CHRIS NEUMER: Here comes my next question, which is absolutely nothing we’ve talked about and I realized, flipping through your IMDB page a few days ago, that you’re probably getting the question, “What have you been doing these last 8 or 9 years, you’ve been gone?” And I thought, “Oh this poor, poor woman.” Because you haven’t been gone! You’ve been doing tons of stuff! Tons, tons, tons! But you look at the reporter from the Omaha Daily News and that’s what she’s asking. Are you preemptively scared or angry or do you have a pat answer prepared for the question, “Where have you been?”
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: I have a pat answer. I have a real answer, which is, I was incredibly fortunate…
CHRIS NEUMER: I don’t want the pat answer. I know the real answer. I’m just asking!
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: Well, do I have a pat answer? I don’t because I mean, what’s the pat answer? I wish I could have worked…
CHRIS NEUMER: Or, “I was working.”
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: I was working.
CHRIS NEUMER: (laughs) That’s the thing that always surprises me. A long time ago I was talking to Debra Winger and I asked, “Where have you been?” I was young and very naïve. She told me that she hadn’t been anywhere, She said, “I’ve been doing exactly the same things, you just don’t know that.” And that’s sort of the shift in perspective that I think journalists fail to recognize. I don’t know how to play ‘stupid journalist’ anymore though. I can’t necessarily put myself into the headspace of an interviewer who sits down and says, “Tell me about the movie.” The lack of perspective sort of goes hand in hand with that question “Where have you been?”
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: And it’s interesting to the public that you have given something to them and they want more of it. So, it’s not like they’re saying, “What were you doing every day of your life? Were you actually being productive?” They were like, “Why did you give me something and then not produce something else that I could get entertainment from?” So I’m kind of like, “Okay, we’re in a relationship here.” That’s kind of how I am in my relationship. My partner says, “I need more of this. How come we’re not going out to dinner?” And I’m like, “Okay we have to go out to dinner more.” Because they want more. Now you’re caught up where you’re in a privileged relationship with your audience. But frankly, if they want more from you, it’s good.
CHRIS NEUMER: See, now I’m rethinking my relationship with Joel Schumacher. Do you have any advice on how to break up with a director?
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: (laughs) Yeah…
CHRIS NEUMER: That was a great answer, by the way. I’m completely thrown for a loop because of it. I want to sit here and ponder the relationship that a director has with his audience, but can’t. So I move on, appreciatively. One of the reasons that I was looking forward to talking to you was because of an interview I saw you did during the Boys Don’t Cry tour. It was a very nuanced, very sensible, very rational, very balanced explanation of how the true tragedy with Brandon was the creation of the humanity of the character and then ripping it down, essentially destroying the person. And I thought, “That’s a really interesting perspective.”
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: Well, I love doing interviews where [the journalist] has already read up on me. I’m very prolific on my website so you can get all the basic answers. I prefer an interview where you’ve already consumed all that stuff and we can actually talk about… what was the thing? That I was ripping into the humanity of John the killer?
CHRIS NEUMER: No, no, no. It was Brandon’s dream of—he had created this dream and then everyone else chipped it away. That’s the really horrible part. You made me understand that psyche in very humanistic terms and you weren’t beating me over the head with it. I was surprised that you could do this. You don’t often see very accepting, very progressive beliefs that can either take it or leave it. You don’t see that very often.
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: Explain that, I don’t understand. Like, progressive beliefs… meaning… oh, that I have a progressive understanding of human nature and I’m putting it into the movie?
CHRIS NEUMER: Yes, but you’re also fully willing to accept that other people might not buy it. I’ve had several dealings with vegans, hard-core recyclers, people who are against fur etc, and our conversations always come down to the point where I say, “Well, that’s fine for you.” And they’re like, “No, it should be fine for you too.” Then I say, “Guess what, it’s not.”
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: Well, I’m not a proselytizer. That just goes back to like with Brandon, what was my basic job there? I understood Brandon. And I took on a character that I think most people, in their lifetimes would never understand. So what was my job? My job was to make the character, first of all to build him so that he was true and then to bring you in if I could and the way to bring you in was to make him as universal and like you as possible. He wants love and acceptance.
CHRIS NEUMER: But the thing that truly separates you is that there’s no sense of “the audience has to accept this!” Instead it’s like, “I’m just putting this out there.” If you like it, great. If you get something from it, beautiful. If not, eh, what can you do?” Nuance is very important. One thing I wanted to ask you about, I was thinking about this in the opening scene of Stop Loss, and I apologize in advance for making you a representative for all women directors, but I figured I’d start with you since I’m talking to you now. I was writing something about the lack of female directors that had movies open in the summer of 2007. I think between May and August there were two movies that opened in more than 800 theatres that had female directors, and one of them was killed! And I thought to myself—
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: One of them was killed?
CHRIS NEUMER: Adrienne Shelley.
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: (whispers) Oh yeah.
CHRIS NEUMER: Waitress was delightful. And Kasi Lemmons was the other one with Talk to Me.
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: She’s a nice girl.
CHRIS NEUMER: Wonderful woman. And these situations always bring up this quote from Robin Swicord.
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: She’s really good.
CHRIS NEUMER: She said, “Why do people always assume that I write with my vagina? And I tell them, this is not true.”
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: (laughs)
CHRIS NEUMER: And I thought, here you are making a movie about war, about troops, you have an action sequence at the beginning that is pretty hard-hitting, did you come up against any, I don’t know what the term is… did you encounter any trouble because you are a female and you were directing a war film AND what the hell is wrong with Hollywood?
