We Spoke With Catherine Keener About Journalists In War Zones: “I’m Astounded That People Would Choose To Do This”
Her new film 'War Story' comes out next month on DVD and Blu-ray.
Catherine Keener has such an anxious, radiant charisma that she could easily just stick to movies which ask only that of her. But the American actress has always made more interesting choices than that, answering her early roles in ’90s indie films like Walking and Talking and Living in Oblivion with more prickly work in Being John Malkovich and The Ballad of Jack and Rose. In 2005, alone she turned in an Oscar-nominated performance (her second) as author Harper Lee in Capote, while helping to ground the comedic excesses of The 40-Year-Old Virgin.
But her role in the new film War Story – which landed in American theatres earlier this year, and is due for Australian release on DVD next month — is decidedly sombre compared to much of her past work. It’s also notable for the sheer amount of solo acting she does, long stretches without any other actor on screen.
Keener plays photojournalist Lee, who has taken refuge in a Sicilian hotel after being released from captivity in Libya. After years of documenting horrific acts firsthand, she finally hit breaking point, and suffers Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) on her own, a world away from her native New York. Lee is stunned by everything around her, including sudden noises, and struggles to make sense of it all. She obsesses over photos, chain-smokes, rearranges furniture. She also stubbornly refuses to come home, and won’t get an x-ray for injuries she suffered on the job.
It’s bleak subject matter, but Keener is hypnotic. She gives a detailed, meditative performance that’s so subtle it’s almost alarming when Ben Kingsley enters the film, for a brief scene as Lee’s hard-nosed colleague. Directed and co-written by Mark Jackson, War Story very quietly examines the complicated psychological toll that covering a warzone takes on journalists.
Keener’s passion for the subject is obvious during our 15-minute phone interview. While she’s chatty and enthusiastic – “I loved it so much,” she says of Melbourne, where she spent five months shooting Where the Wild Things Are – she’s open in her admiration for the journalists who put themselves squarely in the line of fire to, as she puts it, “bear witness.”
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Junkee: It’s great to talk to you. I’ve been watching your movies for years. I think the first thing I ever saw you in was Living in Oblivion (1995).
Catherine Keener: Holy shit.
I think I wrote something about it for my high school newspaper, like two years after it came out on VHS.
(Laughs) That’s great. Yeah, I still have a copy on VHS. That’s funny. I liked that movie. What I always remember about it is, y’know the crew that was filmed [as characters in the movie]? We were standing on the side of the stage and it mirrored our [actual] crew. It was exactly alike.
Well, that’s how it should be, if it’s about the making of a low-budget indie film.
It was just so podunk, it was funny.
War Story is an interesting movie for you, because there are so many solitary scenes. Had you done much work like that before?
No. You know, it’s so funny because, as an actor, you spend so much time [alone]. I do, anyway. I don’t really travel with anybody. I think about how many hours I’ve logged standing on a curb at an airport waiting for a ride by myself. It does get pretty isolated. I haven’t done films like that, but I have felt that way as a result of being an actor. You’re just kind of a traveller.
There are some phone scenes that are pretty emotional. Were you actually talking to someone on the other end?
No, I wasn’t talking to anybody. I think I was just sort of … there. I was ready to go. Sometimes you are and sometimes you’re not.
I had talked a lot to these war photographers, and one of the editors of the LA Times in the photojournalism department. She helped me a lot with things, [like] some of her experiences with people in the field, and how she related to them. I think their stories just stayed with me. I mean, they’re so potent. For the real war journalists, their stories are so incredible. All you have to do is listen, and you can’t shake it.
And the movie is about the toll that the job takes, not about being on the job. So you’re really seeing the cost of doing this kind of work.
Right. And I felt like, at that point for my character, Lee, that was sort of the sum total cost of this constant barrage of images that … are just going and going and going. And she’s a conduit. Her job is to just take, pass, take, pass, take, pass.
I think about that when I see some image that’s horrific – I can still remember photos from 9/11. I still see them – and if I keep seeing them and I keep taking them, just to kind of bear witness to these ruthless people, where does that go if there’s no pause?
If an image can affect a person that much just by seeing it, imagine the person taking it, who is actually there going through the whole process.
The whole process of looking at it and editing it and all of that stuff; you have to distance yourself from it in order to do the work. But when you’ve stopped…
It’s something that’s happening now, I guess. There’s been a lot of research. A place opened up in the last few years for PTSD in journalists who cover violent areas. It is becoming more and more known.
But how could it not [take a toll]? It’s like you’re a soldier without a weapon. Your weapon is your pen or your camera, and that’s the only thing you have to bear witness by. It’s an extraordinary profession.
Without making light of what’s happening in the news, the film’s release is obviously incredibly timely.
Well, they’re just the latest pawns in this fucking shitshow. I mean, it’s really unbelievable. It’s like throwing them in the arena with the lions.
I’ll always remember this: there was an Italian journalist not that many years ago – I think it was the Iraqi War – who was about to be executed, and they had a hood on him. Right before he was executed, he pulled off his hood and said, “This is how an Italian dies.” It just stuck with me so much. That kind of spirit, I think, is what will send a journalist into a warzone. “I’m here for a reason: to see. I’m looking at this.”
They move me so. I can’t think of a word that’s enough. ”Admire” isn’t enough. It’s beyond that. I’m astounded that people would choose to do this. Attention must be paid.
People don’t think about who took the pictures; they just see the pictures and think about the subject.
Precisely. Yeah.
Have you had feedback from photographers and journalists who have seen the movie?
I have. I’ve heard mostly really positive … I don’t know if I should say ‘positive’, but you know what it does? It causes them to share their story a little bit. It’s not so much about the movie. It’s more about what it provoked in them, and their own story.
And I’m sure just opening a dialogue about it.
Exactly. That’s better put. But I don’t need to hear about whether someone liked the movie or not. I mean, I always hope that something happens, that there’s some reaction somewhere. But [that dialogue], that’s what’s interesting to me. I think it’s more that someone cared to look at it a little bit more.
What’s next for you?
I’m gonna do a movie called Unless, based on this book by Carol Shields. She’s from Toronto. It was the last year of her life. It’s a beautiful book. [She was] quite a well-known novelist, she had cancer and wrote this. It’s pretty powerful. So that’s what I’m gonna do next.
(Pauses, then laughs) Another comedy.
Yeah, I was going to ask if you seek out something in the opposite direction after you do a film like War Story.
I feel like, ‘God, I just want to do something funny’, but I’m not calculated that way. I like to go where the directors are – if it’s somebody I want to be around for a couple of months, who has a mind that I admire and want to hopefully learn something from. I don’t really have any big plan. For me that’s okay, because it’s sort of how life is like. It’s just me. I don’t have people advising me or telling me what to do. I have an agent who’s incredibly supportive and has been for 20-some years. ‘Agent’ is way too simple of a word. She’s a friend.
But that’s about it. We’re just travelling around, actors. It’s like, where do you wanna go?
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War Story comes out on DVD and Blu-ray on October 22, through Accent.
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Doug Wallen is Editor of Mess + Noise and Music Editor of The Big Issue. He also writes for Rolling Stone, TheVine, FasterLouder and The Thousands.