While first reading WAR by renowned Scandinavian playwright Lars Norén, I thought of something a friend once said: “Catastrophe is my starting point!” The characters of WAR are thrown into the highly-charged crucible of a world run amok and are forced to find a new way to live. I thought of how throughout history mankind has overcome the darkest periods with surprising creativity. It is almost as if we need to come to catastrophic dead ends before we can create new beginnings. To me, this human resiliency is at the core of the story that will inform my choices in the production of this film.

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Norén’s WAR is about something of great magnitude. It has a higher purpose in mind. We are all now living on the hinge of history, a dangerous time where everything is in question, a time of constant war. Could there be a more timely film? WAR asks important questions and yet plays out on the most fundamental human stage of the family. I have thought for many years to make a film about the indirect effects of war. Not the external battlefield chaos we see in the huge budget movies, but the profound internal destruction on a human scale -- the desperate poverty, violence against women and the destruction of family.

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I want to depict characters who are put into extreme situations, experience emotional states where self-creation and self-destruction walk a razor’s edge. The story is brilliant, intimate, driving, emotional and has a surprising and hopeful ending. The characters are fully formed and authentic, but there is much more here than meets the eye. Norén’s writing stealthily gets inside you and once there, it transforms into something unexpected, explosive, transcendent. On the outside, a superficial reading might see it as modest naturalism, but soon you realize how bold the grand ideas and emotions are compressed inside the writing, driving the story forward in unusual ways.

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The story takes place nowhere and everywhere. I want that to be fundamental part of the film’s universality. Somewhere a few years from now, mankind faces its deepest existential challenge. We see it though the life of a family, the most essential human group. Adapting the play for the screen, I quickly saw in my mind’s eye the physical map of the story. In the writing, I found many structural “openings” to put the characters inside the landscape of the story. WAR is full of actions, events and private cinematic moments beyond the dialogue. We’ll mix unbroken takes in formally lit scenes and long tracking shots with energetic hand-held camera - that I believe intimately capture the powerful internality of the actors’ characterizations. I imagine evocative groupings of ramshackle huts or trailers on a bleak hillside. My long-time collaborator, renowned cinematographer Lisa Rinzler (Pollock, Lisbon Story, Dead Presidents) is committed to the film. Lisa loves to work in low light; sometimes a simple window source or even a candle is enough. 

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She works in an instinctive manner – starting with darkness and developing an evocative poetic, painterly palette and avoiding the appearance of artificial lighting “movie looks” I see long, wordless sequences where a character is followed in intimate tracking shots, which are deeply internal, following a single action. I want to maintain the apocalyptic tone in the writing played out in the imagery and performances. For instance, an otherworldly wind might travel over a wheat field. The gray haze in the sky might signify a far-off nuclear event. Subtle details, like the way a tattered curtain blows inward, a candle flickers, a moldy food or the caked blood on an actor's fingers give the story it’s tone. The sound design will be immensely important. Jet planes screeching overhead, and the look on a face when the jets are heard but not seen. The distant sound of helicopter blades whirring. Far off explosions, the flickering out of house lights, vibrations rolling through a house causing the window frames to vibrate. There is no need for big Hollywood scenes of battlefield explosions. Let the actual war take place inside each character’s psyche and the audience’s minds. 

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 WAR is a character driven story. No one is black or white entirely, good or bad – everyone is just thrown into the human soup of chaos to fend for him or herself the best way they can. The power of the writing and intense characterization is that we see ourselves in all of them. Everyone is handicapped: a little girl who can’t sleep, an older sister is a prostitute, a ravaged mother in love with a distrustful man, and a soldier returning from war blinded and half mad. So there is no escape; the wounds are too fresh. But the story is exactly about the possibility of rebirth when there is seemingly no escape, and the unique quality of human beings to create escape routes just when none appear open to them. WAR is a meditation on the catastrophe of endless war. What happens when all of the social rules fall by the wayside? What happens between men and women? How do families stay together when economic catastrophe comes? What happens in the minds of children when all the norms and security of families are destroyed by famine, poverty, rape, and chaos?

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Despite its dim view of the cultural moment, and the bitter edges of its characters, there is something exhilarating and hopeful about WAR. Part of that comes from the bold verve of its surprise emotional ending. Perhaps the seeds of our destruction hold new undreamed possibilities?  Preserving the intention in Norén’s original writing keeps WAR from being just another gloomy post-apocalyptic movie. The story unfolds with a real purpose and grace, a family’s survival which mirrors mankind’s own struggle to ever-higher levels of morality.

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WAR has a luminous ending instigated by the vitality of a 15-year-old girl who knows that life doesn’t stop, it can’t stop.

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STORY SYNOPSIS