Besides the members of al Qaeda, there were probably only two people on earth for whom the death of Osama bin Laden was a major setback: director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal.
The Oscar-winning duo behind “The Hurt Locker” had spent nearly two years researching, writing and scouting locations for a film about the failure to capture the terrorist mastermind in the mountains of Tora Bora back in December 2001. And then came the news of the May 2011 nighttime raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
After a few months of soul-searching, the filmmakers decided to scrap the project in favor of one more current and, perhaps, more ambitious.
“Zero Dark Thirty,” out Wednesday, will be known as “the bin Laden movie,” but it’s really the “bin Laden courier movie.” The two-and-a-half-hour intelligence procedural dramatizes the CIA’s 10-year hunt to develop a lead on the whereabouts of the al Qaeda leader. He was ultimately discovered and killed by tracking one of his messengers.
The story is unusual for the war/spy genre because of who is at its center: a woman. Jessica Chastain plays Maya, a young analyst who is instrumental in putting together the puzzle that leads to the courier.
“Early on, I made the discovery that women had played a prominent role in this hunt and that was surprising to me,” Boal says. “It just seemed like the right way to tell this story.”
Chastain also did not anticipate the role a woman played in the manhunt. “When I was reading the script, every page I turned was a shock, especially the role Maya took in it,” she says. “Then I got upset and wondered why it was such a shock to me, like, why would I assume a woman wouldn’t be involved in this kind of research?”
It’s no Hollywood fantasy. The character of Maya is, in fact, based on a real person. She is reportedly a Pakistan-based intelligence officer in her 30s who works as a so-called “targeter,” identifying people and places that could be hit by drone strikes. Not much else is known about her, because she is still working undercover.
Boal, a former investigative journalist, interviewed many sources involved in the bin Laden operation firsthand. He declines to say exactly whom, but e-mails obtained by Judicial Watch show his sources include a SEAL Team 6 planner, as well as Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers. Boal won’t say whether he spoke with the real-life Maya. Chastain says she did not. Boal also doesn’t know if the agent has seen the film.
Whoever the real Maya is, you probably don’t want to cross her. In “Zero Dark Thirty,” she’s portrayed as tough, dogged and constantly pressing her male superiors to do the right thing. She often acts more macho than some of the male characters.
In one scene that had many cheering at an early screening, the CIA director, played by James Gandolfini, is expressing skepticism during a high-level Langley meeting that bin Laden is hiding inside the Abbottabad compound. When Maya deigns to speak up in the male-dominated room, the director asks, “And who are you?” to which she responds confidently, “I’m the motherf – – – er who found that.”
Someone print up T-shirts with that line now.
The real Maya is equally brash. When the news was announced via an all-staff e-mail that she had received the CIA’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal for her work on the bin Laden case, the real Maya replied all with a message that called out her bosses for obstructing her and claiming she alone deserved the award, according to the Washington Post.
The rest of the film, though somewhat compressed, is also inspired by real life.
“The story is inherently dramatic, but at the same time, it was interesting to stay within the longitudinal and latitudinal guidelines of history and reality,” Bigelow says. “There was never a moment when you say, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could do this?’ You can’t think like that. There was nothing that was done that didn’t come from the research.”
The raid on bin Laden’s compound is meticulously recreated in an almost-documentary style using a night-vision effect to let it play out from the SEALs’ point of view. The killing of the grand poobah himself happens quickly, without the clichéd trappings we’ve come to expect from Hollywood in a moment like this — the swell of cheesy music, the fist-pumping, the cutaways to a roomful of Washington bureaucrats screaming, “Get out of there!” into a speakerphone.
As Chastain puts it, “This is not a propaganda movie — ‘Go America!’ ”
Bin Laden himself (played by Ricky Sekhon) gets only a few seconds of screen time, most of it spent dead on the floor. His face is never shown.
“That was a creative decision,” Boal says. “We really wanted to tell the story of our characters and not really break away from that.”
The film’s adherence to realism also extended to the locations. The film was mostly shot in Jordan and parts of Punjab, India, about two hours from the Pakistani border.
An exact replica of bin Laden’s 38,000-square-foot compound was built on a farm in Jordan over three months. The exterior cinder blocks were aged to look worn, and the interior was arranged as close as possible to the way it looked that May night. One difference: The replica was anchored by a 6- to 9-foot-deep foundation that allowed it to withstand the rotor wash from the Black Hawk helicopters.
For a scene in which agents are trying to locate bin Laden’s courier via his cellphone signal in a chaotic Pakistani town, the production headed to a crowded market in Chandigarh, India. “Zero Dark Thirty” was the first Western movie to shoot there, and locals were so curious, they made filming difficult.
Bigelow was forced to set up decoy shots to distract them. A cameraman and an actor would head off to one corner of a market and pretend to film a scene, while the actual shooting was taking place in another area. Another time, “We had one of the grips dancing while we got the actual shot elsewhere,” Boal says.
One aspect of the film that may have strayed from fact is the use of waterboarding and other extreme interrogation methods. In one of the movie’s early scenes that was filmed at an actual Jordanian prison, a detainee (Reda Kateb) beaten bloody is shown chained to the ceiling. He is later waterboarded. The information he ultimately reveals helps find bin Laden’s courier.
The inclusion of torture has been controversial because government officials, including Senate Intelligence Committee chairs Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin, have said definitively that waterboarding did not yield any information that led to the killing of bin Laden. Others, such as former CIA Deputy Director of Operations Jose Rodriguez, have said it did.
“That’s a hugely complicated and controversial topic that we could talk about for an hour,” Boal says. “We felt that it was part of the story, so we had to include it. There’s a political controversy about what piece of information was gained in what way. What the film portrays is that no single piece led to bin Laden. It was an accumulation of 10 years of work and many different tools in the intelligence toolbox, including spy work, electronic intelligence and bribery.”
“There was no question that methodology was controversial, but there was no debate on whether or not to include it in the movie because it’s part of the history,” Bigelow says. “Then it was a question of working with the material and finding the right tone and balance.”
Boal acknowledges that the film’s brutal interrogation scenes were toned down in the editing process after intelligence experts who viewed the film said prisoners were not treated quite so harshly.
Even while the film was shooting, it was stirring up controversy. In the run-up to the election, Republicans accused it of being pro-Obama propaganda that would celebrate the president’s role in killing bin Laden. Obama appears in the film just once, in a brief clip from 2009 that’s playing on a television.
“We wanted to focus on the work force, the agents on the ground and the special operations soldiers who work day in and day out without regard for partisan politics,” Boal says. “By focusing on them, we were able to keep the policy-making and partisanship at bay.”
“Zero Dark Thirty” is also the subject of a Department of Defense investigation into whether the filmmakers were granted access to classified material.
“There was a bit of an election-year controversy about that,” Boal says. “I’m not gonna get into that, except to say the movie was made independently. There was no arrangement or deal of any kind with those [governmental] agencies.”
Despite the flak, “Zero Dark Thirty” is still currently considered the front-runner for Best Picture and Best Director at the Oscars. It has already been named tops by the New York and Boston film critics groups.
One person who hasn’t yet seen it is Obama. Bigelow says the commander-in-chief might check it out in January when it’s screened in Washington. He probably already knows how it ends, though.