When journalism meets film-making

Osama bin Laden is back in the limelight on our cinema screens. Paula Fleri-Soler delves into the making of Zero Dark Thirty and finds it to be neither fact nor fiction.

Zero Dark Thirty is a fascin-ating action film that is almost completely accurately based on the results of in-depth interviews and research.

The film recounts in astonishing detail the meticulous work carried out during the decade-long hunt

It is neither a work of fiction, nor can it be described as a documentary. The film recounts, in astonishing detail, the meticulous work carried out during the decade-long hunt of the most wanted man on earth – Osama bin Laden – while highlighting the human side of the operatives who struck, possibly, the greatest blow on the war on terror to date.

The idea of a film based on the hunt for Bin Laden started over six years ago, when director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter, war reporter and investigative journalist Mark Boal developed an idea focusing on the failure to capture Bin Laden during the battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan in 2001.

“However,” says Boal in the film’s production notes, “when Bin Laden was killed, that film became ancient history.”

After Bin Laden’s death, the writer moved to Washington and eventually to Pakistan and other parts of the Middle East to cultivate his new screenplay, based on these startling new and historically significant events.

Boal received help from many government agencies and people involved in the intense manhunt. That, and good old-fashioned investigative work, led to his screenplay.

“I was, at the end of the day, fortunate to be able to write a script drawn almost entirely from first-hand accounts of the people directly involved in this mission,” he says, going on to explain that at a certain point he had to take off his journalist’s hat and put on that of a screenwriter to tell the story – after all, he was writing a film.

“It is a story of finding a very sharp needle in a very large haystack,” says Bigelow about the film.

“Once Bin Laden escaped to Afghanistan, he fenced himself in with a byzantine network that took years and years to unravel. And what I think is so intriguing about Mark’s script is the way it tracks all the minute steps, in a way that’s dramatic yet totally unsentimental, unsparing and unsettling. This is a very raw account.”

The hunt for Bin Laden took 10 years and spanned locations across the globe. The film captures the frustrations, dead ends and human losses the operatives working the mission had to live through; it was this human aspect of the story that Bigelow and Boal wanted to delve into.

Who actually were these nameless and faceless CIA operatives who did not give up and worked through professional failures and personal losses and stayed on the trail even when it led absolutely nowhere?

“The public knows very little about what the unsung heroes in the intelligence community go through, which is as it has to be,” explains Bigelow.

“But here, you get the rare opportunity to have a first-hand look at the men and women at the heart of one of the most covert operations in our history.”

She speaks highly of her screenwriter. “Mark didn’t just ascertain facts; he absorbed the subtle nuances permeating the atmosphere of this world: the personalities, conflicts, motivations, uncertainties – and then brilliantly illuminated them.”

The audience’s point of reference is Maya (Jessica Chastain), whose story is at the centre of the film. Based on a real person, she is basically a young CIA officer whose job is to find terrorists.

This is a woman devoted solely to doing her job, and she travels the arduous personal journey from new CIA recruit into hardened analyst who will not rest until she finds her target.

We learn little about her actual motivations, much less about her personal life; and yet she remains a fascinating persona. “In essence, you see her grow up through the film,” says Chastain, “as finding Bin Laden becomes a more personal mission to her. You see her start to lose her old self and turn into someone new.

That so little is known about her beyond her job was a conscious choice, says Boal. “I like characters who are defined solely by what they do, in the existential present tense. At the same time, there was the practical consideration. I had to limit biographical detail for the sake of protecting identity.”

A stark reminder, indeed, of the top secrecy of the mission and the dangerous world its protagonists inhabit. The film offers a tribute to them and an understanding of the work they do.

“The ultimate goal for all of us was to bring people into this shadowy yet vitally important world that is seen only in the rarest moments, and illuminate its human face,”concluded Bigelow.