Good Kill-In Theaters May 15th

ANDREW NICCOL DIRECTOR/WRITER Q&A

Can you describe Tommy Egan in your own words?

He’s a character who we see going through this new schizophrenia of warfare, so he’s doing what we’ve never asked a solder to do before, which is to fight for 12 hours and then pick up the kids from school. We’ve never asked our soldiers to decompress like that in such a short amount of time. Tommy is a man who’s struggling with this new form of warfare. He’s also a pilot — he’s grieving the loss of flying, having been pulled out of the cockpit. A large part of the film deals with him grappling with the death of flying.

You’ve worked with Ethan Hawke in several movies. What did he have in particular as an actor that you thought would bring Tommy Egan to life?

I have a shorthand with Ethan, having done three films together. He’s almost incapable of doing something dishonest — if he forgets a line of dialogue, it’s usually because it’s a bad line. He was also completely right for the role because he’s the right age; he could play that approximation of post-traumatic stress disorder that these pilots get. Ethan also has a great facility with language, and I told him we won’t be needing that because he’s playing a strong, silent type. Normally he plays gregarious characters, but I needed him to shut that part of him down and become emotionally unavailable.

What was the genesis of this project — what drew you to want to make a film about drone warfare?

It used to be the case that if you went to war with a country, a fighter would actually go to that country. And now we’re in a situation where we fight a lot of wars by remote control. I was interested in how a character like Ethan’s might deal with the schizophrenia of that. The other aspect I found interesting is the fact that a lot of these pilots — especially the ones who have flown before — feel like cowards when they’re engaging in drone warfare from afar. The military was going to issue a medal for drone pilots, but they had to rescind it because there was an outcry from actual pilots. This is a new kind of warfare that we’ve never seen before.  I knew about drone strikes but I had never realized exactly what it entails to carry out that strike. The fact that a lot of these guys are based outside of Las Vegas was something you couldn’t make up. I found it intriguing how we’ve transformed our desert into Las Vegas and now we’re fighting another country, in another part of the world, where there’s an actual desert — visually I found that very intriguing.

Can you discuss GOOD KILL’s unique point of view, which is often from the perspective of an unmanned drone?

We shot in Morocco — Morocco plays Afghanistan, Waziristan, and Yemen — and I never wanted to shoot on the ground because our UAV crew in the movie never goes on the ground. It was important to me to respect the point of view they were operating from. But it was also a challenge because in order to choose locations I had to scout by helicopter or a crane. I couldn’t just drive into a town and say this looks great — until I saw it from above, I didn’t know if it looked great. So I tried to conform to that God’s-eye point of view as much as possible. Tommy Egan has a God’s-eye point of view, but then on top of that there’s a God — I wanted to put him under the same sort of surveillance that he was employing.

On that note, can you explain the patch of green in the backyard of Tommy’s suburban home?

That house I used for the Egan’s is actually owned by a member of the military. I wanted to contrast all the brown I was seeing in the same manner that I used the Vegas strip with its glitz to contrast the brown of the warzones. So I gave the family a new, almost surreal green lawn. We’ve managed to bring water to the desert and that’s how Vegas exists. I also wanted our desert to contrast with the deserts of the Middle East, the ones Tommy sees at work every day. Those desserts are a world away from Las Vegas; they’re very brown and desperate for water, implying haves and have-nots.

Las Vegas is crucial to your setting — at one point it’s referred to as “the end of civilization.” Were you inspired by a specific Nevada Air Force base, or did you merely want to weave Las Vegas into the plot, and if so, why?

I wanted to base it on an actual base outside of Las Vegas. I didn’t make anything up but I also couldn’t name it, because I couldn’t attach the missions I have in the movie to that particular base. There’s only one base located outside of Las Vegas, so it’s no real stretch finding out what it is. Visually, it was an amazing, obscene contrast between what the drone pilots were seeing during the day — this very arid landscape, compared with the garishness of Vegas. The younger drone pilots I spoke to for research would actually do a shift, where they’re fighting the Taliban with a joystick, then go home to their apartment near the Vegas strip —they weren’t really family guys like Tommy — and play video games. I didn’t even put that in the movie because I thought it was so outrageous.

When the drone pilots enter the cubicles where they fight the War on Terror from Nevada soil, a sign reads You Are Now Leaving the U.S.A. Can you explain this interesting and very specific detail?

It’s the way people tend to customize their cubicles at work. It’s ironic as well because it reminds us again of what a remote-controlled war this is. They’re 7000 miles away from the enemy and once they go in there, they sort of lose touch with reality. It’s also surreal that it’s basically 12 hours apart: when it’s dawn in Afghanistan, it’s dusk in Vegas and vice versa. I imagine the crews found that disorienting.

Tommy is a former fighter pilot who is fighting a different kind of battle in GOOD KILL, contending with shell shock while he sees a lot more from his cubicle piloting drones than he ever would have in the cockpit of a plane. What are the psychological ramifications of this new kind of fighting?

