With
Stop-Loss, the queer director comes of age.
She’s
intense, with big dark eyes that come right at you. As a
writer-director, Kimberly Peirce has put that intensity to
work. Her 1999 debut, Boys Don’t Cry,
about the rape and murder of a young trans man named
Brandon Teena, was so wrenching that many in the
mainstream audience didn’t dare to see it. But the
film impacted the culture, launching Peirce as a
singular talent and winning a Best Actress Oscar for
its star, the then-unknown Hilary Swank.
For a while it
looked as though that mighty debut would also be
Peirce’s farewell. Rumors linked her with
various film projects, but nothing shaped up. Would
she become one of the saddest Hollywood statistics—a
gifted woman director who never gets a second chance?
No way. Peirce is
back, with a top team behind her sophomore project.
Stop-Loss, her drama of returning Iraq war vets,
which opened March 28, was produced by Scott Rudin and shot
by legendary cameraman Chris Menges. Visually, the
film is as handsome as its stars: Channing Tatum,
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and leading man Ryan Phillippe --
who, coincidentally or not, plays a character also named
Brandon.
Peirce’s
script follows three freshly discharged young vets dealing
with the prospect of returning to Iraq thanks to the
military’s stop-loss policy, the
“back-door draft” that sends troops back for
repeated tours of duty. In its ambitious bid to
grapple with that policy’s consequences as well
as the demands of postmodern manhood, Stop-Loss lacks
the cohesion of Peirce’s first film. But it
stands as a thought-provoking expansion of the same themes
that made Boys Don’t Cry so haunting.
I caught Peirce
by phone amid a 22-city promotional tour.

Man talk: Peirce huddling with Ryan Phillippe
Stop-Lossstarted as a personal story for you. What happened?
I was in New York for 9/11. Unfortunately, I saw the
towers fall. And then America entered the war. And
that was a devastating turn. I knew that we were
amidst this seismic cultural change.… Not long after
that, my little brother told us he was signing up to
fight in Afghanistan. He ended up going to Iraq. It
was a profound change for my family that he was going
to be there, in combat. Obviously, it was an everyday
concern. Is he alive, is he safe, is he injured? Is he
changing? I ended up IM’ing with him pretty
much from the day he landed in Kuwait.
What did you talk about?
He would tell me what his missions were, like that they
were either kidnapping or clearing houses. I was very
sad to hear that this was going on. As we would probe
emotionally into stuff, there would be a limit. He
would say, “I’m a professional soldier.
I’m paid to fight, not to think. This is my
job. If you go too deeply into the emotional issues, I could
get killed tonight because I may be distracted from my
job.” The second thing that was really
interesting was soldier-made videos. My brother was
home on leave one day, and I was at my mother’s house
and I heard “Let the bodies hit the floor / Let
the bodies hit the floor.” I walked out and saw
him just mesmerized by the television. And on it were these
images, handheld. The camera was on a sandbag or a gun
turret, or it was wired into the Humvee or in a
guy’s helmet during a firefight. You’d see
boots run by, guns go off—you would hear, “We
got a man down!” So you were literally in the
combat zone, in the battle with the guys. Then they
would go back to the barracks and cut [that video] to
patriotic music like Toby Keith’s
“Courtesy of the Red, White, & Blue,” or
what I like to call thrill-kill, music that’s
really about adrenalizing you. Then you would get
AC/DC or Linkin Park or Drowning Pool’s “Let
the Bodies Hit the Floor.” I knew from that
point forward that the movie needed to be born from
these videos.
Did you ever think of including gay or lesbian
soldiers in Stop-Loss?
I completely did, and I definitely found out about some
amazing stories. It simply would not have fit in this
particular movie.
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