Rick Rosenthal
Rick Rosenthal is set to return to the director’s chair with his brand new film Drones: which is his first feature film since Nearing Grace.
We caught up with Rick and his son Noah, who serves as cinematographer on the film, at the BFI London Film Festival to chat about Drones, the inspiration behind the story and how he came to land his cast.
- Drones is the new film so can you tell me a bit about it?
Rick: Drones is about two Air Force personnel in a trailer in Nevada flying a drone over Afghanistan, half a world away. They are trying to find a guy who may or may not be a terrorist: they are surveying a mountain compound. They think they are on the right track because a couple of kids in this compound have put out a banner that says ‘Happy Birthday Daddy’.
So they anticipate that they guy is going to show up. However, while they are waiting some of this man’s friends and family show up: this compound now has around twenty-five people in it including women and children.
They are not sure that this guy is a terrorist - but command says that he is a terrorist. World comes down to take him out, but one of the pilots refuses to launch the Hell Fire missile. That is essentially the core of what happens in the movie.
- Where did this project start for you and what was it about Matt Whitten’s script that really drew you to the project?
Rick: I think that the moral ambiguity of modern warfare is what interested me, and the human cost. In many ways, it is very apolitical film that is neither liberal nor conservative: it is anti-war in the way that Paths of Glory was anti-war. Increasingly we are on the verge of a remote control warfare era, and that morality interests me.
Noah: I think that everything that Rick was saying about the moral ambiguity of war and things that are going on. It is a really unique visual challenge to be able to create visual progression in one space, and still have an active role as a cinematographer. On the page, you think ‘it all takes place in one space’, but here we were able to get creative.
Through a successful collaboration, we were able to take a visual progression through the movie as it intensifies through lighting and camera work: that was a really exciting opportunity as we went above and beyond what was on the page. Then just the opportunity to get to work with my dad - we have done a couple of short projects together but this was the first chance to do a feature together.
- As you say it is about the complexities of modern warfare so what sort of research did you do into this area? It is fascinating.
Rick: The project started as a play and the screenplay has been adapted by the playwright: whom I worked with about fifteen years ago. Unexpectedly I received an email saying ‘I have just finished this play and I was wondering if you would read to let me know if it could be made into an independent film’.
I got it on a Sunday afternoon and I read it within an hour, I emailed him back and said ‘not only do I think it can be a really powerful film, but I would like to make it.’ So that was the genesis of how it started.
We tried to get clearance from the military to go down to a drone space, but Air Force clearance was denied: but we were able to get clearance from Homeland Security. We went down to a Homeland Security drone base in Arizona: Noah, one of the producers and I went down there. We spent a day on the base with a pilot and one of the heads of the programme.
For the first four or five hours we said nothing about our script, we just took in what was going on and listened to their stories. Then the pilot said ‘what is your script about?’ And we told him, and he said ‘oh my god, that is incredibly close to my story.’
He told us that he was not in the Air Force and he was recruited by the Air Force because he was a flying instructor and had had a lot of experience with simulators. Then he began to open up about his experiences in country and in Iraq, Afghanistan, and some other countries that he couldn’t tell us about.
We also found, strangely through another project that we were working on, that one of the filmmakers’ best man was a drone pilot in Las Vegas. He came down and read the script, vetted it and then spent a couple of days with us talking about his experiences.
It is not easy to get verification of a lot of things, but I felt that we were in very accurate hands. We asked a lot of questions at both Homeland Security and with this pilot: I feel like we have a pretty strong factual base for the film.
- The film is set in a bunker so did you shoot in a restricted space to get the reality of it? In addition, what challenges did that pose as both a director and a cinematographer?
Noah: We built this trailer. First of all, we researched and during our scouting, we saw these real trailers: in Arizona, we were in what would be that sort of space and we saw the real physicality of that and what that would allow us to do.
Rick: It is like a television control room, it really is that small. We wanted to take a little bit of liberty, but the Hollywood movies that I seen which have depicted any kind of drones were such figments of creative imagination and so we had certain rules that we put in place.
We wanted it to feel like a documentary and we wanted you believe that you were in this space and we wanted you to believe that the technical capability of what they were able to do was not fantastical.
In the Leonardo DiCaprio film Body of Lies, there are drones and there is a point where he is in the desert and he is on a close up and looks perfect: we didn’t want that. As good as these cameras and these lenses are you can never get, from five miles up, more than a full figure.
Throughout the film, you never see closer than a full figure in Afghanistan, except on two occasions: there is one shot that is digitally zoomed in as they look to see if they can see wine bottles. The image distorts as you zoom in and you can barely tell what you are looking at.
There is one shot that goes on the ground in Afghanistan: but for most of the film, Afghanistan is seen only through the point of view of the drones. That is a little bit about the visual rules that we wanted to create. Because I come from a documentary background, my first instinct was to go Dogma and try and shoot hand-held and go into this space.
The only problem with that is that we have a lot digital effects, which hopefully you are unaware of, to be able to create that: all of Afghanistan that you see on the monitors are all green screen shots. We built the trailer on a sound stage, and we had some moveable rods but there was no wall that was completely removable: it wasn’t a classic set where walls were completely removable.
Noah: The rule was that the camera always had to in that space: we would never be far out on a longer lense looking in. We shot two hand-held cameras at all time so, as operators, we could get in there in and be within what the physical space as opposed to…
Rick: That was a choice and it creates an aesthetic: I wanted the film to feel real. When you shoot things with a 1000mm lense from 40ft away, you have a completely different aesthetic then when the camera is in your emotional and physical space. Very quickly, we wanted to give the actors a chance to build their performance and so we shot sections of twenty pages a day.
I had read about Sidney Lumet when he shot 12 Angry Men running the entire play every day and only shooting one or two angles. We didn’t quite have the time to do that, but the idea of giving the actors a real chunk of script to perform every day gave them a chance to create different kinds of performances.
- Can you tell me a little bit about the casting process and what you were looking for in the two central characters of Sue and Jack?
Rick: Matt O’Leary has starred in a movie that we produced called Fat Kid Rules, which Noah had shot the year before. I have a strong conviction that he is an actor who is one movie away from being a star: we have watched his progression from character to almost leading man. The only thing that is stopping him, in my opinion, is he doesn’t quite believe that he is a leading man: but I think he is and he is going to grow into that.
No other guy ever read the script and I said to him ‘I am going to give you this script and if you like it you are in’. I work a certain way - that may not have been the smartest way and someone like Shia LeBeouf or somebody else who might have sold the movie.
We had pretty much settled on another actress but our casting director said ‘there is one more actress that I want you to see, but she is on a series on Hawaii and that doesn’t finish until Tuesday’ - Monday was supposed to be the deadline. It turned out that I knew somebody on the case of the show and I emailed them asking about Eloise. She emailed me back and said; ‘one, I thinking you would love working with her. Two, I think she is going to be a star’.
On the Monday night, Eloise was at the wrap party for the series and was talking to a producer who asked her what she was doing next. She said that she was up for this for this film with Rick Rosenthal, and the producer was like ‘Rick? I know him, I have worked with him, let me call him’. Therefore, I got this phone call. That is how we met Eloise.
There was just something about her that was compelling. She trained for ten days learning how to box, and I think that sequence is very authentic when she hits him.
ã
ã
ã
Tagged in BFI