Mirren: Eye a ‘powerful,’ ‘ urgent’ film
TORONTO — With drone strikes becoming the new form of warfare and stirring up heated debate over civilian casualties, Helen Mirren dropped everything to star in Eye in the Sky, a taut drama about that very subject matter.
The Oscar-winning British star had a potential conflict with another, bigger movie at the time she got the script for Eye in the Sky, in which she plays a U.K.based military officer in charge of a drone mission in Nairobi.
But she felt it was an “urgent” story that needed to be told and she took it on instead — even though it hadn’t secured distribution yet.
“When I first read it, I tell you, I thought, ‘This is incredibly powerful and I want to do it.’ There was just no question in my mind,’ ” Mirren said during last September’s Toronto International Film Festival, where the film made its world première.
“I felt it was talking about an incredibly difficult subject in a very thoughtful and properly human kind of way.”
Gavin Hood ( Tsotsi) directed and Guy Hibbert wrote the script for the film, in which a planned drone strike against a Somali terrorist group is complicated when an innocent young girl enters the scene to sell bread near the terrorists’ house.
As the military assesses the potential collateral damage, politicians and experts in the U.K. and the U.S. debate the human, legal and propaganda ramifications.
The suspense builds as they agonize over whether to launch the strike and kill the girl, or allow a suicide mission to happen and kill 80.
“In reality, these decisions are not taken lightly,” said Mirren, who won an Oscar for her starring role in The Queen.
“Do you sacrifice one to save 40, or do you sacrifice 40 to save one? What do you do?”
Barkhad Abdi, who got an Oscar nomination for playing a Somali pirate in Captain Phillips, co-stars as an agent who uses high-tech spy gear to assess the situation on the ground.
He felt close to the subject matter, having fled civil war with his mother and siblings in Mogadishu when he was young.
“But with this situation, it’s different,” he said. “With this situation, it’s a drone. At least when the war happens, people know the danger surrounding them. They try to run for cover, hide.
“But with the drone, people don’t know. No one knows what’s going to happen, no one knows there’s any danger coming and one second it’s all over.”
Hood hopes the film “reminds us of our common humanity and that we don’t lose our sense of empathy for others and we don’t turn the enemy into a dehumanized, non-human object.”
“All sides in a conflict try to dehumanize the other and that’s the only way you can really continue,” said the South African native, who was drafted by his country’s military at age 17 and lost a close friend in battle.
“Both sides do this, throughout history: ‘The enemy is not like me, the enemy is not human, the enemy is somehow other than me and therefore not worthy of my compassion or empathy.’
“Usually what happens in conflicts is we take that approach until it’s reached such an awful climax and then we’ll go, ‘Oh my God, what were we thinking? It’s awful,’ and we have to reconcile.
“So I hope the film contains elements of those complex human relationships.”
Eye in the Sky, also starring the late Alan Rickman, Iain Glen and Phoebe Fox, opened Friday.