The Knock No One Wants to Hear: An Interview with Oren Moverman

by Dan Lybarger

Oren Moverman’s directorial debut The Messenger graphically details the effects of war even though it doesn’t feature a single gunshot. In fact, the most graphic act of violence is when a man spits on one of two unwanted visitors at his door. The men who made him so angry are Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery (Ben Foster, in his first leading role) and Captain Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson), two officers whose duty it is to inform the relatives of fallen soldiers that their loved ones won’t be coming home.

As part of the Casualty Notification service, Montgomery and Stone have to race against CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and the Drudge Report so that the families don’t learn about a soldier’s death second-hand. They recite a prepared message from the Secretary of the Army and exit quickly. The message is devastating, but the two have to keep their own emotions in check. If the technique seems cold and impersonal, it’s preferable to finding out from a letter or an e-mail.

As Moverman and his coscreenwriter Alessandro Camon demonstrate, it’s impossible to deliver bad news without getting affected by it. Serving as a Casualty Notification officer is considered an honor, but soldiers who have had the task will also admit that it’s sometimes easier to charge into combat than to tell strangers their sons or daughters have died.

Montgomery has a combat wound that prevents him from crying in one eye, which might be seen as an advantage with his present duty. He starts violating the rules by befriending a widow named Olivia Pitterson (Samantha Morton). Doing so could get him a dishonorable discharge when he’s only weeks from ending his enlistment. As foolish as that sounds, it’s more prudent than the way he’s been carrying on with Kelly (Jena Malone)—they’re having an affair. She became engaged to another man because she couldn’t deal with the fact that Will is a soldier and could be assigned to potentially lethal duties at any moment. Stone has issues of his own. The strain of his current job makes staying on the wagon after a lifetime of alcoholism an almost impossible task.

The Messenger was made with cooperation from the U.S. military and was filmed on or around Fort Dix in New Jersey. Nonetheless, it doesn’t play like a propaganda film. Instead, the movie feels uncomfortably authentic in depicting how war takes its toll on both soldiers and families even when the troops arrive home safely. The notification scenes are convincing because they feel both heartbreaking and unpredictable. While the lingo and the locations are real, it’s safe to say that The Messenger won’t be used as a recruiting tool.

The Messenger earned Camon and Moverman a Silver Bear at the Berlinale for their screenplay, and Harrelson and Morton received acting nominations at the Independent Spirit Awards. In addition, Harrelson has received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor while Camon and Moverman received a nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

For the Israeli-born Moverman, The Messenger is deeply personal. Now forty-three, he served in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in Lebanon before emigrating to the United States where he contributed to the scripts for Alison Maclean’s Jesus’ Son, Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There, and Ira Sachs’s Married Life. Having visited wounded American soldiers before filming The Messenger, Moverman can speak of sacrifice and loss without sounding like a politician or a sloganeer.—Dan Lybarger

Woody Harrelson and Ben Foster as Captain Tony Stone and Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery of the Casualty Notification Service in The Messenger

Cineaste: This movie hit me a little harder than it would most people because I have two relatives who are currently serving in the U.S. military. Those visits from the Casualty Notification Service are something we really fear.

Oren Moverman: I almost feel like I should say I’m so sorry about that. One of the things that is really complicated for me personally, as I talk about this film and encourage people to see it, is when I talk to people who have family members who are serving. One of the things we tried to do with this movie is to actually make everyone who is going to come to see it, especially those not associated with the military, realize what’s going on in that world. Obviously, it’s a lot harder if you do have a personal connection to it. The truth of the matter is that most people in this country don’t.

Cineaste: In Israel, isn’t military service compulsory?

Moverman: Yes, it is. Everybody serves; most everybody serves.

Cineaste: Did it take a toll on your family when you served four years in the IDF?

Moverman: Yeah. It’s a little bit more complicated in Israel than it is here because, as you say, it is compulsory and everybody serves. Everybody knows somebody who is in the military at the moment, which makes for a very worried, tense, nervous country [laughs] full of people who are impatient with others because they are always in a constant state of fearing that knock on the door. My family was included in that when I was in combat zones and places that were not friendly. I think that I was lucky enough to come back with all my limbs and basically in a good frame of mind.

So I was lucky, and we were lucky. I have a very small extended family so I don’t really have a lot of people in my family who have died in war, but I’ve known people who have died in war. I’ve known people who have died while we were serving together—I’ve seen that side of it.

