one another other out, but there was an inherent boundary. She couldn't do anything with Brandon; Brandon couldn't do anything with her, simply out of loyalty, out of the kind of people that they were. I love that they stay connected and respectful of the relationships they have with one another and with Steve.

Would you call this movie anti-war or pro-soldier?
Pro-soldier, absolutely. The dominant force is the soldiers and getting inside their point of view and their feelings. Like I said, it's thee people willing to die for their country who discover it's about the camaraderie. For me, the most moving thing was the feeling between the men, wanting to protect one another, and the challenges that they face when they discover they can't protect one another. That's the core of Brandon's challenge. "What do I do when I'm in a situation where I can't protect my men from injury or death in the way that I would like to?" No matter what, he's going to finish the mission, and he's going to do his best job. But when he comes home, it's out of love of his men that he says, "I don't want to do this any more. I don't want to bring more men into that situation." That to me is what drives the movie forward.

Peter Clines has had a lifelong love affair with the movies. He grew up in New England, where he studied English literature and education, and now lives and writes somewhere in Southern California. If anyone knows exactly where, he would appreciate a few hints.

Stop-Loss courtesy Paramount Pictures

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