Helen Mirren enters the kill zone
Actor reminisces about her co-star Alan Rickman and the challenge of playing a British colonel in film Eye in the Sky
Helen Mirren found it “very liberating” to play British Col. Katherine Powell in political thriller Eye in the Sky, a mission-focused character free of both vanity and back story.
Mirren has plenty of experience playing formidable women, including her Oscar-winning performance as Elizabeth II in The Queen.
In the case of Powell, her part was originally written for a man.
The casting switch not only reflects that times have changed, said Mirren over the phone from New York, it also “stops (the movie) becoming a film about macho men protecting war. It opens the dialogue into what the film is really about, which is a dialogue about question marks.”
Now in theatres and directed by Gavin Hood ( Tsotsi) from Guy Hibbert’s screenplay, Powell leads a top-secret operation from London to capture terrorists in Kenya.
She’s especially keen to bring in a radicalized British woman whom Powell has been tailing for six years.
But when surveillance inside the house — delivered in real time via a camera embedded in a flying bug — reveals a suicide bombing is planned, the mission switches from capture to a drone strike kill. If only Powell can get political players and military higherups, including Alan Rickman in one of his final screen appearances, to approve it.
When a young girl wanders into the kill zone to sell bread, seen by everyone including the Nevada-based drone pilot (Aaron Paul), the moral questions surrounding collateral damage intensify.
Mirren likens the tension and moral conundrums of Eye in the Sky to a courtroom drama. “The audience should come out and talk about it,” she said.
To her, Eye in the Sky isn’t about the ethics of drone warfare in general, “but how, specifically, is it right here in this way or is it right over here in that way?” observes Mirren. “Drone warfare is here . . . we can’t say, do we agree? Drone warfare is not going to go away. We have to think about the implications of using it and regulate the way in which they’re used.”
Although Mirren co-stars with Rickman, who died in January, she never got to work with him because each character’s story was shot separately to keep production costs down.
Mirren said she missed “never having a drink with him at night, which I would have loved to have done.”
Mirren, who appeared opposite Rickman in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra in 1998 at London’s National Theatre, said, “the Alan you see onscreen is Alan. It’s not Alan playing Snape. It’s the Alan we all knew and loved; the funny, witty, substantial, intelligent, humane person. The Alan I knew and loved. And I think that’s great.”
Eye in the Sky wasn’t a big-budget
“We have to think about the implications of using it (drone warfare) and regulate the way in which they’re used.” HELEN MIRREN
movie, but Mirren knew as soon as she read the script that she wanted to do it, although she feared she might have a conflict with her commitment to play gossip columnist Hedda Hopper in Trumbo. By shooting her scenes first, she was able to fit both movies in.
“It was very difficult. I was the first up. We did all of my stuff first,” she said, explaining Hood talked her through other characters’ dialogue and what Powell would be seeing on giant screens once the film was completed. “I had no idea of the tone or what would be happening in the other parts of the movie. I just had to go with my instincts and my director, Gavin.”
When she saw the finished work, “I thought it was fantastic,” said Mirren. “I thought all of the stuff on the ground was brilliantly shot, utterly believable.”
She chuckles when asked if wearing Powell’s uniform of loose-fitting camouflage fatigues helped her find her character.
“You’re playing a woman who is happy to put that on every day of her life, which is beyond my comprehension, personally,” Mirren said. “But it was great because it dropped all sense of vanity. ‘Does my bum look big in this?’ Yes, it does.”