Ray Pride

Eugene Jarecki was speaking in paragraphs about "Why We Fight," his essential, articulate documentary about the intertwining of American money and munitions, when we talked while a string quartet played in a downtown hotel lobby.

Like George Clooney's "Good Night, and Good Luck," a central part of Jarecki's film is President Eisenhower's farewell warning against the "military-industrial complex." "Eisenhower stopped me in my tracks," Jarecki said. "I had never seen a president talk as honestly about anything to the American people. He was looking right at me and his eyes were extremely concerned and there was something about... it was immediately clear to me how much courage it had to take, to take your last few moments in office if you've devoted your entire life to being a soldier and a president, to take your last few moments and spend a disproportionate number of them on a warning of that gravity about forces that you, yourself were part of creating, an architect, not just a solider, right? So here he is, basically looking us in the eye, and saying, for many reasons, we've unleashed a kind of monster. What are we going to do about it? We've got to do something about it. There's a kind of vigilance needed to keep this monster in check, to recognize its strength. To recognize the capacity for danger. You can't watch something like [Eisenhower's speech] if you're a caring citizen, not run with it in some way, there's no way to ignore that. At least for me, there wasn't. It was immediately clear to me that there was a film there. I would apply Eisenhower's thinking to today and try to understand to what extent his concerns were coming to pass."

What, I wondered, convinced BBC commissioning editor Nick Fraser to let Jarecki pull the trigger and start doing his wide-ranging shoot and edit? "It's very funny that you ask about Nick Fraser, because the idea for `Why We Fight' was first expressed in a conversation I had with Nick Fraser, where he basically asked me what every filmmaker has ever wanted to be asked, which is, `What do you want to do next?' And he asked it in a very encouraging way and therefore I felt at ease to tell him the most sort of off-the-top-of-my-head blue-sky scenario. And I told him, I want to make a film about the threat posted to democracy by our contemporary form of unbridled capitalism.

"He said, `That's a big topic, how are you going to do that?'--that's exactly what he said. And I said, `Well, nowhere are the friction points between capitalism and democracy more clear than in the mechanics and impact of the military-industrial complex. So I'd like to make a movie about that.' And he said, `What do you want to call it?' And I said, "I've always wanted to make a movie in the spirit of Frank Capra's `Why We Fight' movies. So I dunno, maybe I'll just call it `Why We Fight' and I'll have that speech from Eisenhower, that military-industrial complex speech be one of the voices heard in terms of a kind of partial answer to the larger questions. I kid you not! That's literally how articulate the conversation was! Because I guess it was Nick [allowing me to let] off a head of steam that I'd built up over a long period, recognizing that I had been murmuring about a lot of different things related to this, but that they hadn't coalesced into a pitch of any kind and by asking me in the way that he did with the kind of loving, he's a wonderful commissioning editor, he's the man. He's really the classic artist's benefactor from Renaissance times. If he were living in the Renaissance, he's one of these guys who'd be supporting a bunch of people that nobody else understood. And then, later, you'd hear of them, and if it weren't for him, they wouldn't have a roof over their heads. He does that with a lot of us, and he did it that day with me by reaching out a branch and saying, `What do you want to do with this?'"

So it's Socratic commissioning instead of Socratic questioning. "Yeah, it is. What happened at that moment was that Nick allowed me, Nick is a kind of, he's a Brit, and he's lived a lot in America and he loves America, he had said at that time, I'm fed up with all these people making movies that are critical about America, because that's all I seem to show [on BBC] and I think he recognized what I was going to do was a kind of tough-love portrait of America at a crossroads at a time of great and critical importance in which our future is being shaped, for good and bad. The far-reaching qualities of the film, and the film's capacity for warmth alongside analysis, and for suspense alongside revelation was something that spoke to him cinematically and spoke to him philosophically."

"Why We Fight" is now playing.

(2006-02-21)

Also by Ray Pride

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Gentle, intimate and elegant, Jonathan Demme's homespun "Neil Young: Heart of Gold" is the height of understatement and the depth of heart
(2006-02-14)

Lonesome Crackhead
"Freedomland," both the novel by Richard Price and the new movie directed by Joe Roth, are about the power of a lie and the force of poverty
(2006-02-14)

Humanism's face
Made with the most modest of budgets on digital video, Debra Granik's "Down to the Bone," which won two prizes at Sundance 2004, including for actress Vera Farmiga's "outstanding performance," is a powerful mix of control and fearlessness, of observation and contemplation
(2006-02-07)

Tip of the Week
It's creepy bosh, for the most part, but Shimizu remains more clever than most people obsessed with the act of staring at one's fellow (wo)man
(2006-02-07)

Suddenly Sundance
(2006-01-31)

Tip of the Week
(2006-01-31)

Doll Parts
(2006-01-24)

Tip of the Week
(2006-01-24)

My America
(2006-01-17)

Tip of the Week
(2006-01-17)

Master Shot
(2006-01-10)

Tip of the Week
(2006-01-10)

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