The GenreOnline
Interview – Writer And Director Gavin Hood
By Mark A. Rivera
Gavin Hood is the Academy Award Winning Filmmaker of Tsotsi
and his other film credits include Eye In the Sky, X-Men Origins:
Wolverine and Ender’s Game. His latest feature film, the riveting
political thriller Official Secrets opens up theatrically in the U.S. and the
U.K. on August 30, 2019. Mr. Hood was kind enough to grant me an interview
regarding the film. If you have not seen the film or are unfamiliar with the
story, hen there may be spoilers ahead. My spoiler free review can be read by
clicking on the link here.
Gavin Hood) Hi Mark.
Mark Rivera) Hello Mr. Hood. May I call you Gavin?
Gavin Hood) Please. May I call you Mark?
Mark) Of course. I just like to ask who I interview for the
first time what they prefer rather than assume.
Gavin) Fair enough. Absolutely. Please call me Gavin.
Mark) I watched Official Secrets and I must say it
was very riveting. In the film, you intercut scenes from news reports in
history as it was going on and I know this was based on a book so my first
question is how do you adapt what is history into drama?
Gavin) That’s a great question. First of all thank you for
pointing out the footage. You know you have your characters of George Bush,
Tony Blair, Colin Powel, and the question arises, Should I cast them with
Actors? So much of the story is really told as we all learned about as it
occurred on TV and we watched George Bush and Colin Powel and I thought we
could use the real broadcast footage and let them speak for themselves and once
you do that you start gathering a ton of archive footage and then it becomes a
question of How do we edit this in? So there is that side and there is
the other side, which is just extensively interviewing the real people because
this is the first film I have done where the characters are still very much
alive. Although there was a book, it focused mostly on Katherine and I was
referred to Journalist Martin Bright and he put me in touch with others and
ultimately to Ben Emmerson, the Lawyer played by Ralph Fiennes, who is this
formidable intellect and we spent many weeks just talking to these people who
are very much alive and I wanted to make sure their story is accurately told.
It was interesting because when I made Eye In The Sky,
although the research was very detailed, I was writing about fictional
characters and in this case the people are very much alive and they are going
to comment very much on whether they thought the movie was good or bad so you
really need to make sure that you get the facts right because otherwise you are
going to lose their support.
Mark) When you do use the news footage does it fall under
fair use?
Gavin) We had to pay for it. So you buy according to which
news organizations footage you want to use, make a deal to use the footage
because the footage was shot by a particular photographer and the news
organization and they own the rights to that footage.
Sometimes you find you want to use a clip of say, George
Bush speaking and that particular footage is owned by NBC or CNN and you might
find you make a better deal with one than the other, but you are essential
getting the same thing or you like the angle of a particular camera better than
another angle.
Mark) I found it interesting that Katherine Gun is someone I
had never heard of and we all have heard a lot of names like Julianne Assange,
Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning and she predates all of these people, but
why is it I never heard of her before seeing this movie?
Gavin) There is a woman called Reality Winner, that is her
real name, and she is in jail now for releasing the information of the hacking
of the 2016 election. She actually went to prison for five years.
Mark) We all know now that the news is like 90 percent owned
by multi conglomerate corporations and I want to know from your point of view
because you live in America and you are an international man, I mean did youu
know about this person before this project?
Gavin) I think that’s a great question Mark. I didn’t know
either. When I was approached by my Producer about her, I researched her and I
thought to myself, Wow. Why don’t I know about the story? So I know
exactly what you are saying and I agree with you one hundred percent, and on
the one hand, you could get all conspiratorial about it or on the other hand
here is what I really think happened. She leaked that memo and the Chileans,
Mexicans, Bulgarians, Angolans, the smaller countries on the UN security
council were so outraged that they refused to bring the Iraq situation to a
vote in the UN. Meaning that Tony Blair and George Bush never got the UN
authorization for war. What Bush did immediately was say, “We’re going in
anyway.”
So for a day or two Katherine’s story was big news.
Certainly in England and then it got crushed by a much bigger story that was
what are we all watching? Troops and helicopters invading Iraq. At that moment,
the public is interested in a war. These news organizations are not covering
how we got into the war. Now all of what they are reporting on is the war. So
in a way, a big story got crushed by a bigger story and it is only in
retrospect, now that we know what a disaster that war was and how much we were
lied to, you kind of go back and ask what actually happened here?
The other thing that crushed it was the Attorney General
withdrawing the case. Then of course, the world moves on and other stories pop
up and the story dies. Katherine is also quite shy. After all she had been
through that year, she quietly needed to get over it all and withdraw. So just
think about Katherine as opposed to Snowden or Julian Assange, who are much
bigger political figures and continued to leak out the information and talk
about it, Katherine released only this one memo. She was a young woman, an
ordinary person going to work and came across this while doing her job and it
really upset her and she ‘s leaked this one memo and then they turned her life
upside down. Put her under a tremendous amount of stress and then they dropped
the case. If she has one regret, it is that she didn’t get her day in court.
She has said to me, “In some ways I was relieved they dropped the case, but
what Ben and I really wanted was the trial so we could expose the truth and
they took that away from us when they dropped the case.” In a way the film is
an opportunity to say, “Wait a minute. This is what happened?”
Mark) Was GCHQ an independent contractor that worked for the
British Ministry of Intelligence?
Gavin) No. It is a government agency that is the same as the
NSA. It is not as sexy a name. NSA, the National Security Agency. Government
Communications Headquarters. It’s so British to kind of call something so that
it appears innocuous. GCHQ is exactly the same as the NSA. So there is two
kinds of agencies. CIA and the British equivalent is MI-6 and they deal in
human intelligence. They are on the ground talking to people. The NSA and GCHQ
are the spies who listen in to conversations and so they are signals
intelligence. NSA and GCHQ do the same thing. It’s just a much more boring
name.
Mark) You have some fantastic talent in this film. I mean I
don’t always know the names of the talent, but I recognize the faces.
Gavin) We were very lucky to get such great talent. Anything
that might generate a conversation that is slightly political also has
financiers worried. So you need to do everything you can to give them
confidence that the film has a chance of being seen and part of how something
has a chance of being seen is with Actors so we were very lucky when Kiera
Knightly said yes and then with Ralph Fiennes and Matt Smith. When Ray Fiennes
said he can give us six days because he was directing his own movie, we shot
everything with him in six days.
Mark) This is a great film and I really appreciate the
opportunity to speak with you about it.
Gavin) I thank you for your interest in it because we live
from film to film so thank you very much for your generous words.
Click here to read my theatrical review of Official
Secrets.
© Copyright 2019 By Mark A. Rivera
All Rights Reserved.
