Exclusive Interview with
Michael Winterbottom
“Without journalists being willing to take certain calculated risk we wouldn’t know what’s going on”
What appealed to you about the subject of A Mighty Heart?
– Dede Gardner, who runs the production company Plan B, told me and Andrew (Eaton) that she was trying to make a film of Marianne’s book. We’d been in Pakistan at the time of Daniel Pearl’s kidnapping and perhaps partly because of that I was interested to read the book. When I read Marianne’s book it seemed to me that she’d painted a very accurate picture of Pakistan. She told the story very powerfully and that’s what made me want to make the film.
– To what extent did the book or your meeting with Marianne Pearl play a role in the decision to make this film, and which of the two was the most important there?
– The first thing that happened really when the possibility came up to make the film was that I went to Paris to meet Marianne. From reading her book I imagined she was going to be a very powerful woman, a very intelligent woman, but also what was great about meeting her was that she was incredibly friendly, easy going, very keen to try and make the situation comfortable. She was very open about discussing her experiences in Pakistan, the things that happened to her during the period of Daniel’s kidnapping. So meeting her was part of the process of deciding I wanted to make the film and also I think meeting her and seeing she wanted the film to be made was important. Obviously we wouldn’t have wanted to make the film if Marianne hadn’t wanted the film to be made. We wouldn’t have wanted to make the film in any way that Marianne didn’t approve of. She was very relaxed and she basically said that she’d written the book because she wanted people to understand what had happened. She hoped that by writing honestly about that kind of experience it would have some sort of positive impact and that she was supportive of the film and would help with the film being made without trying to control how the film was made.
– Before making the film, was your personal view on the work you had done before in documentaries on Pakistan or on that area of the world corroborated in Marianne Pearl’s book or did it differ, if so, how?
– One of the things that was good about reading the book was that Marianne’s portrait of Pakistan seemed not only very vivid, but also accurate according to my experience of working in Pakistan. I’ve worked in Pakistan before on a couple of films and her experience as an outsider trying to work within that system and trying to understand what Pakistan is, was very similar to the sort of experiences that we had had as outsiders trying to make our films.
– Do you believe that Marianne and Daniel Pearl were aware of the grave danger they were running in their work as journalists in Pakistan by investigating such sensitive topics such as extremism in the Far East?
– Yeah, I think Marianne and Daniel were both very careful journalists. I think both of them understood that they were working in a very difficult place and taking a certain number of risks. I think everyone in the world depends on journalists to report from war zones and from difficult situations and without journalists being willing to take certain calculated risks we wouldn’t know what’s going on. If it weren’t for journalists trying to report on these stories the rest of us wouldn’t have any idea what’s happening in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iraq and I think Daniel tried to make sure their behaviour kept them as safe as possible, but you can’t report on terrorists without meeting terrorists, you can’t report about a war without being where the war is happening. We should all be grateful there are people willing to take those chances.
– You are a master at conveying the sense of Marianne Pearl’s growing anxiety – interpreted by Angelina Jolie – and how she gradually gets caught up and lost in the frenetic twists and turns of the Pakistani bureaucracy where truths and lies are interwoven. Has the film been shown in Pakistan? And if so, do you know what the reaction of the Pakistani public has been?
– We’ve shown the film to the people who worked on the film in Pakistan; I’m not sure how widely it’s been shown beyond that. But obviously one of the good things about the situation these days is that with the Internet people are able to watch films anywhere round the world, most films are available in some form or other on the Internet, and one of the good things about people pirating films is that they can be seen in places where perhaps there wouldn’t be any distribution otherwise.
– Could one say that in extreme cases, when grief doesn’t cause irremediable heartbreak, behaviour as is shown by Marianne Pearl – who agrees to an interview with CNN after she has learned of her husband’s death – can strengthen others to the point of setting an example?
– I think Marianne’s decision to talk to CNN was, in the first place, to try and help the investigation into where Daniel was. I think she went on TV in the hope that it might somehow contribute to Daniel’s safety or, if not that, at least to let him know that she was being strong. I think afterwards, when she realized Daniel was dead, she went on CNN to try and express her feelings, just as in the book she tries to express her feelings about what happened then. I think she feels that because of her religion, which is Buddhism, she wants to express her view of the world and she wants to be clear that she hasn’t given in to defeat or despair or hatred. I think that the appearance on CNN was part of that and was incredibly brave. It’s hard to imagine having to talk about those issues and talking about them as clearly and honestly as she does after you’ve found out your husband has been killed. Marianne is a journalist now, I think she goes around the world reporting, as she wants to give examples of strong and powerful women to the people who read the magazines that she writes for and in a way the book is part of that as well. I’m sure the CNN appearance was part of that too, as a positive example to other people.
– Is the choice of the documentary style, so frequently used in your film, meant to reinforce the dramatic truth of the subject?
– For me the style of film isn’t particularly documentary, the style of film is just trying to capture what it was really like. We try and shoot very simply, with a small crew, on real locations, with a hand-held camera. So with the first phase of filming we went to Pakistan and filmed in Islamabad and Karachi. A lot of the locations were real locations where the events happened. For instance, the place from which Danny is taken by the kidnappers was shot outside the actual restaurant, the hotel where he first meets the kidnappers was shot in the real hotel where that happened, and so on. It partly makes it simpler because you don’t have to think of “what should this look like? Where should this place be?” There’s a real story so you might as well shoot in the real place. Also because stories come from the real places and these places can give you a lot of information about how the story happened. By filming in Karachi and Islamabad, by seeing where the story took place and just the fact that the other people are there, the type of buildings, the type of climate, the type of people there, the energy of the place, the rules of the place, the poverty of the place. All those contribute to an understanding of the world in which the story takes place and perhaps to a certain extent contributes to an understanding of why these events happened.
– When you were on location with A Mighty Heart did you get a sense that the Pakistani actors and extras had any questions for you?
– We had a really good experience working in Karachi. I’d worked in the area before on other films, but more in the North. We did a little bit of filming in Karachi on Guantanamo but we hadn’t spent so long or worked with so many Pakistani crew members. We had a very young enthusiastic Pakistani crew that was great to work with and a lot of the people working on the film were not professional actors but were more like characters. They were very interested in the project and they were very good to work with. What was great was that the sections inside the house were shot in India, so we were able to take all these Pakistani people across to India and that can be quite tricky because it’s not always that easy to get visas for people from Pakistan. But we managed to get visas for everyone so we then had about twenty or thirty Pakistani people working in India as well. That in itself was a very positive experience when making the film.
– Do you personally believe that the action of a single human being can make a difference in the world around her/him?
– Yeah, of course, individuals can make a difference. Individuals can make a difference to other individuals. Some powerful individuals can have a big effect on lots of people. But I think people working together have more impact, that’s why politics is important, that’s why people should be involved in politics because groups of people working together can have more of an impact than individuals.