The uncomfortable reactions to the movie must be coming from not only the disturbing subject matter, but also from the fact that it's a new language. A normal theatergoing audience can't quite comprehend it yet.

De Palma: Exactly correct. To me it's almost atonal. Suddenly you're playing atonal music and people don't know what to make of it. That's what I noticed when I screened it at the beginning, is people had nothing to say afterwards. Basically they were struck dumb. They couldn't process the material. Then the first thing, of course, when you don't understand something, you attack it. "It's not this, it's not this, it's not this." I'll never forget the first time I saw Barry Lyndon, I just wasn't ready to process the way Stanley Kubrick did the movie, and I reacted very strongly against it. The way he told this particular story, with this particular technique. But over the years it's become one of my favorite movies of Kubrick's. Once it gets you into the temporal sense, and the pictorial sense, of the period, of the piece, it all makes perfect sense to you. But when you first see it, you go, "Why all these endless shots, why these zoom-ins -- what's going on here?"

Like Redacted, Barry Lyndon is also a movie where the filmmaker imposed very stringent technical limitations on himself.

De Palma: Exactly correct.

Is there any other reason besides your admiration for Barry Lyndon for why you wanted to use the same music in your movie?

De Palma: I think what was so instructive about Barry Lyndon was how Kubrick slowed down time; using very classical, measured music, he used very elaborate pull-backs. Of course I didn't have the beautiful pictorials that he did. You make the audience study the frame; something that I think people have completely forgotten about.



Redacted

I'd like to dig a little bit deeper, if we can, into what you discovered about the language of digital storytelling. It's such a new phenomenon, and I think Redacted is one of the few films that really prods at the edges of what's possible -- ultra long takes, handheld consumer cameras, relationships developed over the internet, everyone allowed a voice -- it's fascinating. And the other thing about digital media, which is why this war is a perfect topic for it, is the immediacy and the responsiveness of it. You can produce images like a reflex. That's the raw nerve that this film strikes.

De Palma: It's a great new way to deal with narrative forms. It's like things you discover in video games; the way they tell their stories. And of course video games emulate films a lot, and television shows, with their little story sequences within the games. But there was a really big breakthrough when they started to have games where you could approach the world from any place. It didn't go linearly. It was more like a mosaic. You could discover the story from the north, the south, the east, the west, and I said, "Wow."

I remember when I saw my first video game where it was played from a point-of-view shot. It was Colony and this must have been twenty years ago. I was knocked out by it. I said, "Oh my God." The players were perceiving all of this space through a point-of-view shot. And of course that's one of the main building blocks of moviemaking; it's totally cinematic, it doesn't exist in any other art form. I'm always fascinated by what the video games are doing. I truly believe that the creative forces in my generation, instead of being filmmakers, they wanted to be game programmers. They're literally creating spaces and stories. They're constantly discovering new forms. Every six months there's a new game where they push the envelope into something else. And this is also very true of the internet. The other day I discovered BloggerTV, where you have two guys talking about a subject, like an iChat, and it's any topic they want to talk about, like talking heads on television, except it's a discussion about a specific subject instead of people screaming at each. In any event, all this stuff is changing every day. And as I think about doing another film in this form, I'm constantly amazed at the new things that crop up.

Is it a coincidence that you've been influenced by video games, and quite often the "video game mentality" of modern warfare is cited? Is that something you brought into the film, this idea of soldiers being trained by virtual simulation and how that might affect their actions on the battlefield?

De Palma: Yeah, people say that, but the reality of on-the-ground has nothing to do with a videogame. As soon as soldiers get over to Iraq, they get it real fast. You can play every one of the most violent videogames in the world, and it doesn't give you a clue about what it's like to really be deployed in Iraq. A comparison is ridiculous.



Redacted

As far as the actors whom you chose to portray the soldiers, none of them will be recognizable faces to an audience, but I thought all of their performances were convincing. Private Flake was an incredibly frightening character.

De Palma: It's interesting that you say that, because that's one of the main criticisms I get all the time, "Oh, these actors are overacting; they're a bunch of amateurs." Ridiculous! I mean, they're acting in relationship to what situation they're in. When they're in barrage, they behave like warriors at the post, because that's what they're supposed to look like; that's how the director wanted them to look, and the actors take on a personae and an acting style appropriate for that form. When they're being filmed by Salazar, they're mugging and confused and spontaneous, which is exactly what it's like if you're taking a home video. When people react against Redacted so strongly, they don't understand the context of what the actors are doing. People are used to movies where the actors are always the same because the point of view never shifts. But when you change the form, the acting has to adjust.

So instead of a classical "character arc" you were going for a more prismatic study of people.

De Palma: Yes, but there's still very much a sense of character progression. Flake is a little tweaked when he gets over to Iraq, but you can see him sort of changing as the movie goes forth. People just don't understand how the form affects character presentation.

My immediate reaction after seeing the film, and what I did, was to view it a second time. In thinking about why that was, I got the notion that it was almost too much to absorb in one sitting -- to learn how to view the film, and then to appreciate it at the same time -- and so it resists a sense a resolution.

De Palma: The resolution is very much how I feel. I very much identify with McCoy; I feel frustration at not being able to stop the war, of being a participant in it, but being unable to do anything about it, just like McCoy can't do anything about the girl being raped. He carries that guilt with him. The other thing we'll be living with for decades is all of these soldiers coming back from Iraq harboring what they've been through. It's going to be like Vietnam but ten times worse. And it's going to go on for decades. I live near a V.A. hospital in California and I see these guys all the time, wandering around with that aimless stare on their faces, and of course everyone forgets about them. This is going to be going on for decades.

Redacted is in limited release this Friday.