Stop-Loss

[MacGuffin]

Par's 'Loss' is Cornish's gain
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Abbie Cornish has signed on to play the female lead in Kimberly Peirce's Iraq War drama "Stop-Loss" for Paramount Pictures.

Penned by Peirce and Mark Richard, the story centers on a soldier who returns home from Iraq to Texas and is called to duty again through the military's "stop-loss" procedure. The soldier then refuses to return to battle. Paramount and Peirce are in the process of casting the male lead.
 
The studio is eyeing a late summer start date.

Scott Rudin, who was based at Paramount before segueing to Walt Disney Pictures, is producing alongside Peirce.

Paramount's Pam Abdy and Alli Shearmur are overseeing for the studio.

Although Peirce has helmed only one feature film, she boasts an impressive Oscar track record with actresses, having directed Hilary Swank to a win and Chloe Sevigny to a nomination for 1999's "Boys Don't Cry."

Cornish was the toast of last year's Festival de Cannes for her starring turn in "Somersault," which opened Friday in limited re-lease. The Australian actress' credits include the gritty drug drama "Candy," opposite Heath Ledger, and Ridley Scott's upcoming Russell Crowe starrer "A Good Year." She is about to start filming "Elizabeth: The Golden Age," opposite Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush and Clive Owen.

[MacGuffin]

Peirce drafts Phillippe for 'Stop-Loss'
Source: Hollywood Reporter

After months of searching, director Kimberly Peirce has found her leading man for the Iraq war drama "Stop-Loss."

Ryan Phillippe is in negotiations to star in the film, which centers on a soldier (Phillippe) who returns home to Texas and is called to duty again in Iraq through the military's "stop-loss" procedure. The soldier then refuses to return to battle.

Abbie Cornish already has signed on to play the female lead.

Scott Rudin is producing alongside Peirce.

Despite a protracted casting process, the studio is eyeing a late-summer start date. Paramount's Pam Abdy and Alli Shearmur are shepherding the project for the studio.

Peirce has taken her time in finding the right project to follow up her feature directorial debut, 1999's "Boys Don't Cry." That film brought Hilary Swank her first best actress Oscar as well as a nomination for co-star Chloe Sevigny.

[modage]

Olyphant & Gordon-Levitt Board Stop Loss
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
September 7, 2006

Timothy Olyphant and Joseph Gordon-Levitt will star in Kimberly Peirce's Stop Loss for Paramount Pictures.

Based on a true story adapted for the screen by Peirce, the film centers on Brandon (Ryan Phillippe), a soldier who returns home to Texas and is called to duty again in Iraq through the military's "stop-loss" procedure.

Olyphant has been cast as Lt. Col. Boot Miller, a no-nonsense military man who, serving as Brandon's commanding officer, welcomes the troops home from Iraq but then orders their re-enlistment. Gordon-Levitt will play one of the soldiers who returns to a failing marriage and seems to be having the toughest time readjusting to civilian life.

[RegularKarate]

They've been shooting this around town lately.  A lot of people are showing up to watch, thinking it's Grindhouse related then getting all sad when QT doesn't show up.

[MacGuffin]

Trailer

Release Date: March 28th, 2008 (wide)

Starring: Abbie Cornish, Ryan Phillippe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Timothy Olyphant, Channing Tatum, Rob Brown, Alex Frost 

Directed by: Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don't Cry)

Premise: Back home in Texas after fighting in Iraq, a soldier refuses to return to battle despite the government mandate requiring him to do so.

[Pubrick]

i'll give it a go. there's some good lines in there.

it's too bad that we'll have to wait 10+years after the war is over for the definitive iraq/afghanistan war movie to be made.

[modage]

it's too bad that after this flops we'll have to wait 9 more years for Kimberly Peirce's next movie to be made.

[MacGuffin]

[MacGuffin]

'Stop-Loss' faces uphill battle
Ads downplay Iraq theme as audiences seem skittish
Source: Hollywood Reporter

With its morally complex story of soldiers who have served in Iraq, Paramount's upcoming "Stop-Loss" offers a more direct and gritty account of a current soldier's experience than any commercial feature to date.

Yet you wouldn't know it from the trailer, which emphasizes a young cast in moments of camaraderie in Texas. Or from the poster, which has the vibe of a "Friday Night Lights" or "Varsity Blues" as much as "Platoon" or "Full Metal Jacket."

Such is the paradox of Kimberly Peirce's "Stop-Loss," which, after being moved from the fall to avoid the boxoffice hacksaw faced by other war pictures, holds its premiere Monday in Los Angeles before opening wide March 28. The movie addresses the complexities and pressures of those currently serving in the modern military in ways arguably no studio has.

