Grading ‘The Report’
We track the truth of post-9/11 drama.
One of the most intriguing visuals in the political thriller “The Report” is Adam Driver sitting stoically between massive towers of paper – the entire Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture practices after 9/11 – heaped on either side of him.
The guy who sat in that chair in real life reports that a single detail was different. “I did not look as cool as Adam Driver. That’s a very tall order,” says Daniel J. Jones, the Senate staffer and lead investigator whose arduous work is at the heart of “The Report” (in theaters now). But “if you get out some printer paper and actually stack 7,000 pages, it looks like that.”
“The Report” revolves around Driver’s Jones, his boss Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening) and their efforts to bring heinous and ultimately ineffective CIA counterterrorism practices to public light.
“This is a story about accountability and about how our branches of government interact with each other,” writer/ director Scott Z. Burns says. “And that is very much the story of 2019 as well. They’re not unrelated.”
Looking back now, Jones calls it “a very interesting life for about seven years, for sure,” as he and Burns discuss the accuracy of key “Report” scenes:
Daniel J. Jones’ team did work tirelessly in a cramped basement
When Feinstein tasked Jones with digging into the agency’s Detention and Intelligence Program in 2007, the CIA wouldn’t let the Senate committee interview officials but made records available. The base of operations was a compact room in the bowels of a secret Virginia facility that was half as spacious. “It was a basement, no windows, and it had no internet,” Jones recalls. “You couldn’t take your phone there. You know when you really get into something and dive deep? It’s almost better to not have any of those distractions.”
The film was as accurate as possible in depicting real torture
“The Report” has many flashbacks to the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” developed by two Air Force psychologists at the core of Jones’ investigation, including sleep deprivation, waterboarding, mock burials and rectal rehydration. While Burns acknowledges “a little bit of movie magic,” he did have Navy SEALs as technical advisers “to make sure they were depicting it correctly.” Burns recalls asking one actor playing a detainee to point out any discomfort: “He said, ‘I’m a Lebanese man and it’s really important to me that you show the world what really happened and I want to help with that.’ ”
Jones’ work caused a kerfuffle within the CIA
Everybody seemed to take a side on the report: In a restaurant scene, Jones’
breakfast is interrupted by a CIA employee who tells him, “Your (expletive) report will never see the light of day,” but in one Deep Throat-style moment, Tim Blake Nelson plays a CIA medical officer formerly assigned to a detention site who gives Jones info on the sly. “I was approached by all kinds of CIA officers, many of them offering really great details,” Jones says. “But there was also the other end: ‘Hey, this program was great. I’m sure you guys will find that, won’t you?’ We got played on both sides – it’s a diverse organization.”
A heated face-off between Jones and the head of CIA did happen
Not surprisingly, the agency had a lot of opinions about Jones’ findings. In 2013, newly confirmed CIA director John Brennan (played by Ted Levine) argues in a meeting with Jones that mistakes were made and addressed, but the “unique” intelligence saved lives and led to the Osama bin Laden raid, with Driver’s character getting testy in response. “I was obviously frustrated with Brennan throughout this process,” Jones says.
“He maintains he stood up and objected to the program. We went through 6.3 million pages of records – I found nothing to suggest that.”
The CIA actually filed a criminal referral against Jones
During Jones’ investigation, he discovers a secret internal review by former CIA director Leon Panetta that also found Bush-era torture methods to be largely fruitless and relocates the classified document from the secret facility to his own safe.
After the review goes public during a congressional hearing and the CIA enters Jones’ workspace to investigate – a big no-no – the agency files a criminal referral against him. Jones meets with a lawyer about his situation, the charges are dropped, and like Jones back in the day, Driver plays it all pretty cool. However, “I get more freaked out watching the film and thinking about it with some distance,” Jones says.
“You have such blinders on when you’re in an investigation like that.”
Filmmakers made sure the real John McCain got the last words
Feinstein has Jones’ back throughout the film, though just as important a champion in real life was Sen. John McCain, who doesn’t appear until the end of “The Report.”
“He was always there to offer advice, to push through walls that came up,” Jones recalls. McCain’s eloquent speech in December 2014 commending the Senate’s CIA report was one of the things that made Burns want to make his movie. Instead of getting an actor to play the late senator, Burns thought it’d be more powerful to use a clip of McCain’s speech because “he had been such an incredible spokesperson for this issue.”