Special correspondent
A PRIVATE WAR Rosamund Pike brings war reporter Marie Colvin vividly to life…
Reporting from such hot zones as Kosovo, Sri Lanka and East Timor, Marie Colvin was a war reporter like few others. “She was everywhere,” says Rosamund Pike, who plays her in new movie A Private War. “She was incredibly intrepid. Really spoke the truth to power. If a pack of journalists were going one way, she’d turn on her heel and go the other way.”
The Gone Girl star might not be the most obvious actor to play the American-born Sunday Times writer Colvin, who lost her life – aged 56 – in Syria in 2012. But there’s no doubting her passion for Colvin, who wore a distinct patch after losing an eye “in service of what she believed in” and later suffered PTSD. “She was just a very brilliant, funny, passionate, complicated woman,” says Pike.
Based on a Vanity Fair article by Marie Brenner, the film is directed by American documentarian Matthew Heineman (Cartel Land), here making his feature debut. Arriving at a time when the integrity of the media is under attack, he thinks celebrating the life of people like Colvin “who are out there fighting for the truth” is vital. The son
of a journalist, Heineman calls it “a deeply personal film”; he previously spent time in Syria, where Colvin reported, for his 2017 doc City Of Ghosts.
After Pike attended a screening, they began to talk about her playing Colvin. “We both wrote each other essays of who Marie Colvin was,” remembers Heineman. “It was amazing how similar they both were.”
It was just the beginning of a journey taken by the actress and her director, who both spent time befriending those who knew Colvin. “It was like being a journalist,” says Pike. “I had to gain the trust of a lot of people and try and hope that people entrusted me.”
Pike’s prep process was arduous, from adopting Colvin’s distinct Long Island accent to emulating her body language. She worked with a dancer to show how Colvin splayed her hands as she gesticulated and held tension in her neck and back. The actress even got a tutor to help understand the geo-political complexities of the worlds Colvin was reporting on.
Co-starring with Jamie Dornan, who plays soldier-turned-photographer Paul Conroy, Pike felt it was crucial to get her spot-on. “She’s a woman who I had to do justice to on film. And Matthew Heineman, a great documentary filmmaker, would be making a documentary about her if he could. And he can’t. But now I’ve finished it, I do think, ‘Wow, that was a huge exercise in being human.’ She lived with an intensity that was a very beautiful and troubling thing.”
ETA | 1 FEBRUARY / A PRIVATE WAR OPENS NEXT YEAR.