“A Private War”

(R) opens Friday, Nov. 9, at Bay Area theaters.

David Oyelowo when director Amma Asante told her about a screenplay circulating about Colvin’s life (based on an indepth Vanity Fair story by Marie Brenner).

“A Private War” follows Colvin during the last decade of her life, leading up to her death, at age 56, in February 2012. She was killed while reporting on President Bashar Assad’s military attack on Homs, Syria, where 28,000 civilians were trapped in the besieged city. (It’s now believed by many that Colvin was targeted and assassinated by the Syrian regime.)

“I was very compelled by the paradoxes in Marie’s life, that she was brilliant and brave and excelled in her professional work,” said Pike, “and yet she battled her own demons, and her personal life was in shambles.”

Best known for her chilling role in David Fincher’s “Gone Girl,” and more recent performances in “Hostiles” and “7 Days in Entebbe,” Pike calls her physically and emotionally challenging portrayal of Colvin “the hardest film I’ve ever done.”

“A Private War” is a wrenching psychological portrait of the complex American expat reporter. Colvin’s dispatches earned her numerous prestigious journalism awards, but she was an alcoholic, pushed herself (and her colleagues, fixers and drivers) relentlessly to the brink of disaster and had debilitating PTSD from all the carnage she had witnessed.

Childless, she longed for a more settled life. (Stanley Tucci plays Tony Shaw, Colvin’s boyfriend at the end of her life.) Yet we hear the real Colvin say in voice-over early in the film: “I hate being in a war zone, but I also feel compelled to see it for myself.”

Pike said she saw Colvin “like an addict. Reporting was this compulsion, and it was her master. It exacted a real toll, but it was also where she felt most alive. When she’d see something blowing up on the news, she needed to be there, and to be up close, closer than everybody else.”

When Pike heard documentary filmmaker Matthew Heineman (“City of Ghosts”) was on board to direct the Colvin biopic as his first narrative feature, “I thought that’s brilliant, he’s exactly who should do this,” said Pike. Heineman already had a reputation, paralleling Colvin’s to a degree, for running toward rather than away from violence to snag a story. While filming his Oscar-nominated “Cartel Land” (2015) about U.S.-Mexico border vigilante groups battling drug cartels, he kept filming with his handheld camera through a firefight in the Mexican jungle and a tense gunpoint interrogation.

“By no means have I experienced danger to the degree Marie did, but I can relate to the similarly dark thoughts she had after witnessing so much,” said Heineman, 34, before “A Private War” screened as the opening-night film of the Mill Valley Film Festival.

“Everyone remarked on Marie’s eye patch, but her inner moral injury was probably much more troublesome to her than any of the physical pain or trauma. I think that’s the case for most people who have been at war — as a victim, a journalist or a soldier.”

Heineman hopes his film reminds audiences that intrepid war correspondents like Colvin — or her photojournalist friend Paul Conroy (played by Jamie Dornan of the “Fifty Shades” trilogy) — “go to extraordinary

Watch a trailer at datebook.sfchronicle.com.

vlengths to bring back stories from all over the world. When people turn to a story in the paper, they don’t always realize these reporters often see more war than some military combatants.

“Especially at this time when journalism is under attack, and we’re living in this post-truth, fake-news era, her story feels incredibly timely,” he said. On the heels of “A Private War,” a new biography of Colvin (“In Extremis,” by Lindsey Hilsum) will be published in November and a documentary on her life, directed by Conroy, who survived the same Homs bombing that killed Colvin, will be released in the U.S. later this year.

“Watching (‘A Private War’), you might think no one in their right mind would put themselves in that degree of risk and go into such a living hell,” Pike said. “But if Marie knew the conflict in Syria was still ongoing, she would just say, ‘It’s what we do.’ She believed so deeply in the need to get the word out to the world.

Jessica Zack is a Bay Area freelance writer.