Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal will be on ABC’s “Nightline” tonight discussing the new film, the controversy over whether or not they obtained classified material to write the script and the efforts they went through to achieve authenticity in depicting the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound and a preview of the interview has just arrived online.
The film screened over the weekend for critics and runs two hours and 39 minutes and about approximately 30 minutes of the is made up by the raid on bin Laden’s compound. The title for the film comes from the code for the SEAL team’s landing time of 12:30 a.m. and what you’ll see in the video below is Bigelow describing the lengths they went to remain as accurate as possible.
The set for the raid was built in Jordan, where they shot for almost four weeks. There, the floor, tile, carpet, furniture and the marks on the walls were copied from images seen in ABC News footage that Bigelow says they reviewed frame by frame. As for that confidential material controversy, well, Boal seems a bit incredulous considering those making the claims were making comments about the film before he’d even written a word of the script.
“I certainly did a lot of homework, but I never asked for classified material,” Boal said. “To my knowledge I never received any.”
“They were proud of what they had done, but they had more or less resigned themselves to the fact that what they had done is not something they could talk about publicly,” Boal said. “But one of the things a movie allows people to do is talk in a way that is a little bit freer because they know that movies can change the way people look, [and] that I don’t have quite the same standards of having to reveal sources as I would if I was, let’s say, running a front page piece in the New York Times.”
In addition to that video, a new TV spot has also come online, which I will now have the pleasure of avoiding while I watch football and college basketball for the next week, just as I had to do last night during Sunday Night Football. You, however, feel free to give it a spin.
Zero Dark Thirty hits limited theaters on December 19 and expands wide in January. In the “Nightline” piece Bigelow says, “I think it’s the story of a lifetime.”
