Director Michael Cuesta has had an interesting path as a director since his tremendous debut film L.I.E. (featuring a very early performance by Paul Dano) and the follow-up 12 AND HOLDING (featuring a very early performance by Jeremy Renner). Although Cuesta continued periodically to make feature, he made a real name for himself as a television director, specializing in pilots, including those for “Dexter,” “Elementary,” “Blue Bloods,” and “Homeland” (on which he served as an executive producer for the first two seasons).
But now Cuesta has returned his attention to the big screen, re-teaming with Renner for KILL THE MESSENGER, a fantastic true-life drama, based on the mid-’90s journalistic exploits of reporter Gary Webb, who uncovered the CIA’s role in arming Contra rebels in Nicaragua and moving cocaine into California. But that investigation only covers about half the movie. The rest of the film involves the systematic smear campaign by both the CIA and other news organizations (vengeful that this second-tier newspaper scooped them) to discredit Webb’s reporting and personal life. It turned out his story was correct and that the CIA was responsible for cocaine and crack flooding the streets of the nation’s poorest neighborhood. But the price Webb paid to get the truth was awful, and KILL THE MESSENGER captures his experience all-too believably, anchored by the finest performance in Renner’s career.
I sat down with Cuesta recently to talk about the film, the story, Webb’s tragic life, and what it was like portraying the CIA as flawed heroes in “Homeland” versus through-and-through villains in KILL THE MESSENGER. This interview took place the day after Cuesta and I did a post-screening Q&A of the film. With that said, please enjoy my talk with Michael Cuesta…
Capone: Talking to you on the way out of the theater yesterday, I joked about you approaching this film like a method director. You felt like you needed to get into the head of this character before you could make this film. I think the reason the film works so well is that the audience will sit through this whole movie wondering how they would have reacted under this kind of pressure. And I’m embarrassed and ashamed to say I would have folded much earlier than he did, probably. Was that one of your goal, to sort of put us in his predicament and judge ourselves in a way?
Michael Cuesta: Well, when I said that, I think the work I’m most proud of and like the most is when I really care about the main character and I understand them. When you say “method,” that’s why I need to really get in their shoes and really empathize. And what that does as a craftsman, as a filmmaker, is your attention to what they’re feeling and how they should behave in the film and the shots that you use, all come from really caring and knowing that person, knowing that look, and knowing how they would react to this or that. I’m speaking just in general now. How you really care about the film, too. If you care about the character, you care about the project. So, that’s how I do it. I have to completely understand and empathize and care about the character, and as a result, the audience then does. I think there is a transference of that thing that happens from artist, to filmmaker, to actor, to the film, then to the audience.
Capone: Ideally, that’s the goal.
MC: Ideally, that’s the goal. But I do think the more you care, the more you understand the characters, the more you can somehow connect to what is truthful and what is not going to go into the movie. Because when you edit a movie, that’s the other part of making a movie. So you could have this much footage, and you end up with that much—that’s what you choose to put in there. That process, after you gather it, is directing too and choosing those moments.
And that’s why talking to Sue [Gary Webb’s wife] about Gary and really getting into him as a guy, and being at home with him was very important, so the audience could clearly see he was just a guy. It’s interesting, where ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN, you never got that, which is interesting. It’s like full-on procedural to the very end when they’re typing and the thing’s on the TV. This was a mixture of the two, but it was important to have the two because as things start to go bad for Gary, the one thing that he walks solid on was his home life that he built with his family, and then that started to come apart.
Capone: Let’s talk about Jeremy Renner. He was attached to this just before you got involved. I think he’s actually emerged as this really thoughtful action hero, but I still get a kick out of seeing him act, just dive into a meaty role like this and take it over. Tell me just about him as a collaborator. What did he bring to this?
MC: Well, he and I did a movie together many years ago, my second film called 12 AND HOLDING, and he really acted in that movie, and I think that we had a great experience because he had played some weird parts before that. It was one of his first roles where he was playing a real person, and I think he appreciated me directing him, allowing him to just be a guy. And you could be sweet and funny, you could also be complex—all those things. And I encouraged and dug in with him to push him even further.
There’s this one scene where he’s in therapy, and he breaks down. I remember, we didn’t get it right away, and I kept pushing him. He brought that up when I first came on board. He said, “Michael, you’ve go to do that with me. I remember that fifth take you kept saying ‘Do that, do that.’ And I did it, and it was the take you used, and it was right.” So having that really helps a director be comfortable with his star, to have a relationship. That’s why in Scorsese films, there’s a short hand between De Niro and Scorsese from his early films. And they trust each other completely.
If you’ve been on the set, I am always unnerved by actors who come on the set and think it’s their set. And to have that respect and that short hand with an actor is so key, at least to me. I know there are directors who can just like cut it off, turn it off. Maybe Fincher or somebody who’s a genius, but the way he captures things is very disconnected. I’m too sensitive [laughs]. I feel everything they do. Even if I’m in their eye line for a second, and they flick into my eyes, I have to go. It takes me out. What was the other thing about Jeremy?