And yet the recent boxoffice fate of Iraq movies has prompted Paramount to take a notably careful approach that downplays the war. The movie is being sold as an MTV Films picture with an attractive young cast (Ryan Phillippe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt) that will lure people to theaters for other reasons.

In essence, they're inverting the model: Where fall movies such as "Rendition" and "The Kingdom" that are only indirectly about Iraq tried to tap into the Iraq zeitgeist, a film far more relevant to the war is in a sense trying to distance itself from it.

"Any movie that deals with the war has to find another way in (to consumers)," said one veteran marketer. "So we're in this weird situation (where) the more a movie like this is about contemporary issues, the less you can talk about them in your marketing."

"Stop-Loss" comes from a director known for her unflinching filmmaking -- her most recent film was 1999's "Boys Don't Cry" -- and centers on Brandon (Phillippe), a soldier who finishes his tour in Iraq and returns home to Texas. Soon after he comes home, however, he find himself ordered back to the Middle East under the Army's stop-loss provision, which can order soldiers back at an time. He then must weigh whether to go back to Iraq or flee the country.

In an interview, Peirce said that she believed her film differed from other recent war movies. "I think this is the first movie told entirely from soldiers' point of view," she said. "What we wanted to do was make a movie emblematic of how soldiers really feel." The movie grew out of video interviews Peirce did with soldiers around the country; at one point, she even considered turning it into a documentary.

The director said that from touring the film this past few weeks, she observed multiple audiences for the film -- those directly impacted by the Iraq war and those who weren't but wanted to understand those who were.

The studio declined to offer specifics on marketing, though those with knowledge of the campaign said Paramount was trying to balance the youth marketing with more provocative elements of the film. Indeed, it has toured Peirce extensively in venues from San Diego to Texas. The movie had its South by Southwest festival premiere Thursday night. Either way, it's a relatively big bet, with the movie from an indie director coming from Paramount and not Paramount Vantage.

Those who worked on earlier Iraq pictures say that, while they hope someone finally can reverse the genre's fortunes, they're pessimistic that marketing, subject matter and timing will change their fate. "Anything that isn't full-on entertainment is going to struggle," said an exec involved with a fall Iraq movie. "You can try to sell it about the narrative or other things, but it's not like you can fool people. I wish it wasn't true, but we're all in a sinking boat."

But some experts point out that "Stop-Loss" should be judged differently.

"The problem is previous movies have been pretentious and preachy without saying anything new," Box Office Mojo's Brandon Gray said. "People want movies to take a stand. They don't want them to be mealy-mouthed."

Another Iraq-themed movie opens this weekend, as "War Made Easy," a Sean Penn-narrated look at war and the modern media, gets a limited release. Like Peirce's film, it's a far cry from mealy-mouthed. With the Iraq War hitting its five-year anniversary this month, filmmakers are hoping the public is finally ready for some directness.

[matt35mm]

I'm really looking forward to this.  The first trailer did put me off because it really played up the MTV Films Presents and so on.  The second trailer showed more of the story, which seems really interesting.

But really it's Kimberly Pierce that makes me so eager to see this.  By the way, she's very active on Facebook, and not in a shady publicity for the movie kind of way--she clearly just likes using Facebook.  She has been responding to questions and comments as well as journaling her tour with the movie.  So add her!

[w/o horse]

I really like Ryan Phillippe and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

[MacGuffin]

Kimberly Peirce finds boys who cry
The filmmaker returns with a look at troubled soldiers forced to return to war in 'Stop-Loss.' Being authentic is key: 'I love real emotion,' she says.
By Paul Brownfield, Los Angeles Times

IT is difficult to separate writer-director Kimberly Peirce's new film, "Stop-Loss," from a joke host Jon Stewart made in his monologue at the Oscars. Noting the poor box office performances in 2007 of Iraq-war-related films like "Redacted," "Rendition" and "In the Valley of Elah," Stewart issued a tongue-in-cheek, President Bush-like call for a surge of war movies.

"Withdrawing the Iraq movies would only embolden the audience," he deadpanned. "We cannot let the audience win."

He has a point. Hollywood's concerted if doomed attempts to meet the country's state of mind have yet to yield a coherent movie experience. Peirce would say that "Stop-Loss" is different, because it's not about the politics of the war, it's about the troops -- the culture of buddies -- who served and continue to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of them was her brother, Brett, who enlisted in the Army at 18 and served in Iraq as part of the 10th Mountain Division of the 82nd Airborne, between 2003 and 2004.

It was Brett, she said, who first brought her attention to the controversial policy of the movie's title, which refers to a provision whereby troops can be compelled to go back for a second or third tour of duty even though they've completed their enlistments and want to return to civilian life. Title cards at the end of her film refer to estimates that 81,000 American troops have been stop-lossed since military operations began in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This is what happens to Army Staff Sgt. Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe), a square-up soldier from a military family in Texas who returns to a hero's welcome -- and then an order to redeploy at the end of the month. We have already seen him lead his men through a harrowing ambush in Tikrit, taking casualties. Brandon's decision to go AWOL rather than redeploy (his options come down to war, jail or living out of the country under an assumed identity) drives the story.