Cineaste: Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson) served in the first Gulf War, and Will Montgomery (Ben Foster) is a veteran of the current Iraq war. Their experiences couldn’t be more different.

Moverman: Exactly, very, very different wars. Firstly, from a narrative perspective, it’s good to have that contrast. One of my closest friends is former U.S. Marine and Desert Storm veteran Anthony Swafford, who wrote Jarhead. He inspired me in many ways to take a closer look at that particular war and the dynamic of people who were fighting in that war back then, and their frustrations and their sorts of experience, which is so different from what we are doing now. Today we’re much more involved in the day-to-day occupation. I just wanted to bring those two contrasts into play with each other.

Cineaste: In the film, you point out that the Casualty Notification Service is relatively new in the American military.

Moverman: Since Vietnam. People ask me this from time to time, and it’s even brought up in the movie. There’s no good way to do this, right? There’s no way to do this that makes it easier. And there’s such value to having human beings show up to tell you this as opposed to a letter arriving or, you know, a telegram. It’s really complicated, and maybe this is a question that shouldn’t be asked, but I wonder what is the best way to do this. How do you notify people? I don’t have a clear-cut answer to that. It’s devastating either way.

Samantha Morton as war widow Olivia Pitterson

Cineaste: By including the Olivia Pitterson character (Samantha Morton), you show what sacrifices military families make when their loved ones are away.

Moverman: That was really important for us to do. We kept talking about this as shining a light on the people who live with the consequences of the decision to go to war. War is personal to them—not in a political way, not that they’re activists for a political cause—but because what happens in that war to their loved one is going to affect the rest of their life, whether he or she comes back or not. If the loved one doesn’t come back, then that’s a new life altogether. Or if the loved one does come back, he or she comes back with scars—emotional scars, psychological scars, or physical scars. And families—the spouses, the parents—are going to have to live with that.

For some reason that’s not part of the conversation on CNN or Fox. People are really uptight about getting into that conversation. Maybe they just feel like, “Oh, it’s a professional army, they know what they’re doing. It’s their choice, so they have to live with it, and that’s their problem.” For us, it was really important to say, “Well, no. As a society, we’re responsible for the people who are fighting in our name. We can’t turn our back on them. We have to be aware that these things are going on every day.” That was kind of the motivation behind the movie.

Cineaste: Your own experiences were pretty similar to Will Montgomery’s in the film. Is that correct?

Moverman: Yeah, except that I was born and raised in the Middle East, and so, being a soldier in the Middle East, I felt it was in my neighborhood, good or bad. For Ben Foster’s character, and for these American kids that are going over there, it’s 10,000 miles away. It’s another world, another culture. My experience was not as violent as what these people are going through now. It was a very different time. I was serving in the mid-Eighties. But there’s a lot I identify with in the Ben Foster character, although the experiences are not exactly the same.

Cineaste: In the other movies that you’ve cowritten, you’ve written characters the audience can’t necessarily get close to. F.H. in Jesus’ Son is this oddball drug addict. He’s fascinating, but you don’t really get that close to him. With the Bob Dylan characters in I’m Not There, they’re all enigmas. But you almost make us care about Chris Cooper as he tries to kill his wife in Married Life.

Moverman: I think that’s a valid point. I do feel, however, that in The Messenger, it’s different. That’s the intention, and I do think that you get close to these characters, and you care about them and feel for them and feel with them. It humanizes them to see what they are doing, and I think it makes you feel closer to them.

Cineaste: Did you or Camon ever consider setting this in either Italy, where Camon was born, or Israel?

Moverman: No. We’re immigrants, and this country fascinates us. We’re actually very passionate about the fact that we are Americans now in a kind of old-fashioned, almost sentimental way. It was really important for us to make an American movie. That was a real goal.

Cineaste: How do you handle American idioms so well?

Moverman: It’s a funny thing that happens once you get into the writer’s head, which I’m not in every day. But when you do get into that space, you start hearing voices. You start making voices work for you. The way I do it, and I think Alessandro’s very similar, is by listening to a lot of people around us and trying to take as much as we can, even though we don’t speak that way. I have a slight accent. Alessandro has a very heavy Italian accent. We don’t speak in these colloquialisms, and we don’t really communicate that way, but when we’re in those character zones and writing them, we’re pulling out every reference we’ve ever had and every voice we’ve ever heard.