Jeremy suggests a lot of the script was very-- Peter [Landesman, screenwriter], who was a journalist, he did some scenes that were very verbose and “writery,” and too on the nose. And Jeremy was like, when we got in rehearsals, it was very clear early on that we had to cut a third of it out. It was too much. And he’s not that kind of actor. He’s an instinctual actor. So the words really have to come naturally and true. So if anything feels forced and rote in any way, he just can’t do it. He’ll throw it out. And I’m like that too. I don’t think you have to say this. The pause will say it. The in between the two lines will say what you’re talking about. I cut some scenes in the movie where it’s Gary making his case again, Gary making his case again, and it’s just like, get on with it. It became redundant.
Capone: There are very few scenes where he’s monologuing. There’s the awards scene, obviously, where he gives a speech. I don’t think reporters do that. They're more about letting the subject talk than them.
MC: They’re listeners.
Capone: They just drop enough in there to inspire a response.
MC: It’s funny, because Gary made his case very simply. When you read his book, you can see. A lot of writery stuff got in from the screenplay. I had to cut it because it was too much. There were a couple of scenes where he made speeches, and they just didn’t work. They felt false. Jeremy is not that kind of actor. Maybe if it was like some British actor or Stanislavski-trained guy that was all about the text, or more of a Shakespearian actor could like handle that. But that’s not what the film was, and that’s not my sensibility and definitely not Jeremy’s sensibility.
He’s so interesting to look at that I think you don’t need a lot of words. The speech, funny enough, we made some things in that. That came natural. It made sense. It made sense to him as a man, Renner. It’s like, this makes sense to me. So a lot of us collaborating would be in rehearsals going, once you’re down to a director and actor, you have to take the writer out of it at that point, I have to say. And you have to be like, “What’s going to work for the film?” And we did a lot of work together over a week of just siting in a room with Rosemarie [DeWitt, who plays Webb’s wife, Sue]. But it was mostly just me and Jeremy and then Rosemarie in the rehearsal process.
Capone: In the second half of the film, some of the biggest tension comes from the build up to that award ceremony, because we don’t know what he’s going to say, or if they’re going to pull it from him. When he gets up to that microphone, anything could happen.
MC: When Sean [Bobbit, cinematographer] and I were shooting that scene, I had to use two cameras shooting that, because it was just too much text not to. And I wanted to keep it very simple. It’s classic Bobbitt. We would find an angle and really just keep that. There was a long lens shot, the one in the film, where you’re just on him like here, and the light’s flaring the lens, and there’s a long, dead silence like you don’t know what he’s going to say. I didn't know how it was going to go. But I think Jeremy and I talked. “Get up there and just take your time,” and he did, and I understood the scene at that moment. When I saw that I was like, “That’s the shot.” Bobbitt and I were really excited. “This is what’s communicating what’s in his head.” And he takes a moment, and thinks “No,” and then you see him in a very personal way make the choice like, “This is fucking bullshit.” But he still has dignity, and he pulls it together.
Capone: There’s a shift about halfway through the film—I don’t know if there’s an exact moment—but there's a gradual shift from a procedural to Gary being on the defensive and being attacked. Did you change anything tonally as a director to differentiate the two halves of the film?
MC: Well, you have to. As a filmmaker, you have to have a plan. Sean and I always talked about the camera not moving as much—the purgatory of it all. The third act as Gary’s alone, and he’s really a guy lost, fighting that unwinnable war lost at sea. So the camera started to become much more stayed, I started to isolate him more. Like I said last night, we kept saying ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN and THE PARALLAX VIEW. We were using those two films tonally or visually as a way to approach this film. One’s obviously a movie about journalists, and the other one’s like…the whole third act in that movie is surreal. And I was just using that in the third act of our movie. But I’m glad that you said “gradual,” because that turning point is what gets you there, as you see things from Gary’s point of view. That’s the only time you go out of Gary’s point of view.
Capone: You could pinpoint the beginning of the shift to when his first article about the CIA and drugs gets published.
MC: Oh yeah, when it was released. When the son reads it, and then they call up and are like, “Our phone’s ringing off the hook.” And then clearly Gary didn’t have a say in how they packaged the story. Because when they see it on the website, you see a crack pipe and the CIA logo. It’s clearly going to get people pissed off. “CIA Created Crack.” It’s like they’re cooking crack in their basement [laughs].
Capone: Hollywood does have a very interesting relationship with the CIA, because in some films and TV series, they are portrayed as the guys who are getting the terrorists—complicated people for sure—and then sometimes, they’re coming after you. How was it working both sides of that spectrum?
MC: Well in our film, we don’t see the CIA. We never see them. We see the influence they have with the press, and CIA like any other organization is going to have some PR machine, right? And they have the Washington Post, they have their relationships with them. “Homeland” is a completely different experience. It’s really, if you think about it, a thriller, almost a procedural thriller—the machinations of how to get the terrorists. And then you throw in a little twist, and the person that’s at the helm is a flawed hero. It’s basically Jack Bauer, a bi-polar, female Jack Bauer.
