Uncle Sam and the reel thing

Still in his 20s, Dundalk-born director John Moore has risen rapidly from a career in ads and music video to a heady position at the helm of a major Hollywood blockbuster, the Bosnian-set war thriller Behind Enemy Lines.

Starring such luminaries as Gene Hackman and Owen Wilson, the film may not exactly rival Battle Of Algiers for political insight or subtlety, but it’s a fast-paced and visually impressive work. It has also benefitted beyond all expectation from the events of September 11th and the xenophobic climate those events have engendered in the US.

Moore is aware of the argument which has been advanced that the New York atrocities were the best thing that could have happened to Behind Enemy Lines’ box-office prospects. Since the film was completed at the time, he rejects any accusations of cashing in.

“The first thing that went through my mind was the opposite, they’re gonna pull the movie, which happened with Schwarzenegger’s Collateral Damage which was due out in October,” he says. “To their credit they didn’t, and they didn’t change the content. And I’ve been asked by several American journalists if I feel terrible that our movie benefitted from September 11th – if that’s the case, yeah, I would feel terrible, but I don’t believe that’s the case. I think our box-office would have been very healthy anyway. Obviously, we caught a wave of sentiment, and the ad guys rode it all the fuckin’ way to the bank. But, y’know what, the week afterwards twice as many people went to see Ocean’s Eleven.

“The week of September the 11th, there were commercials on every night-time saying ‘GENERAL MOTORS – TO KEEP AMERICA ROLLING, WE’RE OFFERING 0% INTEREST’, and Coca-Cola rushing out a hundred fuckin’ commercials with people drinking Coke with the Stars and fuckin’ Stripes flying behind them – and that’s supposed to be acceptable?”

The US-based, Dundalk-born Moore’s distaste for this war-crazed, flag-waving ideological climate is apparently heartfelt. It is also odd, given that the film he directed, Behind Enemy Lines, is the most offensive, pro-American, right-wing piece of imperialist propaganda unleashed on the planet since Red Dawn.

In particular, Moore’s name-checking of Coca-Cola as some sort of corporate Satan is truly bizarre in view of the fact that Behind Enemy Lines features a gratuitous free Coke ad, in between the endless mind-numbing scenes of GIs escaping hailstorms of Serb bullets, dangling effortlessly from helicopters, and watching incessant Sky News broadcasts (the film’s company Fox, like Sky News, is owned by Rupert Murdoch).

In a scene that goes beyond George Orwell’s wildest imaginings, the film’s hero, clean-cut good ol’ boy Lieutenant Chris Burnett (Owen Wilson) escapes from evil Serb pursuers to be collected by a travelling convoy of non-hostile Bosnian civilians. Dying from thirst, he asks them for a drink of water – at which point one of them pulls out a beautiful shiny bottle of Coca-Cola, which he lovingly glugs before pronouncing ‘tastes good’, as in the ad.

The film was made with the full ‘co-operation’ of the US military: how exactly does this work, in terms of presures applied on the director?

After a tense pause, Moore pleads: “Man (long pause), Hollywood is a business town, right, and the pictures are business arrangements, y’know? The Coca-Cola thing, right, I know where you’re comin’ from. The Sky News, I swear to you, this was not some free fuckin’ product placement.

“What happened there was I was a big fan of Aernout van Lynden (roving Sky News correspondent) ever since his reporting from Sarajevo during the two-and-a-half year siege. And I hunted him down and I wanted him to play himself in the movie, and until he had met me and given me a 300-point questionnaire on Bosnia, wasn’t satisfied to play himself. So they’re not plugs for Sky, they’re the fact that I wanted van Lynden.’

What’s Moore response to the bombing of Afghanistan?

“What bombing? What fuckin’ war? There’s been no war, there’s no coverage,” he says – and it’s hard to identify which side of the line we’re on, as he oscillates – somwhat haphazardly, it has to be said – between irony and idealogy.

