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Sony Co-Chairman Amy Pascal today responded strongly in the negative to accusations from AMPAS member David Clennon that the Oscar nominated Zero Dark Thirty promotes the 
acceptance of torture. Clennon said Friday that he would not be voting for the Kathryn Bigelow directed film because it “makes heroes of Americans who commit the crime of torture.” Zero Dark Thirty is up for five Academy Awards this year including Best Picture. Speaking at an anti-torture protest in downtown LA on Friday, the actor also urged other Academy voters to follow his lead. The Emmy-winning Clennon played ad executive Miles Drentel on TV series thirtysomething back in the late 1980s. He has also appeared in more recent years on shows like NCIS and Weeds and as a Senator in Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar. Here is Amy Pascal’s statement:
“Zero Dark Thirty does not advocate torture. To not include that part of history would have been irresponsible and inaccurate. We fully support Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal and stand behind this extraordinary movie. We are outraged that any responsible member of the Academy would use their voting status in AMPAS as a platform to advance their own political agenda. This film should be judged free of partisanship. To punish an Artist’s right of expression is abhorrent. This community, more than any other, should know how reprehensible that is. While we fully respect everyone’s right to express their opinion, this activity is really an affront to the Academy and artistic creative freedom. This attempt to censure one of the great films of our time should be opposed. As Kathryn Bigelow so appropriately said earlier this week, ‘depiction is not endorsement, and if it was, no artist could ever portray inhumane practices; no author could ever write about them; and no filmmaker could ever delve into the knotty subjects of our time.’ We believe members of the Academy will judge the film on its true merits and will tune out the wrongful and misdirected rhetoric.”
The controversial depiction of torture in Zero Dark Thirty has attracted attention from Washington DC too. In December, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz) and Carl Levin (D-Mich) wrote Sony Pictures’ Michael Lynton claiming the film was “grossly inaccurate” on the use of torture and similar techniques to acquiring informantion about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. On January 2, the Senate Intelligence Committee announced it would review CIA records of contact officials may have had with Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal. In letters written in December and released on January 3rd, the same trio of Senators asked Acting CIA Director Michael Morell if “the filmmakers could have been misled by information they were provided by the CIA” in regards to the role torture actually played in getting intelligence that lead to locating bin Laden. Bigelow herself touched on the subject at Zero Dark Thirty’s DC premiere on January 8. “We had no agenda in making this film and were not trying to generate controversy. Quite the contrary. Mark and I wanted to present the story as we understood it, based on the extraordinary research that Mark did,” she said. Bigelow was snubbed for a nomination for Best Director by the Academy this year even though the film itself was honored in several categories and Boal got a Best Original Screenplay nomination.
Deadline's Dominic Patten - tip him here.
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WELL SPOKEN, AMY.
Mr. Amy is being deliberately disingenuous in his remarks here. I too saw the movie and clearly the film’s director held a point of view on torture and she expressed it via her main character’s dialogue to man’s begging her for help in stopping his being tortured to which she replied, “you can help yourself by giving us what we want to know”. Clearly whatever else this film director or Mr. Amy may say or believe or deny, this character’s statement clearly puts the director into the pro-torture camp and this message carried throughout the film.
ZERO DARK THIRTY… does not advocate truth either!
What does that even mean? It’s not a documentary, it’s one fictional take on a historical event.
Hey, all you dummies out there… IT’S A “MOVIE”, not a documentary!
So based on that view, I guess Schindler’s List shouldn’t have shown gas chambers? Django shouldn’t have shown slavery? Magic Mike shouldn’t have shown a penis?
Touche.
Well– the people who committed those crimes you mentioned were not the protagonists, as they are in ZDT
If anything this film is saying that torture didn’t work. They find the guy because of a link they thought was dead and then they begin to pursue it. There was no torture in that plot line. And the name they get earlier came out of building a rapport with the guy who gave it to them not due to torturing him.
And um HELLO, the Bush administration did use torture in interrogations… not to mention extraordinary rendition.
