92 EYE IN THE SKY
Helen Mirren talks hi-tech warfare, but doesn’t drone on.
Helen Mirren dons fatigues and drives the drones in hot-topic military thriller Eye In The Sky. Total Film meets the team who are asking the difficult questions in a morally murky climate. words Paul Bradshaw
Imagine that you’re standing beside a railway line and a train is rushing towards you. Just ahead, the track splits into two. Stuck on one set of tracks is a car with five people in it, and on the other side is a car with one person in it. If you don’t do anything, the train is going to kill five people. But, if you pull a lever in front of you, the train will take the other track and just kill one. What would you do?”
Gavin Hood doesn’t wait for an answer, which is good, because Total Film doesn’t have one.
“OK, if you say yes, you would pull the lever, you would trade one life for five, let’s stand you on a bridge overlooking the railway line instead. There’s still five people stuck on the tracks, and there’s still a train hurtling towards them, but this time there’s no lever to pull – there’s a large man standing on the edge of the bridge. If you want to stop the train, you have to reach out and push him off. Is it still just a numbers game, now that you have to actually get your hands dirty?” Getting excited now, he takes it a stage further. “OK, so you might push him – but what if I ask you if you’re ready to jump off the bridge? It’s still one life for five… And what if those five lives belong to your kids, your family…”
Stumping us with ‘The Trolley Experiment’, an ethical conundrum often put to law and philosophy students, Hood breaks down the crux of Eye In The Sky – a film that swaps trains for Hellfire missiles, five lives for five hundred and imaginary scenarios for real human tragedies. Hood describes it as “the trolley experiment on steroids”.
Splitting the action between a Nairobi suburb, a military bunker in Hampshire, a boardroom in Westminster and a cramped metal box in Las Vegas, Eye In The Sky starts us off with an easy one. A drone plane flying over Kenya spots a terrorist cell gearing up for a suicide bombing – one click of the trigger will drop a missile through the roof and prevent a much bigger catastrophe. Simple, right? But what if there’s a cute little girl selling bread outside the building you’re about to blow up? It’s the first impossible question of many that
Eye In The Sky asks the audience – with Dame Helen Mirren, Aaron Paul, Jeremy Northam, Iain Glen, Barkhad Abdi and Alan Rickman, in his final on-screen role, picking sides as the pilots and politicians weighing lives across their laptop screens.
“I read scripts every week,” says Hood, returning to the political playgrounds of Rendition and Tsotsi after 2013’s YA sci-fi
Ender’s Game. “Some of them are good, but very few take you to that place where you think, ‘I have to make this’. When I first read Guy Hibbert’s script, I had the same experience that I hope we’ve given the audience – I kept turning the page, finding myself more and more tense. I knew I had a pretty good thriller
on my hands, but at the same time it kept provoking questions that had no easy, glib answers. I wanted the audience to feel like they’re part of that conversation. Almost like the jury in the courtroom. It’s not good vs evil. It’s not about revenge. It’s never that simple.”
With the recent news that registered drones now outnumber fighter jets in the US airforce – as well as the dozens of daily reported (and unreported) aerial strikes across the Middle East – the film was an opportunity for everyone involved to join an important global debate about the face of modern warfare.
“You know, it wasn’t so much the role as the movie,” admits Mirren, playing against type as the no-nonsense British Colonel who’s itching for the chance to take out the terrorist cell she’s been tracking for years. “I signed up because I’d love to be a part of this movie. It incidentally turned out to be a really interesting role, but it was one that I would never have imagined before I was offered it.”
Poring over a computer screen in an English bunker, Mirren’s Colonel Katherine Powell sides with Rickman’s Lieutenant Frank Benson in Westminster – both trying to convince a roomful of politicians to stop worrying about the ethics (and media fallout) of killing a girl to save others.
“It’s horrendous,” reflects Mirren. “But I’m sure that people go through it – in war, you go through these moments where you have to make unbearable choices in a split second. You have to be the kind of person who has the ability to make the decision and not go, ‘I don’t know; should I do this, should I do that?’ I think I’d be that person. I don’t have a military mind.”
Originally written for a male actor, Powell’s character changed when Hood convinced screenwriter Guy Hibbert that the film needed to feel universal – asking questions of everyone in the audience about the life or death decisions being made every day in their name.
Decisions, of course, that once would have been made by a soldier with his finger on a trigger in the middle of a battlefield, that are now being made by committee in boardrooms, hotel suites and, in one case played out by Iain Glen’s bumbling Foreign Secretary, on the toilet.
