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Mick Jackson (Director)
Robert Wiener (Former CNN Senior Producer)
Ingrid Formanek (CNN Senior Producer)
Bernard Shaw (Former CNN Principal Anchor)
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(Mick Jackson is the director of Live From Baghdad. He spoke to HBO from Los Angles.)
HBO
Tell us how you came to the project, initially.
MICK JACKSON
You need to go back over a decade to answer that question. I was, as everybody in the world was, glued to a TV set during the start of the Gulf War. I've been a science journalist myself in another life, so I was very intrigued by the role of the journalist reporting live as the war started from a hotel room in Baghdad.
I then got approached by (executive producer) Rosalie Swedlin, and asked if I'd like to come on board as a director of a feature film based on what happened. I was over the moon with the possibilities of telling that story.
What happened over the intervening ten years or so is that the movie got developed and re-developed, I think not entirely to its benefit, by many studio executives and became a kind of black comedy, a MASH-like black comedy, and as such it never got green-lit. And I left the picture because I went on to do something else. Various other directors came into the what do you call it, the ring?
HBO
The mix.
MICK JACKSON
The mix, yeah. So eventually HBO heard about the story and thought this is not a period piece, this is very relevant to what's happening now. The theme of reporters trying to get a difficult, complex story out to the public in often dangerous circumstances where they have to face things like censorship and threats to their lives, it's very timely.
So HBO took it up and wanted to put a very different spin on it, which is more like a documentary. Their view was, this is a great story, you don't have to embroider it with manufactured character arcs and comic moments.
I came onboard about this time, too. I was still interested in the story, and I said yeah, of course, it's a great story, and came back on and was part of the mix that developed the script back into being based much more closely on the book, and on what really happened, rather than inventing stuff.
Live From Baghdad is not only a true story, It's good story, and that's not always the case. This one has many facets. It has humor and pathos, it's dramatic, it's thrilling, and it has drive. But most important, it has a very good dramatic shape as a story. A very precise beginning, middle and end, in that order.
The story really begins the moment the Iraqi troops and tanks moved into Kuwait in 1990, in August of 1990. And it ends when the bombs start falling on Baghdad in January 1991. So this is a tight story with great characters. And it makes a great movie.
HBO
Often with films based on true events, there is a degree of creative license taken. Was that the case with this film?
MICK JACKSON
Well, there's always some blurring. The usual things apply when you're turning a true story into a movie. You hope to get to the essential truth of the story, and you have to do things like combining characters where they perform the same dramatic roles, two characters, three characters into one, so you don't have to have the same beat over and over again. Conflating time, joining separate events.
HBO
Yes.
MICK JACKSON
You hope always to get the balance where you tell the greater truth of the story. We try to get as many technical details right as we can. We try to get the details of what happened, who was there, what they said and so on, where these are crucial to telling the story. But you know, no one was there in many of these conversations and recollections vary. So sometimes you have to invent dialogue, you conflate instances, and you do all the other things you have to do to make the story make sense.
HBO
Now the event itself and its coverage - this was, for CNN, an unprecedented event.
MICK JACKSON
Getting this story out was by no means as easy as we think now. Our access to satellites was very much at the control of the Iraqis. It was a very, very difficult, and under the circumstances, nearly impossible thing to get live coverage of the war. It had never been done before. No one had ever covered a war live from behind enemy lines as it happened. And it happened to come out through a telephone line, so it was sound only, but that doesn't diminish the impact, the kind of journalistic precedent for what was achieved.
HBO
One of the most compelling parts of the film was the recreation of the bombing itself. How was that created? You obviously were not in Baghdad, you obviously didn't have a war going on outside the window, and yet...
MICK JACKSON
Damn, damn nearly. [LAUGHTER].
HBO
You had some terrific pyrotechnics.
MICK JACKSON
Yeah. Those were shot in two locations. We built a replica of the interior of a hotel on a soundstage in Culver City. But the view out of the window was in Casablanca, in Morocco. So Casablanca stood in for Baghdad. And the view out of the hotel window was looking out into Casablanca.
HBO
Mm-hmm.
MICK JACKSON
What I remember, and I think what most people remember most vividly about the start of the Gulf War was that graphic on the screen, with a picture of the three reporters in little boxes, and a map of Baghdad. And just these disembodied voices coming out. It was very dramatic. It was very immediate.
But what I wanted to do in this movie was to show what was happening at the other end of that telephone line. So essentially the attack on Baghdad, you don't get a wide shot of the city taken from other places, you just see it from the viewpoint of the hotel room. That's the framing device. The bombing is happening right outside that window.
So to do that, we obviously couldn't do extensive pyrotechnics anywhere in the States, we were looking for somewhere that had a feel of being a city that wasn't an American city, very much a Middle Eastern, North African kind of city. So Casablanca seemed to fit that bill. And we took elaborate pyrotechnics with us. We kind of needed to develop something that we could let off in a large urban area that wouldn't cause you know, alarm and panic, or destroy buildings.
