Brian De Palma: 'Apparently, I'm a left-wing wacko traitor who should be horsewhipped'

Brian De Palma is facing another rough passage. In a career of storms and tempests, his latest film, Redacted, a multi- format examination of US soldiers’ savage behaviour in Iraq, has inevitably not proved popular back home. “In America, you cannot criticise the troops,” he says. “So now it’s all over the web that I’m a left-wing wacko traitor who should be horsewhipped.” But then what would you expect from a film-maker who has courted controversy right back to the early 1980s when he made the coked-up gangster classic Scarface? “I hardly think of myself as a safe director,” he says, baring his mouldy teeth like a decrepit shark.

According to De Palma, the pent-up anger of the US forces in Iraq is worse than that of the troops who served in Vietnam, there, he says, at least US soldiers had brothels to visit in order to let off steam. “This is not the way the army likes to see itself portrayed,” he adds. “They want to be seen the way the administration portrays them: valiant people over there creating democracy – all that mumbo jumbo.” More importantly, De Palma sees the film as a critique of how American audiences are fed propaganda by the US news media. “They sit there and watch their television screens, and see these embedded reporters and infomercials from Iraq, and how well things are going over there, and they think that’s the truth.”

The end result won the 67 year-old De Palma the Silver Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival, one of just a handful of awards he’s won across a 40-year career that has frequently irritated the Moral Majority. In content at least, Redacted recalls his 1989 Vietnam film Casualties of War, which starred Michael J Fox as a soldier who looks the other way as his fellow grunts perpetrate a brutal rape. “The similarities are striking,” De Palma notes.

Far more raw than other recent Hollywood examinations of the conflict, say Lions For Lambs or Rendition, Redacted is closer in tone to Nick Broomfield’s Battle For Haditha. Shot for just $5m, using a cast of unknowns, Redacted is a fictionalised account of an abhorrent real-life event, concerning the rape of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl and the murder of her family by US troops. “I couldn’t use too much of the real material,” De Palma explains. “I had to fictionalise it, because there are continuing prosecutions. You get a large book of things you can’t do from the lawyers.”

Filmed on High-Definition Video in Amman, and made to look like a “dossier” of internet uploads and camcorder footage, Redacted, says De Palma, is meant to echo the way he found the real-life event on the internet. Much of the material in the film originates from a soldier named Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz), who is hoping to make a documentary to get him into film school. In part, this consists of conversations with other members of the unit, including the two men who lead the night-time raid on the Iraqi home in question. … more here, where you can also watch the trailer for ‘Redacted’.