I spoke to a drone pilot who was a sensor operator, which is what Zoe Kravitz’s character plays. If you were a jet fighter, you would drop your ordinance and fly away — we’ve never asked pilots to hover over the scene of their destruction and basically do a body count, which the military calls “damage assessment. This guy I spoke to told me about how they use the infrared night vision to see (targets); he witnessed one strike where they had blown off a guy’s leg — and he was obviously going to die — but he was glowing white because heat appears white in thermal imaging. He gradually got darker and darker as he bled out, until he was the color of the ground. Again, we’ve never experienced anything like this. It’s no wonder there is so much burn out in the drone program. It’s a combination of mind-numbing boredom punctuated by moments of horror.

The grey area of the film — and with drone warfare in general — is how incredibly precise drones are in achieving the mission. There are other positive applications as well. Would you agree?

Bruce Greenwood’s character is interesting in this regard because he has to see both sides, whereas Jake Abel’s character is a great advocate of drone warfare while Zoe Kravitz’s character comes to be quite an opponent. People have said it’s the “least worst” option because there are things about drones that are good — they are incredibly precise. If you have the right intelligence, as soon as you laser your target, you’re going to hit that house. You just have to make sure you have the right house.  There’s also the over-watch aspect of drones, which you get to see in the movie as well. A lot of Marines wouldn’t want to leave their base over in Afghanistan if a drone wasn’t watching over them in case of ambush. It’s foolish to be anti-drone — you may as well be anti-Internet. It’s here and it’s not going anywhere. On the other hand, we have to be careful that our War on Terror doesn’t actually cause terror.  There’s a risk that when we kill a terrorist, we create more.  I was very touched by the fact — and I put this in the script — that kids in Waziristan grow up hating blue skies because it’s ideal conditions for drones to fly. They wake up with smiles on their faces when it’s a gloomy day because drones have trouble seeing through the clouds.

Some of your dialogue is straight out of military strategy, very insider and specific, like in TOP GUN — “Warheads on the foreheads” and “fly and fry” and such. How did you research this part of the screenplay?

I had two former drone pilots on set with me the whole time and they were very important to make sure everything was authentic. The pilots were basically tutoring Ethan and Zoe on the language and actions when piloting drones from 7,000 miles away. They would also correct me if I did or said something that was not militarily correct.

The way their kills are described became the title of your film — GOOD KILL.   Can you talk about the military jargon?

“Proportionality” is an amazing word that was invented by the C.I.A. — the idea that you want to kill me so badly that you’re willing to kill everyone else around me. It’s just another word for collateral damage. Or “signature strike,” which is basically crowd killing. If you’re standing next to a terrorist, you are a terrorist. It’s desensitizing people for killing and it’s making war easier. There is a danger it becomes a perpetual war. The troops might leave Afghanistan, but it’s unlikely the drones will leave.

Were you thinking of TOP GUN while you were making GOOD KILL, and if so, what did that movie signify to you?

I always thought TOP GUN was the movie Tommy Egan saw as a young man that made him want to become a fighter pilot. His age is about right. He identifies with the cockiness of that world and it’s the reason why he’s so torn up about being taken out of the cockpit. I don’t show this in the movie — because the movie is set in 2010, the greatest escalation of drone strikes — but there are now new drones that can take off and land from an aircraft carrier, and that used to be something that was the preserve of only the best of the Top Gun pilots. But I deliberately underplayed it as well because even though Tommy’s driving this muscle car, a ‘67 Firebird, he’s got a dented fender that he can’t afford to fix on a military salary. There’s a certain melancholy to that when you compare it to the glamor of TOP GUN.

The stakes in GOOD KILL become increasingly more complex when the C.I.A. enters the picture, dovetailing with Tommy’s psychological unraveling. Was this intentional?

The C.I.A. is interesting because the drone pilots that I spoke to would tell me a lot of things, so long as the information wasn’t classified. As soon as I asked them about flying missions for the C.I.A. — and it’s well documented that they do this out of this Nevada base — they would completely clam up.  In fact, they wouldn’t even say the letters C.I.A., they would call them an O.G.A., which stands for Other Government Agency.

One of the factors you grapple with very effectively in the film is the psychology of these drone pilots…

You have to get an authorization to push the button and launch a missile. When you see kids run into the impact zone, which occasionally happens after a Hellfire missile is already launched, one of my technical advisors described it this way: Whichever agency signed off on the strike — “they bought the bomb”. So as soon as a fighter pushes the button, the responsibility is effectively over. That’s the mindset he adopted when something went wrong and there was collateral damage.

How did you film the drone attacks, or did you use existing footage and modify them with aftereffects? Describe this technical aspect of the production in detail, if you could.

I shot those scenes in two ways. Sometimes I used aerial footage from a helicopter.  I also used a 200-foot crane with a remote head so that the camera would swim with the motion of a drone. I was always looking down — I never wanted to be on the ground. And I continued using that point of view when I got to Vegas. In terms of the drone strikes themselves, I added distortion and degraded that footage so it was more plausible for an audience. Actual drone strike footage now is even clearer due to advances in technology — it’s almost too clear. My story is set in 2010, and the only drone strikes you can see from that time period were made available through WikiLeaks.