“That happened!” laughs Hood. “I interviewed this one politician who told me that he’s been on his cell phone, stuck in the bathroom, when someone’s called wanting an answer whether or not they should drop a bomb in the Middle East.” It’s a brief moment of release in an otherwise nerve-shreddingly tense film – with Aaron
‘ The machines are out there, and they’re getting stronger’ gavin hood
Paul’s rookie drone pilot sweating over the bomb button in a Vegas container and Barkhad Abdi’s covert operative dodging gunfire on the ground as the terrorists get ready to leave the building, the girl (newcomer Aisha Takow) gets nearer to the blast zone and the real-time clock ticks off the moments left to make the call.
“You could feel the tension on set every day,” says Abdi, picking the film as his first since receiving an Oscar nod for Best Supporting Actor in Captain Phillips. “It’s such a sensitive topic, and it’s so current. But it’s a story that doesn’t get told. No one is talking about drone warfare in Hollywood. Aside from everything else the film says, it tells the story of the innocent people who get caught up in war, on both sides.”
One shot
Filming entirely on a Cape Town backlot, Hood shot everyone’s part separately to keep costs down – drawing eye-lines on blank screens and reading all the missing lines himself to get the right reactions. It’s an odd parallel to the film’s portrait of modern war – no longer waged on a single battlefield but phoned, emailed and Skyped-in across multiple continents, leaving technology to do all the heavy lifting.
“I didn’t even really know what drones were,” admits Abdi (along with Hood and Mirren and pretty much everyone else). “Gavin showed me some of the real technology out in California and you can’t even imagine stuff like that. If nothing else, this film gives us an understanding of what drone warfare really looks like – and what it costs.”
“Some people chuckle when they see the bird…” sighs Hood, second-guessing the obvious questions about ‘The Hummingbird’, a robotic camera disguised as a flying, flapping bird that Abdi’s undercover agent flies around corners to peer through the windows of the terrorist stronghold. “But the real version of that was built five years ago!” Later replaced in the film by an even smaller robo-beetle that silently, secretly spies from a rafter in the roof, Hood seems genuinely worried that the tech in the film is already slipping behind the times. “You can be assured that everything you see in the film is very real,” he says. “It’s all going to look pretty basic in a few years time…”
Not that technology is the real issue, with Hood making us painfully aware that there’s a real human being behind every aerial strike. With around 30 per cent of drone pilots reporting some form of post-traumatic stress (double the numbers of fighter pilots), the film opens up another important line of debate about the psychological cost of drone warfare.
“We talked to a lot of pilots,” explains Hood, basing Aaron Paul’s rookie on a mix of real USAF pilots that he and Hibbert interviewed before filming. “We talked about what it was like to pull the trigger for the first time. Some of them left afterwards and never came back. And then there are some, like Brandon Bryant [ the US pilot who made headlines in 2012 by speaking out against drone warfare] who had taken out many targets until the day he killed a child and couldn’t take it anymore.”
Speaking to everyone from military intelligence officers and arms manufacturers to politicians and journalists, Hood did everything he could to make sure Eye In The Sky was as accurate as
‘ this film shows us what drone warfare really looks like’
barkhad abdi
possible – unearthing a lot of facts that he half wishes were still buried.
“What really shocked me was where the military are going next,” he almost whispers. “We spoke to the guys who make these things. The amount of computing power available today means you can have swarms of armed drones, and you can fly that swarm into an assembly, a party, a convention, whatever… And then you can tell those drones to ‘identify and destroy’. The more people you talk to about this, the creepier it gets. It’s not a theoretical conversation from James Cameron any more – it’s very real. The machines are out there, and getting stronger.”
And that’s not the half of it. Raising more judgement day questions than just robo-right and robo-wrong, Eye In The Sky enters a much bigger debate about whether the means of drone warfare will ever justify the ends – something that Hood still doesn’t have an answer for.
“Extracting the soldier from the battlefield is a very complicated new idea,” continues Hood. “Wherever our enemy moves, we, at the moment, feel justified in attacking him. The question is what that means for the laws of war. And don’t forget, whatever we do, the enemy will do too. You can only be the first person with a new weapon for so long. Are we going to have drones watching us on the streets of London every day? Some would say yes. If you’re a police officer, if you’re Helen Mirren’s character, you want all the tools at your disposal to do your job and keep people safe. On the other hand, if you’re living under the constant surveillance of armed robots – as people in Pakistan are doing at this very minute – it’s sort of horrifying.
“There might not be any easy answers, but that shouldn’t stop us asking the questions.”