HBO
Mm-hmm.
MICK JACKSON
And eventually the special effects guys came out with this wonderful thing, which is like a boiler, essentially, laid on its side and sliced down so you've got a kind of semi-cylindrical trough that was filled with an elaborate mixture of titanium and magnesium so that when it ignites, you get this tremendously bright flash. And several of those were lit off in the streets of Casablanca.
HBO
And the city - it was quite effective, the feeling of the city in ruins, the morning after. How did you create that?
MICK JACKSON
We found some demolition sites in Casablanca, and shot on those with soldiers crawling over the ruins. We also found this huge site in Palm Springs, which was a big iron ore, mining site, now abandoned. But it had big, formerly industrial structures that were in ruins with a lot of rubble lying around, and that's where we shot most of the wide shots of the devastation.
HBO
It really played well. So in terms of the stars like Michael Keaton, how was the process when he came on board?
MICK JACKSON
Well, Michael was on board before I came on board in the United States. So that was kind of part of the package. It actually excited me about working on the project, because reading Wiener's book, Wiener is a real character. I mean, he's very much like Hunter S. Thompson in many ways, kind of a wheeler-dealer operator, good at crisis management, good at getting things done, good at finding shortcuts to getting what needs to be done done.
And Michael Keaton's energy as a comic performer, and as a dramatic performer seems to be exactly in sync with that. You know, he's a very very restless, very energetic, hyper, drive kind of actor, those were real plusses.
HBO
And the rest of the cast is terrific. David Suchet is great. Helena Bonham Carter-
MICK JACKSON
Helena I think is just wonderful in the role of Ingrid. It's not something that she wanted to do at the beginning, I went to visit her in Reno where she was staying, badgering her, saying you know, you've got to do this, this is the role of a lifetime, it's going to be very risky for you, it's something I know you can do. And eventually I talked her into it.
HBO
Where was the bulk of your preparation? Did you do a lot of storyboarding?
MICK JACKSON
I tend to do storyboards literally on the back of paper napkins.
HBO
[LAUGHTER]
MICK JACKSON
That's for on the set. I say look, this is what the shot's gonna look like. Someone's gonna come in here, and this is gonna be the framing and then hand it out to people so I have an endless supply of white paper napkins so everyone knows what's in my head.
A great deal of preparation needed to be done for the Moroccan shoot. Finding locations, and trying to make the very difficult logistics of getting military transport planes to a certain location, closing down an airport, getting tanks to go through the streets of a city and so on.
HBO
What are your own reflections- and you touched on this very briefly at the beginning- about the topicality of the film?
MICK JACKSON
It's extraordinarily topical. It kind of sends shivers down your backbone when you think about it because most of the characters are still alive, and some are very much active participants. Ingrid Formanek has just been thrown out of Baghdad where she was reporting. Naji, the character played by David Suchet, is now the Foreign Minister of Iraq, and is taking part in negotiations with the U.N. security council, and Saddam Hussein is still the president of Iraq.
HBO
Yes.
MICK JACKSON
The last line of the movie is David Suchet's character Naji saying to Robert Wiener, you know, I will see you when this war is over. And it ain't over yet. I think that's the feeling that you take away from the end of the movie.
I think one of the interesting things that's dealt with in the movie is exactly how you, to coin a phrase, commit journalism, when you're working in a country which has censorship. You know, you're reporting to the outside world on what's happening inside a country where you can't get uncensored information out. How do you get the truth out? Do you kind of admit that what you're doing is compromised in some way by the censorship that you're working under?
I think one of the achievements of Robert Wiener and the CNN team was to, to really persevere in keeping a presence in Baghdad at a time when reporters were leaving.
What this movie does is to take you into Baghdad, not as a dot on a map, but as a place populated by ordinary people like mothers and kids and waiters and taxi drivers, as well as soldiers. And make you think just twice about what it is you're advocating when you say, let's go to war.
HBO
What do you hope audiences will take away from watching this film?
MICK JACKSON
You know, there's two things here. There's Saddam Hussein and his brutal repressive regime and the people around him. And it's hard to defend that in any kind of rational way whatsoever. He's a really brutal man and he kills people with his bare hands. And there's the Iraqi people who unfortunately have to suffer untold hardships, firstly in that long war with Iran, then the sanctions, and now the possibility of another military attack. Those are not the people who've done or wish us any harm. And they are unfortunately among the victims.
You know, huge numbers of Iraqi soldiers were killed during the Gulf War. Those were mostly conscripts, they had no choice. Pushed out by Saddam into the desert. They weren't the elite. So I think, this is real people, real lives. It's worth remembering. Iraqi as well as American.
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