In simple terms, say your contract with the military is for 2 years. You’re expecting to get out on the day you contract ends. But instead of going home, the government ships you back to Iraq or anywhere they chose. That’s getting Stop Lossed, and it's what the film is about. Here’s the official synopsis:

Decorated Iraq war hero Sgt. Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) makes a celebrated return to his small Texas hometown following his tour of duty.  He tries to resume the life he left behind with the help and support of his family and his best friend, Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum), who served with him in Iraq.  Along with their other war buddies, Brandon and Steve try to make peace with civilian life.  Then, against Brandon’s will, the Army orders him back to duty in Iraq, which upends his world.  The conflict tests everything he believes in: the bond of family, the loyalty of friendship, the limits of love and the value of honor.

Anyway, about a week ago I got to participate in a roundtable interview with Kimberly where she talked about what drove her to make the film and why it took her so long to make another movie after the critically acclaimed “Boys Don’t Cry.”

As always, if you’d like to listen to the audio of the interview just click here. It’s an MP3 and easily placed on a portable player. Finally, if you’d like to watch some movie clips from “Stop-Loss” click here.

Question: Why aren’t there any women in your unit?

Kimberly Peirce: That’s a great, great question. I was interviewing soldiers across the country and I was looking for the emblematic story of what was going on with this generation, which was fundamentally either people who were in the service or who had signed up for patriotic reasons. They wanted to protect their family, their country, their home. They went over there. The most profound realization that they had, and that they share with me, was that once you get over there, it's not about why you signed up, it's about survival. It's about protecting the soldier to your left and the soldier to your right. The whole focus is to bring them home alive. So I wanted to tell that story. As I got into it, I said, “Great, let's put a woman in here.” But when I would go deeper into interviewing Army guys, not National Guard - okay? - and I wanted it to be Army, that was very important, because there is a difference between the two and I thought that again that was more emblematic - even though I think that there's a great story in the National Guard. Women are not put into combat in the Army. And the thing is this. That means that if you want that mentality of - I'm going to pick up a gun and I'm going to charge into this situation, I couldn't do it with a woman. Right? But women are certainly doing combat, and this is very interesting. I went to Paris, Illinois, the homecoming of a thousand soldiers of the 1544th Guard unit, because I am very interested in the Guard, and those women, unfortunately, that unit had the highest casualty rate and the highest number of combat hours. So then you say, “Well how were women getting killed in combat if women aren't supposed to be in combat?” And that's because it was a transportation unit. They were driving the generals to and from Abu Ghraib and those kids were getting fired on on the way. So women are fighting, right? But it's ending up that they're fighting because they're driving a car that gets attacked, which is just as valid as what the men are doing. But if I want to tell the story of this band of brothers, then it had to be about the men. And the men said to me, “Look, if we have a woman on our unit, it's not the same. We're not going to rely on her the same way.” Now is that right? Probably not. But that's what most men will confide to you. They’re just like “It's about the camaraderie between men.” And that's an issue we need to deal with, but what I didn't want to do was defuse the power and the authenticity of my male movie with something like that.

Question: You originally wanted to make this as a documentary. How far were you into it when you had this idea of making it into a feature theatrical film?

Kimberly Peirce: That's a good question. I mean, when I say I was making a documentary, it was that I was doing what I do when I work. I pick up a camera and I go and I am drawn to something that is both personal - my brother was enlisted and my country was at war - and I had been in New York for 9/11, I saw the tower fall, so there's something personal here, there's something I have a sense of, but there's something I don't fully understand. So for me to go and interview people, I can begin to get inside the story better. I always videotape everything. My house is filled with them. I was thinking this will probably be a documentary. I was also collecting soldier-made videos. The videos that they take with their hand-held cameras. They put them on the gun turret, they put them on the ground, they put them on a sandbag, and they film their experience in combat or their experience in the barracks. And then they go back and they edit it on their little computers and they put it to Toby Keith or patriotic music, Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue, I’m an American Soldier. I mean I love those songs. And they bring you to tears when you watch them because they're so patriotic and the way the guys cut it together. And also the rock music, Drowning Pool’s Let the Bodies Hit the Floor. So I was collecting all this stuff and I was trying to figure out, because I always let the material speak to me, what is the story here? I was on the verge of making it into a documentary. I was about to buy all these cameras and send them to soldiers. What happened was that I was paying for everything, and I get to a point where I'm like if I know where this is going and I'm going to spend more of my own money, there's going to be a limit to what I can do. So I actually went to Participant Productions with a proposal. They were the ones who made the Al Gore documentary. And it’s actually so funny, I talked to David Guggenheim and he was like, “I'm making this movie on global warming.” That’s what he was working on. They were willing to give me money and what happened was, I said, “You know what? I don't want to take it.” It would have been a substantial amount of money to move forward with this soldier-made video project, because I was starting to understand what the emblematic story of the generation was, and I didn't want to commit to an output of a documentary when I could tell that I was going to make a fiction. And the reason that making a fiction made more sense here is… So here I was listening to all these stories that were so moving about soldiers' experiences in combat and coming home. No matter what, it was told in the past tense. So if I wanted to bring the audience as deeply as possible into the story, I was better off taking the stories that I was understanding, distilling them down into the underlying emotional truth, creating a fiction, and then I could tell it in the present tense.

Question: In so many areas of the country there’s still a reflexive tendency to react to anything that’s deemed critical of the prosecution of the war. Do you feel that your film can overcome that?

Kimberly Peirce: That is definitely an attitude that is out there. I've been very fortunate. This movie is pro-soldier. This movie was born from the soldiers' experiences literally. My brother fought. I interviewed soldiers. We include their music videos, the videos that they make in the movie. We had soldiers, Iraq vets and Marines from other wars look at every version of the script. They actually ran our boot camp. Sergeant Major Jim Dever, 25 years in the Marines, loves the military. I mean this is his whole life. He's a total pro. He does all of Clint Eastwood's movies. He had trained many, many soldiers, and he set up a boot camp that was modeled after the training that he did for soldiers for the actors. We had Iraq war vets in the boot camp because I wanted my boys as they were being trained, I also wanted them to be talking to soldiers all the time. Find out from their perspective, what does it feel like, what does it feel like? And the great thing is we were all coming to the same conclusion. Every soldier says it’s about camaraderie. So I didn't have to kind of dictate that. The reality was revealing itself. Soldiers have come to all the screenings. Soldiers are in most of the scenes when there are a lot of soldiers. And now I've just done this 22-city tour and we go to a commercial theatre and we put people from colleges and people from the community and soldiers. We’ve had vets at every screening, and so often - I'll give you my website, you'll see – we’ve got soldiers standing up saying, “Thank you for making a movie that tells it accurately. I don't know how you did it but you got it accurate. And thank you for respecting us. And thank you for protecting us.”

Question: Pro-soldier but not necessarily pro-system?

Kimberly Peirce: Not necessarily. Yeah, you could put it that way. The thing is it's pro-soldier. Right? And then, this is the thing, when you tell a drama, which is really my passion -- I love great stories, I love great characters, I love human issues, and I love issues that are personal to me -- for me, it's always about the character. Who is that person? How do they live? What would they say? What would they do? That's what I'm doing every single second of making the movie. So yeah, if the soldiers are having a problem with something, then the character can have a problem with it. Other than that, it really is out of my jurisdiction.

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