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: (laughs) Okay, so first thing: I was very fortunate that I learned my lesson from one of those interim projects. It made more sense for me to pay for the development of a movie, rather than accept any money from Hollywood to do that. I easily can set things up, that’s not hard. So on this one I was like, let me just do it myself. So I paid for it. I just picked up my camera, went all over the country, interviewed soldiers, gathered stuff, and gathered all the videos. I was in heaven working. Because I could just wake up and work 20 hours a day, no problem. Wrote the script on spec with Mark Broussard who is a novelist from Texas. Fantastic writer. Paid for all that. When we were done with that process, I had a script and you totally knew what the movie was and I then cut together a five minute trailer—that was the soldier’s videos and some of the research I had done around the country. We presented that to the studios. We went to a bunch of studios and financiers and producers and we said, “Okay, this is the movie. We want to make it. If you buy it, you make it. If you don’t, you pay us a huge fee. We don’t want the fee; we want you to make it. We don’t want to get stuck in that bizarre development situation.” If they were making a war movie and they went out looking for a director, I might have been like, “Hey guys. Boys Don’t Cry was tough and I’m tough and the guys will respect me.” In that case, I might have come up against that. But in a bizarre way I sidestepped all of it because my brother fought, I’ve been interviewing soldiers for years—
CHRIS NEUMER: And you were approaching them.
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: And I was approaching them. I also understood emotionally and physically what these soldiers were going through and, believe me I wanted those action sequences to be jam-packed. I showed the studios the footage that I had gathered and by showing them footage that I had gathered the testosterone level was already up; the authenticity was already up, so I think there ended up being that kind of cut through. And maybe that’s the way women need to do it…
CHRIS NEUMER: So not even make it an issue, just be like, listen, you accept that I’m here, you accept that this is the case…
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: And I’m already so far ahead on a stylistic level with it because I’m like, “I like when that bomb explodes, I like this and I like that.” And the trailer is so jam-packed full of rock music. It’s tough, it’s hip, and it’s accurate. It’s got all the war footage that audiences had never seen. Because I was getting it off the internet and getting it from soldiers so it kind of wowed them and if you entertain them then they would follow, so there wasn’t an issue of, “Does she have the right sensibility?”
CHRIS NEUMER: Gotcha. I don’t know why I’m thinking about incredibly horrible pitches for the project you’re describing, like “She’s All That except in Iraq” or something like that. I don’t know why I’m thinking that… I guess because what would be the worst thing you could do and Hollywood usually does that.
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: One more thing, I think that opening sequence really does kind of rock people and moves them, the great thing is that the fact that I’m a woman is an afterthought, then it’s kind of great. Then women… then I’ll be the first woman who’s done that, then women can do it and there won’t be an issue about it.
CHRIS NEUMER: Kathryn Bigelow might have something to say about that.
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: (laughs) Okay, not the first. I love Kathryn, she’s great. Let’s not even put a number on it, let’s just say… that—
CHRIS NEUMER: It will be apparent that women can easily do it.
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: And not every woman and not every man… it’s about what your sensibility is. There are men who are great… others who aren’t.
CHRIS NEUMER: Even I know this. For whatever reason it doesn’t seem like the people who are signing the checks necessarily… maybe they get it too, but they don’t like it.
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: Now to what the hell’s wrong with Hollywood…
CHRIS NEUMER: Well, yeah, as I said, two female directors directed movies and I know that there are far more—
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: Tamara Jenkins also did one last year.
CHRIS NEUMER: I don’t think it opened in 800 theatres or it came out between May and August.
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: Okay, you’re right.
CHRIS NEUMER: It’s just… it seems like in today’s day and age that it should be—
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: There should be more?
CHRIS NEUMER: Yeah. Don’t even get me started on movies made for black audiences.
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: That there aren’t enough made for black audiences?
CHRIS NEUMER: I mean, Daddy Day Care?
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: That they’re bad.
CHRIS NEUMER: I mean this is…they’re horrid! What was the other statistic I found while researching this? In 1991, there were 7 movies made that had black actors in the lead and this last summer there were 6. And not only that one of them was Daddy Day Care and one of the other ones was equally horrid.
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: Well, you know, that’s also about, you need someone who can make those characters authentic writing the screenplays.
CHRIS NEUMER: Yes and Robert Johnson needs to be taken out and beaten for what he’s doing.
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: Who is he?
CHRIS NEUMER: He’s the guy who owns BET and the guy who produced the “other” movie. Not Daddy Day Care.
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: Oh no… Is he African American or…
CHRIS NEUMER: No, he’s African American.
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: So, he’s just making his money. What we need is more—to be honest, movies tend to be either autobiographical, or things that we care about, we just need more African American writers.
CHRIS NEUMER: All of the above. But I have tell you if I was black, I would be pissed as hell.
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: (laughs) You’re not pissed as hell now?
CHRIS NEUMER: You make a valid point, I’m still pissed as hell!
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: And you’re not black.
CHRIS NEUMER: And I’m not black. I’d be more pissed if I was black. And I just don’t know what to do. I keep calling people. I keep calling producers going, “What can be done? What can be done?”
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: More. It’s just in the writing. Where are the really great female characters coming from? Sometimes they’re coming from men, sometimes they’re coming from women, like Tamara Jenkins. So it’s also at the writing level.
CHRIS NEUMER: I don’t know if this makes me super progressive or naive, but I thought your female lead was really a good role model, and though she doesn’t say much…
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: Abby.
CHRIS NEUMER: Who I thought was Agnes Bruckner for at least the first hour and a half of the movie, but I thought she was such a strong, she was good because she didn’t say anything.
KIMBERLY PEIRCE: That’s that American stoicism. I love that you mention that because I think that there’s a whole aspect of this, military family and the other side of the soldier. And she did it very well.
