Brian De Palma's Redacted is a brutal look at the underside of the Iraq War showing that soldiers haven't become polished holy relics somehow since the Vietnam War, when they were the same array of good and evil that all of humanity is. On the Huffington Post, De Palma sounds off on the film's distributor for changes made in the movie, as well as the right-wing media who have branded him a traitor.
At Redacted's Venice Film Festival premiere in August, the director insisted, "The pictures are what will stop the war. If we put these pictures in front of a mass audience, maybe we can stop the war." He also won the festival's award for Best Director.
In the months since De Palma made his opinions known, however, Redacted's ending has been very publicly --and against the directors will -- altered. While the original ending concluded with a montage of dead Iraqi soldiers, the film's distributor, Magnolia Pictures, has since blacked out the faces, citing potential liabilities as none of the dead signed releases. De Palma, Magnolia president Eamonn Bowles, and company owner Mark Cuban publicly sparred over the changed ending in October at the New York Film Festival, at which the redacted Redacted played.
"I fought this right up to the 9th hour," De Palma says. "That was the first time I actually saw [Bowles]. These people were never involved with the making of this at all. We made this film completely with my Canadian crew. I never saw any of them until then.
"[The studio] writes the releases for the pictures we had in the movie. They were well aware we were using this montage," says De Palma. "This montage is all over the internet. That's where I got the idea. This was not a surprise to them. If they had told me we'd need releases for all the war photos I would have recreated all of them, like I did the film. At the 9th hour someone looked and said 'oh my god'. The bottom line is they didn't want to be associated with the pictures. This is not a surprise."
Redacted has brought the Scarface, Casualities of War and Bonfire of the Vanities director renewed attention from the media. Last month Bill O'Reilly called De Palma "a true villain in our country" and said the movie could lead to deaths of U.S. troops.
"That's how these people make a living," De Palma says in response. "They attack me one day and they attack someone else the next day. They just go into one of their right wing rants... They do this every day. This is people stirring the water and on to Lindsay Lohan or some other outrage. I wish it had some meaning."
