INTERVIEW: Kathryn Bigelow & Mark Boal

'Sat at the head of a table, Bigelow and Boal give every impression of having wandered into one of the minefields in their previous Oscar-winner, The Hurt Locker.  Their answers are curt, tight-lipped, as if still in lock-down mode after hanging out with too many spooks. “People are going to bring whatever politics they want to it,” says Boal, “but we try not to bring any agenda to it and tell the story. Something that gets lost in the politicization is the no single piece of information led to Bin Laden, and no single technique. There were lots of tools in the toolbox, under two administrations spanning ten years. In terms of the efficacy-of-torture debate, that’s a debate that continues even among the people that did it. That debate will probably continue for some time. I’m not trying to settle a score in that debate. So much as: this stuff happened. We had to include it in the story.” This is disingenuous. Nobody is disputing whether torture happened.  What has senators like John McCain up in arms are the scenes showing the film's main suspect giving up Bin Laden’s courier only after being extensively tortured (a second suspect does the same), when in reality, the Saudi on whom he was based, Mohammed al-Qhatani, gave up all his useful intel before he saw any rough stuff. This is an important thing to get wrong. This is the freebie to Dick Cheney that so dismays the film's critics. Despite Bigelow and Boal's disavowals, their film expresses a definite opinion on torture. That opinion is that it works.' — from my Sunday Times article on Zero Dark Thirty