Column: Director Scott Z. Burns on why 'The Report' on CIA torture interrogation needed to be a feature film (via latimesopinion)
Here’s the math of this movie: Out of more than 6 million pages of CIA documents came the 6,700 pages of the classified 2014 U.S. Senate report on CIA interrogation techniques, and that was boiled down to about 500 pages of the public executive summary, and out of those — and a lot more research — come two hours of a new film: “The Report,” about the politics and the substance of the CIA’s post-9/11 torture tactics for questioning terrorism detainees.
And I wrote down in my notebook: “You’re the only one who’s gonna tell this story.” That line actually made it into the movie. I guess that’s how I felt after that meeting was that, it was me versus the story, and one of us was going to win.What about it made you think, gee, this story needs to be told as a feature film, not as a documentary?
The thing took place over almost 10 years, between the revelation of the [CIA interrogation] tapes being destroyed and the report itself coming out. It’s hard for, I think, for people to really piece together a story, a tragedy that unfolds that slowly. The CIA said its “enhanced interrogation” program was based on techniques devised by two psychologists who believed using coercion and forced helplessness would get detainees to offer up intelligence details, which didn’t happen.
Then the [Senate] report came out and I did a very fundamental move. I called Feinstein’s office and I said, “I’m a citizen of California, and I’d like to speak to this gentleman, Daniel Jones, who is listed as the lead investigator on this report.” Or, “yes, these bankers did horrible, criminal things, but we need them to fix the system, so we’re not going to hold anybody accountable. Because if we hold people accountable, then maybe they won’t let us have our healthcare plan or our immigration plan.”
When I did my research, I started off by needing to understand what SERE school was, because these [interrogation] techniques were based on a thing called SERE; it stands for “survival, evasion, resistance and escape.” He said, “Are you going to show this [torture] thing?” And I said I wasn’t sure. I had toyed with the idea of trying to get around having to shoot these things, because it was scary to me that it would alienate people.And Alberto said to me, “If you don’t show it, aren’t you doing exactly what the CIA did? Aren’t you getting rid of what everybody knows? It’s very powerful communication, to see the thing being done to fellow humans.” And I found his argument very, very compelling.
At one point I think I had toyed with it being called “Survival” — SERE, basically, whatever that acronym stands for, but obviously the fact that I can’t even remember it now probably means it wasn’t a good title! That is very much the arc of Daniel Jones in our film, so it felt like a really good resource for me to go back and refer to time and time again.yeah, we’re making a movie about the CIA torture reportWell, you know, we didn’t get funding very easily, and nobody in Hollywood really helped with this movie, and pretty much everybody passed on it.
I had a very interesting conversation with [author and New Yorker writer] Jane Mayer one day. We were talking about whether this story has a happy ending.
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