In case you didn’t already know it, Australian writer and director David Michôd is the real deal. He immerses himself in each new project over many years, so his output may seem infrequent, but the quality of what he makes is pretty solid. In the last 10 years, he wrote one of my all-time favorite shorts, SPIDER, as well as the anarchic character study HESHER, while also directing 2010’s crime drama ANIMAL KINGDOM (the current TV series is based on his film), 2013’s THE ROVER, and an episode of HBO’s “Enlightened.”
But his highest-profile writing-directing gig is set to launch on Netflix this Friday, May 26. Based on the book by the late journalist Michael Hastings, WAR MACHINE is part antiwar parody, part workplace drama (keeping in mind that the “work” is commanding NATO forces, and the “place” is Afghanistan). Brad Pitt stars as Gen. Glen McMahon, leading an incredible ensemble cast that includes Anthony Michael Hall, Emory Cohen, Topher Grace, RJ Cyler, Alan Ruck, Tilda Swinton, Will Poulter, Ben Kingsley, Lakeith Stanfield, Meg Tilly, Griffin Dunne, and narrator Scoot McNariy, who plays a Rolling Stone writer (very much based on Hastings) granted tremendous access into the riveting and ridiculous world that is war. It’s a remarkable film, and if you can get past Pitt’s extremely affected performance, I’m guessing you’ll love it.
I had a chance to talk to Michôd via phone about WAR MACHINE and the many avenues he explored in piecing together the screenplay after Hastings died. I could have talked to him for an hour about this impressive work, but I think we cover a fair amount of ground. Please enjoy my talk with the talented David Michôd…
Capone: Hi, David. How are you?
David Michôd: Hi, Steve. I’m good, thanks. How are you?
Capone: Good. It occurred to me we met years ago in Chicago when you were here with ANIMAL KINGDOM. It’s good to talk to you again.
DM: Yeah. Wow, that was so weird, that tour. I was so excited I was going to get to see all these different cities in America, then I realized all I was actually seeing was the road from the airport to the hotel.
Capone: As I was watching this film, it confirmed something for me that I’ve felt for many, many years, which is that we can never fully win a war anymore the ways that wars are being fought; it’s not soldier against soldier anymore—that’s something that’s said it a couple of times in the film in different ways. How do you know if you’ve won a war? What’s the standard now for winning a war?
DM: Yeah, this is good. Straight to the core of it. It’s like the one thing we owe our fighting men and women more than anything else is a clear sense of objective. It just seems to me to be nothing other than cruel to send them out to an inhospitable place with a really muddy sense of what it is that we’re asking them to do. I think that clarity exists when a war you’re fighting is being fought on solid moral ground.
In World War II, I don’t think anyone was confused about what the objectives were. We were pushing back aggressive attempts at imperialist aspirations. It was quite clear. We were pushing back against something that shouldn’t exist. What’s happened in the last number of decades is it’s almost as if the U.S. military, and by extension its Western allies, have turned into a kind of quasi-imperialist force without even realizing that that’s what it is. These excursions into these parts of the world really have very little to do with actual hard defense of national security. They’re all about trying to force a world view on foreign land.
Capone: McMahon’s equation on the board about insurgents is something that is new to us. In World War II if we killed an enemy, it didn’t inspire that person’s entire family to try to come and try to find you. They were just replaced by another soldier. Now it feels like a much more personal thing, especially when Americans are going into someone else’s country.
DM: Yeah, this is what Scoot says in the movie. It’s fascinating to me because it’s almost the insidious way in which we can look back on the empires of centuries past and assume that they’re imperial aspirations were clear and evident from the outset. The contemporary world makes me wonder whether this stuff has crept up on us, that our beliefs in moral riotousness and forms of government and political organization are somehow inherently good and worth forcing on the rest of the world, without realizing what we’re doing in the process is actually becoming an empire, which in a way is an entirely new mindset for the United States, anyway.
I think it was quite clear after World War II that America not only didn’t see itself as the world police, but didn’t want to. If anything, its historical roots lay in freeing itself from colonial shackles. And something’s happened in those decades since World War II that has turned America, and by extension its allies, into a quasi-imperial force, which is scary.
Capone: I wouldn’t call this a war movie; it’s a movie about war. You’re telling this story about war through these individual characters, and the character that I really couldn’t take my eyes or brain off of is Keith Stanfield’s character, because he seems to know what’s really up. He’s asking the questions that everyone should be asking but no one is. Tell me about what you saw as the function of that particular guy. He’s the only one going “What the hell are we fighting about? I don’t know what the enemy looks like.”
DM: Well in some ways it’s difficult for me to talk about that character without also talking about Will Poulter’s character. They are the young men who have been charged with carrying out the almost nonsensical directives of the executive level but for whom the emotional response to those responsibilities manifest in very different ways. Basically, they’re both confused. Will’s way of handling it is to simply stick to the strictures and the responsibilities of his role as a squad leader, and Keith as a disgruntled corporal can’t help but voice his bewilderment. It always felt important to me that there be, to the extent that I wanted to build a movie that was about all the various strata of the military, a voice of dissent on the ground. That there be a voice on the ground that said openly and directly “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing here.” And what better person to say that dialogue than Keith Stanfield?
Capone: You filter this story through the eyes of this reporter that Scoot McNairy plays. I’m wondering was that your way of honoring the source of material—Michael’s book and his reporting? What did you achieve in terms of storytelling by using that devise and having him be our narrator and our eyes into this story?
DM: I never felt an obligation to make Scoot’s character as expansive as it is to honor Michael’s book. I always had a belief that the power of Michael’s book was in its observation; it wasn’t in the character of Michael Hasting’s himself. And if he were alive today, I would believe that he would have very much appreciated the tonal thrust of the film. When I first started writing it, I had actually always imagined that the journalist character would be barely noticeable. He would be like the mosquito that brought down the elephant, because I didn’t want it to be a movie about a journalist destroying a military career. I wanted whatever that story was that was written to simply be the strange endnote that was an endeavor that was already doomed to fail.
What I discovered, especially when I was cutting the film, was that there is so much that is complex about this movie. It’s complex in terms of information and politics and tone, and that it was very much in our interest and my interest to have a singular voice of seeming reason guiding you through this world to provide it with a critical distance through which to experience the various tonal schisms in the film, to experience the size of Brad’s character, and also to editorialize poetically.
Capone: In putting together Brad Pitt’s character, did you two come up with this very deliberate delivery? He’s got a very specific physical and vocal quality to him. I’m wondering how long you two worked on that. He looks like he’s always ready to have his picture taken.
DM: [laughs] That’s an excellent way of putting it. I had a pretty clear picture from the outset, as clear as a weird picture like this can be, of a tonally schizophrenic movie in which you felt a clear disconnect between what was happening at the management level and what that experience was for guys on the ground. In order to amplify that schizophrenia, it felt important to me and to Brad that we let him off the leash, that we let that upper-management level get absurd, let it get nonsensical. And to let the character be, to the extent that the movie is about vanity and ambition and hubris, all of those things writ large, to let him be loud and brash and delusional, and to let him be—to bring it all the way back to where we started—that World War II general that we imagined he secretly dreamed of being since he was a kid.
Capone: David, it was great to talk to again and best of luck with this. Thanks.