“There’s been funding of Northern Alliance, which is like ‘oh, great, you took the gun off one fuckin’ raghead to give it to the other guy’. Very smart policy, fellas. Do you remember how much pride they used to take in the Gulf War, going ‘here are today’s videos’, and you could sit down and watch it with a few beers and watch the fuckin’ raghead running down the road and going ‘BOOM!!, it was great. They haven’t done any of that this time, they’re not showing anything because they realise thay have no tactics and no plan in Afghanistan.”

What are Moore’s feelings about the glorious leader of the free world, George W. Bush?

“Our president,” Moore reckons, “is happy to subject his foreign policy to flag-waving, jingoistic movies, saying ‘We will smoke out the evildoers’, and ‘That’s the spirit America needs’., I think he’s a dangerous man at a dangerous time. I suspect that he’s just the frontman and he has little real personal power. But I ain’t a fan – it’s his ineptitude as a leader of men that makes him lethal, he’s happy to say ‘HEY, I’M STOOPID, AND MOST AMERICANS ARE TOO! AIN’T THAT RIGHT, FELLAS!!’. He forgets that less than half of the people voted for him.”

John Moore’s interest in Yugoslavia predates his involvement in the film, and he’s well versed in the details of post-Yugoslav politics, whatever the excesses of the film might suggest.

“Since the wars broke out there in 1991, I’ve been horribly attracted to them. You could tell when Slovenia first seceded that it would all end in Hell. You could tell Croatia was getting twitchy. Bosnia’s only attempt to help itself was to declare itself an independent country.

That this was always likely to be problematic, since most of Bosnia’s inhabitants were uninclined to go along with the plan, seems to be irrelevant.

“Did you know,” Moore continues, “that nineteen countries recognised the Taliban government in Afghanistan pre-September the 11th, and NO countries recognised the government (sic) of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992. None. Talk about a fucked-up world.

“And you know, as usual, it took American involvement to really get something done. Here’s where I support the US way of things and the US military, which gets a hard time, all the time, for trying to do the right thing.

“But the American military gets a hard time for being on the good guys’ side all the time. It may sometimes make innocent mistakes in an attempt to do the right thing.”

A Serbian person watching Behind Enemy Lines could take the view that, for all the undoubted Nazi-style barbarities of their self-appointed wartime leadership, Serbs in general are portrayed as very much the bad guys in a conflict in which no-one had a monopoly on evil. It is, of course, a fact that Serbian forces inflicted the majority of the killing, and – in the context – Moore is unrepentant about the film’s somewhat one-handed represenation of the war.

“I’ll go toe-to-toe with anyone about the facts of the movie,” he asserts. “Everything is based on a real-life event, and every character in the movie – certainly on the Bad Guys’ end – is based on a real character.

“The town of Hac is based on Srebrenica. Oleg Krupa plays Lokar, who is based on ‘Arkan’ (Zeljko Raznjatovic, assassinated Serb paramilitary and indicted war criminal – CF). He got a bullet through the eye in his hotel room in February of 2000; I remember the head of security ringing me up and saying ‘the guy’s just been whacked’, and we all knew it was our guy.

“We visited Sarajevo, which is probably my favourite city on earth – every cliche that you can imagine about seeing the obvious pain of the place is true. I’ve seen it.

“I’ve been to Beirut, and maybe because it’s in the Middle East and it carries that baggage, you can kinda handle the fact that the Holiday Inn is shot to pieces. But when you see that stuff in Sarajevo... we went up to the hills, which are still covered in landmines, and you look down on the city and your stomach retches with anger and you see the football stadium full of graves and you realise that we didn’t do anything to stop any of this.”

So the US should have intervened earlier?

“No, the EU should have led the way, but they failed miserably and you can fuck the United Euro up your fuckin’ ass cause it doesn’t fuckin’ exist, it’s a load of German bankers tryin’ to get one fuckin’ banknote cause they’re fuckin’ Nazi motherfuckers and they’re trying to take over Europe again.”