Listen to a podcast interview of Michael Winterbottom
Even after establishing himself as a filmmaker who often focuses on how humanity is tested in the worst of times, nothing could have prepared “A Mighty Heart” director Michael Winterbottom for the onslaught of 100 scooter-riding paparazzi as they converged on his star, Angelina Jolie, during a shoot in Mumbai.
“We were driving the streets with Angelina in the vehicle, and there was something like 50 or 100 people on motorbikes whizzing past them” to snap photographs, he says. “That was pretty chaotic.”
Winterbottom’s new film, “A Mighty Heart,” opens Friday and chronicles a different sort of chaos: the 2002 search for Wall Street Journal correspondent and Stanford University graduate Daniel Pearl. Pearl was kidnapped and slain by terrorists protesting the U.S. incarceration of fighters at Guanta`namo Bay. Jolie stars as Pearl’s wife, Mariane, whose book “A Mighty Heart” (Scribner, 288 pp., $14, 2003) provided the basis for the movie.
Winterbottom has become adept at capturing all manner of mayhem in his films. He painted a portrait of bullet-dodging correspondents in war-ravaged Bosnia in “Welcome to Sarajevo” in 1997. And in 2002’s “In this World,” he followed two Britain-bound Afghan refugees as they turned to human smugglers for a treacherous trek across Asia.
Like many of Winterbottom’s films, “A Mighty Heart” depicts characters who exhibit incomprehensible grace under fire. Mariane Pearl, who was five months pregnant at the time of the kidnapping, is portrayed by Jolie as a woman whose deep compassion is eclipsed only by her love for her missing spouse. Rather than focus on the expansive, broader story of radical Islamic terrorism or the politics of Pakistan, “Heart” fixes on the bravery Mariane Pearl exhibited through the ordeal.
Though he’s known for his topical, documentary-influenced films, Winterbottom makes movies that find themselves in just about every section of a neighborhood video store. He adapted Thomas Hardy’s “Jude the Obscure” into “Jude” in 1996. He captured the psychedelic excesses of the Manchester, England, music scene in “24 Hour Party People” in 2002. And he created an Orwellian environment for the sci-fi thriller “Code 46” in 2003.
But as a filmmaker and storyteller, Winterbottom also is adept at going places to shine light on the kinds of stories that the Fourth Estate often neglects to report with any depth. With “A Mighty Heart” and “The Road to Guanta`namo” – his 2006 film about three British Muslims held and released without charges by the United States – he depicts two radically different reactions to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.
“Guanta`namo was opened literally a week or two weeks before Danny’s kidnapping, so all these things that happend are real consequences of the kind of increasing violence on either side,” he says.
Such films are not going to inspire film studio bean counters to break into cartwheels, but the casting of Jolie – husband Brad Pitt produced the movie – helped make “A Mighty Heart” a more commercially viable release.
“A Mighty Heart” also offers a living, breathing counterpoint in Mariane Pearl to the belief that the world is too fragmented for anyone to come to any real agreement.
The outcome of the movie is no secret – Daniel Pearl’s beheading was videotaped and put online by his captors – but it ultimately shows members of the U.S. State Department, the FBI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency and police putting aside their differences to work together in spite of the polarized political environment. They were unable to save Daniel Pearl, but Mariane told them with an almost saintly grace that they had not failed, because they had found a way to work together.
“Mariane’s story and attitude as a person says you don’t have to be one of these two extremes,” Winterbottom says. “And if someone like Mariane, having had the experience that she’s had, can still refuse to be full of hate, can refuse to see the world as good vs. evil, she’s an example for everyone that there’s a big space in the middle and that there’s no reason why you can’t avoid the hatred.”
`A Mighty Heart’
opens Friday
Rated: R (violence, some sexual content and language
Cast: Angelina Jolie, Dan Futterman, Irrfan Khan, Adnan Siddiqui, Will Patton, Denis O’Hare
Director: Michael Winterbottom
Writer: John Orloff (based on the book by Mariane Pearl)
Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes
Contact Mark de la Viña at mdelavina@mercurynews
.com or (408) 920-5914.
