Mark Boal has been talking about “The Hurt Locker” for months now, and he’d really like to get back to work on his new screenplay. But when you’ve written (and co-produced) one of the best movies of the year -- a tense, wrenching Kathryn Bigelow-directed action drama that came out in June but will clearly be in the thick of the awards race into next year -- there’s always more work to do.
So Boal, a mid-30s journalist who covered conflict and culture for Rolling Stone, Playboy and the New York Times before writing the screenplays to “Hurt Locker” and “In the Valley of Elah,” submits with a resigned good humor to his promotional chores.
Spoiler alert: Toward the end of the interview, after the page break, we talk about an event that happens early in the film. If you haven't seen it yet, consider yourself forewarned ... but if you like movies and you haven't seen the film yet, what are you waiting for? (Below, Jeremy Renner in "The Hurt Locker"/Summit Entertainment.)
(Memo to the FTC: We shared a pizza. He paid.)
Writing about the bomb squad in Iraq for Playboy, was there a point when you decided it should be more than just a magazine article?
I don’t remember exactly when, but yeah, I felt it was a big enough story that it warranted more. Even while I was there, I was thinking there was way more than I could fit into the piece. And on a selfish level, I thought that as long as I was risking my life out here, maybe I should try to parlay it into something else.
It really became more than just a notion after the piece came out. I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I thought the piece would have a little bit more impact than it did. I wrote the piece and thought, I totally scooped everybody. When this comes out, there’s going to be a flood of stories about the bomb squad.
And then nothing … until the movie came out.
Why do you think the piece didn’t get more attention?
Maybe it wasn’t a good piece, or Playboy wasn’t read in the way I thought it was. But also, the coverage at that time was not about the futility of conflict. Nobody was writing about the logistical folly of saying, “We’re gonna have 20,000 troops in Baghdad, a city of millions of people, and they’re gonna chill everything out.”
As soon as you got there and walked around, you could see it couldn’t possibly work. I mean, the enemy is not identifying themselves as the enemy, and nobody in the U.S. military speaks the language, and they’re not fighting you in a conventional manner – they’re just planting bombs and walking away.
It just seemed, on that very nuts and bolts level, doomed. The coverage didn’t seem to be acknowledging that, and Rumsfeld was like, “There’s some dead-enders, but we’re gonna sort this out any day now.”