Capone: Films about writers, or anyone that does something creative, are not always visually interesting. How do you make a film about a writer and the writing process interesting?
MC: Well, that was hard. In the script, there was no process of him writing the story, and it wasn’t visual. I think there was, but it was like him sitting down, typing, and looking.
Capone: You used photos on the wall, strings connecting them with pins…
MC: Well, what I decided to do was make it very physical and very active and very “kid in a candy store.” Gary was really into that process. He was into the details. This is stuff I’d read about him, and I remember saying to Jeremy, “I think what I want to do is ultimately create a montage out of this and make it fun and exciting and keep it from his point of view.” Like, what kind of music would he put on when he was writing? Just like we all do when you write or do any creative endeavor, sometimes you play music.
So, that’s what inspired that sequence where those guys say don’t write the story, and he’s like, “Fuck you.” A lot of people didn’t like him because they said his work endangered his children. And when they say, “Don’t write the story,” he does it anyway. But after that, when he writes the story, the idea was to visualize his process of writing. And you’re like, “How do you do that?” You just get a bunch of images and thematically capture his spirit.
Capone: There’s actually a lot of weight given to that moment where he types the headline [“Dark Alliance,” which was also the name of Webb’s book about this experience].
MC: Everything stops. Yeah. No, that was a conscious effort to make that so that the denouement of the whole thing.
Capone: Let me go back to the awards banquet fantasy sequence. I do think that's a really important moment, because it’s the one time that we see what should have happened and not what actually happened. Talk about including that moment. Was there any debate about having something like that?
MC: There was. You know what it was? It was written really paranoid and schizophrenic, and I didn’t understand it. It was a little bit of miscommunication between myself and Peter who put this together as a screenwriter. I didn’t get it. I didn’t get it from the Gary that Jeremy and I were cultivating in the film. And when I showed up that day, I wasn’t going to shoot it. There was one moment when we did the speech...I had a long day to do that, so it was great. We were very relaxed to do this one piece. That's the difference between film and TV, boy. I had 12 hours to do all of that; it was fantastic. Then I was watching it, and there was one moment when the audience got really excited, and I’m like, “This is how it should be.” And then it occurred to me how to capture it, to make it as real as possible. So when you see him get up, it is a fantasy, but it’s just how Gary would have wanted it—very simple and real and warm. So I did the shot of the State of the Union-type thing, coming though all those people and patting them on the back.
Capone: Honestly, I thought it was a real thing at first.
MC: Oh, you did?
Capone: Until I realized it went on just a little too long, and I went, “Oh wait. We’re lingering here. This probably isn’t actually happening.”
MC: Yeah. I wasn’t trying to--with something like this, it’s not a twist in the film. It’s just more of what he really needs right now. He needs this. People are torn in the room. There are some clapping, some not, and that’s how it is in reality, by the way.
Capone: There are a few moments in the film where I think you want us to wonder, “Wait, is this real?” The Ray Liotta scene or the phone call in the middle of the night. There’s a quality to those scenes where you don’t want us to doubt it, but you also want us to feel like his life has become surreal, and can we trust his mind right now?
MC: Well, you feel uneasy. It makes you feel uneasy. It doesn’t have the optimism and the life in the first half of the movie, and that was a conscious effort I always kept. Bobbit and I were always like, “Full of life, upbeat, optimistic guy on the beat, cop on the beat, excited about the road he’s going down.” When he’s like, “Watch your ass, Gary,” before he goes to Nicaragua, and I put the guns in and Reagan. That was a very conscious decision to put him in the shades. I was very happy with this poster, I have to say. Because I wanted Jeremy…we kept talking and it’s like, “Fuck it, let's go SERPICO” He was trying sunglasses on, and I went, “No. Go with the Aviators, man.” It’s the classic cop. And Gary wore those too. Gary actually had a big cop, bushy mustache. We made a choice with the facial hair to not do that. It looked funny. It would have been distracting, so we chose just to goatee, which is more like a hockey player.
Capone: You mentioned last night that you had a consultant on set regarding any CIA references, and what you could and couldn’t say.
MC: I don’t know him that well. We met on set a few days. Everything seemed good. I was like, “Are you good with everything? Did you watch some of the stuff we’re shooting? You see where the script is right now?” “Yeah, yeah.” And then in post, he came out of the woodwork once he started to see the scenes, maybe because they were real now. He was like, “Oh, you can’t say that.”
Capone: But you said it was mostly Oliver North references he didn't think you could say as much as you did.
MC: Yeah. With Oliver North, he’s bad. He will raise shit and go after you and create problems, so it was about using what has been proven—at least written about—rather than making shit up. That’s the difference, and when I got into post on the movie, I had to make a lot of corrections, because the movie is about a guy that was trying to tell the truth and believed in that, and the last thing I want is to like have outright fucking lies in the movie. I think it would just betray what we were trying to say.
Capone: I can’t believe they’re still dealing with the repercussions of this.
MC: Every time the studio would beat me up I said, “I’m Gary Webb. You’re killing me.” [laughs] That feels like it’s still going on; it’s a tough thing sometimes.