The film, Peirce's first since her debut, "Boys Don't Cry," burst from the indie scene in 1999, is destined to be digested as political and antiwar, no matter how much she argues that her real subject is the culture of guys fighting this war. Interviewing troops, Peirce was struck not by their political stance but by their reluctance to return to a place where they couldn't prevent their comrades from being routinely injured, maimed and even killed.

"There's not a single character who says, 'I don't love my country,' " she argued. "The most profound realization I had was, they sign up for patriotic reasons, almost every soldier I talked to said, 'But when you're over there none of that matters. It's all about your buddies.' And you're like, well that's a cliché, but then it's not."

As for her own feelings, Peirce said demurely: "I questioned whether the Iraq war was going to make America safer."

'Seminal questions'

ON a recent Satur- day, Peirce, 40, was perched on a window seat overlooking the ocean in her Malibu one-bedroom apartment, which doubles as her office. She is small and energetic, conversational and without airs. "Boys Don't Cry" began as her MFA project at Columbia and ended with studio deals for her and starring roles for first-time Oscar-winner Hilary Swank.

Swank has appeared in 13 feature films since "Boys Don't Cry"; Peirce, with "Stop-Loss," has now made two. If it's a false comparison -- an actor doesn't come aboard a movie until after a writer has penned a script and a producer has hired a director -- it nevertheless speaks to Peirce's prolonged absence from the ongoing cultural conversation that are movies.

"I look back and it's like 'Boys' asked me and asked my culture some of the seminal questions that I will ask in my life," said Peirce, who is gay. "Same thing in this. My baby brother, who I brought home from the hospital and who represented pure innocence, was taught to be a soldier and to kill."

She has always been fascinated by masculinity and the working-class culture of fighting and drinking in which she said her father was raised. Peirce's mother was 15 and her father 16 when she was born in Harrisburg, Pa.; she shuttled around, subsequently, among relatives and locales, including Florida, Puerto Rico and New York.

"Boys Don't Cry" was the real-life story of Teena Brandon (a.k.a. Brandon Teena), the Nebraska teenager who played with the boundaries of gender by posing as a male, naively walking the razor's edge of sexual politics until it cost her her life. The film was violent, raw and nerve-wracking, but also elegiac and even beautiful, depicting the isolation of small-town Nebraska and the desperate, highly charged deceptions of its main character.

"Stop-Loss" has a different chemistry to it. The violence emanates from the alpha males, but it's more mournful. Star quarterbacks and homecoming kings, they come back from war alien to themselves, to say nothing of the civilians welcoming them. What eases the transition, mostly, is alcohol and watching videos of themselves in Iraq. All are suffering some form of post-traumatic stress.

Phillippe's character, Brandon, is experiencing flashbacks from a house-to-house firefight, but by the time he gets stop-lossed he's established as the stable one among his buddies Steve (Channing Tatum) and Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), both of whom float around in a haze of aggression and alienation, with the suggestion of undiagnosed brain injuries.

"Her priority is always with the actors," Gordon-Levitt said of Peirce. "She's an extremely sharp, perceptive observer of humanity. We talked about stuff that's not even in the movie. It's there implicitly. . . . That's the rehearsal process [with her], and that's so inspiring and encouraging and frankly rare."

Brandon's going AWOL is as transgressive, in its way, as Brandon Teena trying to pass herself off as a boy. The message is unmistakable; these young guys, from military towns like this one in Texas, are being redeployed like punch-drunk fighters being sent back into the ring for Round 12.

What captivated executives at MTV Films, Peirce said, was the potential youth cross-over of the soldier videos she inhaled as her research. "They go back to their barracks, and they cut on iMovie," she marveled of the videos. "And also they're so savvy, they're pulling images off the Internet of Boeing, and like, you know, planes taking off and planes landing.

"The movie was born out of these hand-held videos that were cut to rock music and patriotic music that I was seeing," Peirce said of this generation at war. "Because . . . we've never been this close to this experience."

Box office is secondary

PEIRCE was back off the road, in the midst of a 22-city screening tour of her new movie, many of the dates at or sponsored by colleges. She seemed unperturbed about the climate in which her movie is arriving or, more likely, indifferent to the marketplace. Indeed, Peirce and the marketplace are only casual acquaintances. Though she was given a series of first-look development deals by Michael De Luca, when he was an executive at New Line Cinema and when he was at DreamWorks, the deals did not produce films.

"I think women are probably not as driven to just turn out the numbers," Peirce said, when asked why she hasn't made more films. "It's a weird thing. Look, I want to make a lot, but I want to love them, because they're a part of me, you know?"

