By Danny Peary
“This film reminded me of a courtroom drama, only the audience is the jury,” says Helen Mirren at the press conference for Eye In The Sky at The Waldorf Astoria in New York City. “And then when you come out of the cinema, hopefully you go and have dinner or you go to a bar and you discuss it, and you talk about strategy. Is it correct, is it incorrect, should we, shouldn’t we? The film throws it out to the audience. And what I love about the film is that it makes no decisions for you. It puts the questions in your lap.”
In Gavin Hood’s (Tsotsi, Ender’s Game, Rendition) white-knuckle political thriller, Eye In The Sky, Helen Mirren slips into military garb to play Colonel Katherine Powell, a UK-based commanding officer who wants to order a drone strike on a house in Nairobi, Kenya before the major terrorists who are inside depart. With time running out, her commanding officer, Lt. General Frank Benson (Alan Rickman’s last role), is elsewhere in a stuffy conference room trying to convince skeptical British diplomats of the legality of the strike. When it is obvious that one of the terrorists is about to go into a highly populated area wearing a suicide vest, it looks like the missile strike will get clearance from British and Americans at the highest level. But when a little girl starts selling bread outside the house, Steve Watts (Aaron Paul), the drone pilot who sits in a bunker in Nevada, refuses to launch the missile until a new collateral damage assessment is done, and there is less chance the girl will be harmed.
When watching this exciting, provocative movie, you may find yourself rooting for something that you were against when you entered the theatre. And afterward, you will be eager to engage in healthy debate about whether drone strikes are ever justified. This is the rare recent movie that encourages thinking, and that’s surely a good thing. “I was drawn to this film because of the amazing script [by Guy Hibbert, the writer of Mirren’s acclaimed TV series, Prime Suspect],” the actress says. “The film is so true in filmmaking. If it’s on the page, it’s on the screen, and with this movie, it was absolutely on the page. It’s beautifully written and constructed, and it focuses on an interesting issue in a very interesting and humane way. I didn’t really know very much about drone warfare, but we were all on the learning curve with this one. Regarding the research that Guy had done, and then that Gavin had done, we all learned a lot. I had no idea of the technology. I had no idea that these kinds of operations are conducted in the way that they are with all of these checks and balances. That’s a good advertisement for democracy. It’s not bad that people go into these kinds of operations with their consciences and an awareness of legality and political issues; it was fascinating how so many voices are involved. Every second counts, which is how the film ratchets up the tension.”
Helen Mirren is typically commanding in the role of Colonel Katherine Powell, but as director, Gavin Hood, reveals at the press conference, the role was actually written for a man. “I never told Helen until after the film was made that Powell was originally a male,” the director smiles. “In the original script, the character was written for a man and I don’t judge Guy Hibbert for doing that. There are many, many men doing this work, and there are women doing this work, but frankly at this point, there are more men than women doing military work. Helen only found out when I mentioned it in some interview.” The actress laughs. “Yes. Yes. Yes. And I was going, ‘You were so bad!’ But the issues become broader with a woman as the Colonel. Would a woman make those decisions? I don’t think that’s in the discussion at all. It’s more that we are all in this together, so we women can’t sit back and say, ‘Oh, typical men, you know.’ Having it be a woman is a very good device just to broaden the discussion and bring us all into the discussion.”
One of the many discussions that the film may provoke is that revolving the plight of refugees around the world, and particularly in Mirren’s homeland of England, which is increasingly feeling the force of those heading into Europe from The Middle East. “It’s a problem in many people’s minds, yes,” Mirren says. “Whether it actually is a problem is another matter. For millions of years, it seems to me, people have been traversing the globe and finding safety. That is the absolute natural human thing to do. We’re just obeying our perfectly natural human instincts, and animal instincts, if you like. It seems to me that that is the history of human life: moving to a better place. My God, I’m part Viking…we’re all mixes. That’s the brilliance of DNA: that I can find that I’ve got a little bit of Chinese in me. It’s exciting and wonderful, in a way. I know it comes out of tragedy and horror and that is something else, but there are beautiful things that come out of that.”
As well as being a cogent, keenly intelligent look at an important issue, Eye In The Sky also has the sad distinction of being the film of the late, great Alan Rickman, who passed away in January this year. “I think that Alan would be incredibly proud of this movie,” Mirren says. “I think he is very proud of this movie, let’s put it that way. I think that if he looked at his canon of work, and it’s been great work his whole life, I think that if he had the chance to choose what would be his last movie, I’m convinced that he would point to this movie. What I love about it is that the Alan that you see up on the screen is Alan. He was brilliant as Professor Severus Snape and in all of the character roles that he often played. But that is Alan in Eye In The Sky. The elegance, the wit, the formidable nature of him, the humanity of him. We have Alan up on the screen, and I think that’s such a great thing for his last movie.”
Eye In The Sky is released in cinemas on March 24.
