Q&A: Director Ridley Scott's 'Body of Lies'
Director Ridley Scott doesn't pull any punches when it comes to his opinions on the war in Iraq, the media, and why the CIA has gotten weak.
By Gael Golhen
Russell Crowe and director Ridley Scott on the set of Body of Lies
Courtesy of Warner Bros.
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Read Premiere's interview with Leonardo DiCaprio.
Read Premiere's review of Body of Lies.
Director Ridley Scott has traded in blade running and chest-popping aliens in favor of political intrigue, both on the micro (American Gangster) and macro (Black Hawk Down) levels. Scott's latest movie, Body of Lies, reunites him with American Gangster star Russell Crowe, who has also worked with the famed director on A Good Year and Gladiator. Lies, which also stars Leonardo DiCaprio, is an international spy-versus-spy thriller about the war on terror.
In this exclusive interview for Premiere, the British director pulls no punches when it comes to talking politics, from the war in Iraq, the media, the CIA, and more.
What does the bombing in Islamabad [on September 21] say about the world now and your movie?
It tells me that we are not making any difference whatsoever. And you have to raise some questions like, "Should we be there?" and "Should we have gone in at all?" There is always that revisionist's view that [questions] should we intervene. In the last eight and half years, the world changed. Over the last twenty years, ten years, you have got the advent of all these other nations that are honestly as powerful as the United States. So, the United States that could be thought of as the only nation that was capable.... of financially and psychologically being the watchdog of the world is now less relevant. So you have Pakistan saying, "Hey, you have had yours. Now we will have ours. Ours being what? Nuclear energy? Atomic bombs? Weapons, et cetera, et cetera." So the world has equalized about ammunitions: China. India. Japan. The UK. The United States is coming down to size. I hate to say that because I am not American [and] because I owe my career largely to the United States. Putting my naive hat on for a second, I like part of their intentions. They have tried to establish certain codes and standards over the last fifty years, but it has been progressively tainted for the need for other things. So the whole thing has just crumbled.
To stick to the political issues in the film, does it mean that the US needs to withdraw?
You can't. You can't go in there and get out. Are you crazy? Because if you did, I think there would be chaos. And there are so many factions that have been involved since the US have been in there. They have evolved and got stronger.
So, what is the solution?
I think you hang in... I hope to God that they don't have to stay in Iraq for, like, sixty years. But I don't know what the solution is. We keep getting stories on a day-by-day process from every television station under the sun. That is the other thing that has become confusing and defusing: you don't quite know what the real story is. There is so much communiqué today, whereas thirty years ago, forty years ago you had Reuters and newspapers in the frontlines writing columns. Now, the US government switches on CNN to see what is going on. Seriously!... It is messy, and it is out of control. For example, the whole banking debacle that has just gone down — Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs and AIG and then there are two massive mortgage companies [Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae] that happen to have been saved by the government — and you wonder how much there is created by paranoia, by the information from media. And so where do you control the media? The media would argue that that is exactly what the media should be doing: they should be showing everything all the time. But sometimes things may not necessarily be quite as bad as the general information insists it is. But then the argument is that it is bad enough, and it is good that we knew. Does it clean everything up? I think it will do this time... for a bit.
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