"You talk to any director," she added later, "it's tough. It's tough to make movies that you love."

She spent years developing "Silent Star," about one of early Hollywood's infamous scandals, the murder of silent film director and actor William Desmond Taylor. By the end of 2003, Peirce said, she had the film cast with Annette Bening, Hugh Jackman and Ben Kingsley, only to balk when the studio asked her to make a $30-million movie for $20 million.

Her agent, Peirce concedes, thought she ought to have directed 2005's "Memoirs of a Geisha" after she was interviewed. But Peirce, who has Japanese relatives by her mother's second marriage and has lived in Japan, didn't want to produce a PG-13 film about an underage prostitute.

"Stop-Loss" was written on spec, Peirce working with co-writer Mark Richard. When they started, Richard said, the movie "Jarhead" was on the horizon. Author of the novel "Fishboy," Richard had met Peirce through actress Charlize Theron, whose production company at one point held the film rights to Richard's short story "The Ice at the Bottom of the World."

"Kim and I come from opposite ends of the political spectrum," Richard said. "I'm a conservative and she's a liberal. We agree to disagree, but one thing we won't step down from is: Keep the drama honest."

Richard said he saw "Stop-Loss" in the context of "Coming Home"; Peirce was thinking about "The Deer Hunter" and "The Best Years of Our Lives." Then, Peirce said, "I watched 'The Last Detail,' " referring to the 1973 Hal Ashby film about two Navy men giving a newbie some life experience while escorting him to the brig. "And I sat down and I was like, 'We're making a $6-million movie. That's it.' I mean, of course . . . this became much bigger, but it was with that attitude. I was just like, OK, I can like totally regret the lost years, cause I lost a lot of time."

Years passed developing "Stop-Loss" too, but here Peirce was doing what seems integral to her filmmaking -- what she calls "cultural anthropology." She needed to research, to watch soldier videos, attend their homecomings, talk to them. So she could convey, without pity or polemics, the macho scene in which Brandon, Steve and Tommy pass around a shotgun, shooting up appliances and housewares, wedding gifts that Tommy and his bride never opened.

"I like to go for the reality, I like to go for what's underneath," Peirce said. "And I don't even judge it. But that isn't what all Hollywood movies are. . . . That's an example where my success in 'Boys' brought me this great Hollywood career and all these offers that I really appreciate, but I really have a very particular thing that I like doing. I love real emotion, I love real drama. I love guys shooting up wedding presents."

[w/o horse]

  I hated the camera.  Every time I see a movie with that handheld quality I come to Xixax and say I hate the camera but I'd like to remind the board that I don't think it takes much talent to shoot a film like this.  Chris Menges is a completely legitimate cinematographer and Kimberly Peirce is a competent and natural director but you can't tell by the way this movie looks and moves.  I want to, later on down the road, come back and revisit the large, large pack of these vérité inspired dramas and maybe have a rational conversation about them and reveal how some succeeded more than others.  Later on, maybe.

  The movie tries to fit a lot into it as well, and the swollen narrative drags its stomach between the visit to Preacher's family and the meeting with the New York lawyer.   It's forgiveable because there's glimmers of truth everywhere, and sometimes the characters become honest beacons for the pain of the Iraq war, personal failure, not living up to expectations, and the difficulty of returning home, starting over.  All 100% of my favorite moments are in the Texas hometown.

[pete]

I really liked the acting but the melodrama was kind of intolerable.  I guess it's hard to find closure when the movie is all about what is going on right now at this moment.
christian bale's character in harsh times is a much more convincing decorated iraq war vet.

[john]

I really liked the acting but the melodrama was kind of intolerable. 

Exactly. It's also a shame that there are a few great moments and pieces of dialogue - expressions and recollections that seem very intimate and natural shoehorned, and then suffocated, by these tedious melodramatic tendencies.

I had felt bad about not supporting this theatrically when it was still a hypothetically phenominal follow-up froma director that had been dormant way too long. But fuck that... there are plenty of films released every month I don't get around to buying a ticket to that deserve my guilt much more that this slice of Viacom Net Worth (however sincere it's intentions actually are.)

Joseph-Gordon Levitt was, again, quite good. Pretty understated in comparison to everyone else's hamfisted obviousness.

Though based on only one film prior to this, it seems that Kimberly Pierce should know better. There are even a few glaring, hackneyed moments that seem like they were put together by a rushed High Schooler using iMovie.

W/O is pretty right on about the camerawork. It's intent to show you at all times how naturalistic it is removes it entirely from anything natural - or any moments of spontaneity at all.

It's not that it's a useless film - there are plenty of those to trash (or provide much more discussion on these boards, apparently) it's just that everyone involved was capable of so much more.