We also had on set with us Lieutenant Colonel Paul Sinor, who was a gold mine because whatever he would say sounded so good that we would just steal from him. That’s how we would Americanize it. In a way, and I think Alessandro would agree, we have to work extra hard because we always feel a bit behind. We really have to find the language and make it as powerful and as accurate as possible because if we don’t, you get the feeling that some immigrant wrote this movie.

Cineaste: I understand that when Foster and Harrelson interacted with the performers who were receiving the death notices, they weren’t told how the recipients would react. Is that true?

Moverman: There were no rehearsals. We separated the actors so that the notifiers never met the people they were going to notify. It all happened in a very raw way, in a very immediate, present way. I spoke with both sides separately and they didn’t know what the other guys were going to do.

Cineaste: You’ve had a warm reception with this film. Why do you think that even the better films that have dealt with the Iraq war have not done that well at the box office?

Moverman: That’s a good question. I just don’t know. I think that every movie is different. If we were to analyze it, I think that it has a lot more to do with the way marketing works, the way publicity works, the way films are strategically placed in the marketplace. I know that’s not the fun stuff to talk about. But I think if you’ll look, case by case, you will see that this applies not just to Iraq-themed movies, but to any movie. I don’t think it has that much to do with the theme, to tell you the truth, even though the tendency is to bunch all of these films together. That particular subject matter doesn’t work because people aren’t ready for it or just don’t care.

But I think that if you make a good movie, and I think that’s what we’re all trying to do, hopefully people will pay attention, and they will come. And they will not be afraid of the subject matter. They will just want to see a good movie. I haven’t seen all of them. I can’t tell you why a particular one works, and another doesn’t. It just starts with trying to make a movie that works on its own.

Cineaste: I understand that Woody Harrelson didn’t wear leather boots for this role.

Moverman: Woody is very special that way. He’s vegan, not just in his diet, but also in the way he lives his life. He doesn’t wear certain things. He doesn’t wear leather, and he doesn’t wear chemically-altered or animal fabrics. So part of the deal of working with Woody Harrelson is that you have to provide him with some kinds of special clothing.

The Messenger contrasts Montgomery and Stone as soldiers from different generations and different wars

Cineaste: That seems to be a fairly small price to pay for what you get.

Moverman: I think yes. It’s so worth it. It’s not even an issue. But the smaller the film, the more complicated it gets. We have a scene in the movie where Woody is eating a hamburger, but he would not eat a hamburger, and we had a mad scramble on a Saturday afternoon to find the right kind of vegan burgers.

Cineaste: Even though the film is set here in the States, would you say that it is universal in its themes?

Moverman: I would say yes, absolutely. That was the intention as well—to make an American film that touches on themes and ideas that could easily be understood everywhere. I do think it boils down to it being a film about life. How do you get through life, having experienced pain, loss, and grief? How do you find friendship, love, humor, and connections in a world that is not easy to live in?

Cineaste: You are actually the fourth person who was attached to direct this film. How did it feel to take the reins yourself?

Moverman: It was a process. I came into this as a screenwriter. I never really imagined that I’d be directing it, so we were lucky to have three really interesting directors along the way. Each one of them [the late Sydney Pollack, Roger Michell, and Ben Affleck] dropped out for a pretty legitimate reason. No one left slamming the door behind them. It just didn’t work out for practical reasons. Or in the case with Sydney Pollack, we couldn’t develop it in a direction that he wanted. He admitted that it wasn’t going to be a love story and that was what was interesting to him. When Ben Affleck left the project, we had all the momentum to make the film, but the writers’ strike was coming up. There was all of this energy behind it. They offered it to me. I was trying to be very responsible as a screenwriter and not jump into it without making sure with my cowriter that it was the right idea at the right time. Once everyone agreed, I was more than happy to take over.

Dan Lybarger, who talked with Joe Berlinger about his documentary Crude in Cineaste, Vol. XXXIV, No. 4, has also contributed to The Kansas City Star, Script Magazine, eFilmCritic.com and KCActive.com

The Messenger is distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories, www.oscilloscope.net. To purchase The Messenger, click here.

Cineaste,Vol.XXXV No.2 2010

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