If this is not negative campaigning against ZDT, I don’t know what it is!!
Well, there were gas chambers, there was slavery, and penises exist–in the case of Zero Dark Thirty, Osama Bin Laden was already dead and torture did not provide the CIA with any useful information. So, there’s a problem here.
Amy Pascal, while fuming with vaulted righteousness, has made a film that supports an official lie and the use of inhumane torture tactics that are considered war crimes by the Geneva Convention.
But yeah, no big deal, Hollywood is immune to political criticism.
I did not like it and the story did not actually need it. We dids not need to see it in graphic, blow by blow detail. It felt like voyeurism.
Don’t approve of what Clennon is doing but the film DOES take appear to take a position that there was a clear path from torture to Bin Laden, and the fact that they’ve highlight a fabricated incident of torture for what seems like the first quarter of the film is something that they can’t hide from. The most I hear any experts say about this is that incidents of torture may have reinforced things that were already known. If the filmmakers had just added something simple that would have elucidated this, they could have had their cake and eaten it too. I think it was important for any film on this subject to depict a scene of torture. But why they didn’t just add a line from someone that said, “yeah, we’ve heard that name before” (from a normal interrogation) is beyond me. Unless the filmmakers were truly trying to say that without torturing people we would not have found Bin Laden. I believe they were going for ambiguity, but the takeaway most people have is different.
I also think its laughable that in publicity the film is called “The Real Story,” and when the filmmakers are attacked they say “It’s just a fictional account.” Can’t have it both ways.
The Abu Achmed name was given up not as a result of torture, but after a hearty meal and some trickery.
Exactly. Everyone gets too hung up on the torture scenes to remember that. They essentially said,”You were sleep-deprived and told us some stuff. Here’s some food. Tell us more.”
Actually, that’s not true.
Torture was used because it works. It is brutal, it is not nice, it might violate your political correctness, but the fact is that it works, especially if done correctly and answers cross-referenced.
And the threat of more torture.
Yay, after they tortured the hell out of him. You remember the first 30 mins…yay the food worked, after they put him in a box, and a dog collar, and the waterboarding…
Who the hell is David Clennon? I’m an AMPAS member as well and think that if I made my AMPAS voting choices publc and used my membersgip as a platform to espose badly reasoned political views a part of those choices I would understand if the Academy rescinded my membership. Shut up David whoever you are and don’t use your membership in OUR organization to spout off nonsense.
and you sir are the epitome of a lock-step, comfortable, conservative (now, don’t get that confused with conservative politically..), Academy Member. you are a dying breed. there are people who actually use their positions to, god forbid, express views that matter to them and to other people. believe it or not, many people find torture reprehensible, and many find its positive portrayal in popular culture to be just as reprehensible. So what if someone wants to speak out about it?
You assume a rescission of AMPAS membership is as “scary” to others as it is to you. It is not. Classic overestimation of the Academy’s importance in the world and to other people.
Congrats on your membership in 1996 – almost 20 years ago. A lot has changed in the the world since then. One thing that hasn’t: the hubris and cognitive dissonance of most Academy voters.
May the ratings continue to slide and the audiences grow more apathetic – but the Academy wouldn’t know anything about that because it’s still 1996!
Her statement is garbage: “This film should be judged free of partisanship. To punish an Artist’s right of expression is abhorrent.” No one’s saying the artists shouldn’t have the right to make their movie. No one’s saying the government should have stopped the film from being made. There is no free speech issue here an Sony should stop pretending there is. The issue is: the film claims water- boarding led to intelligence that led to Osama Bin Laden. The Senate Intelligence Committee, (Democrats AND Republicans, i.e. John McCain) says that’s a lie. The film is dishonest. To call it dishonest is not politics, or partisanship, it’s just a fact.
Maybe you saw a different film than I. The waterboarding did not directly lead to Bin Laden. That bit of intel came after a hearty meal and some convenient untruths.
Why don’t people realize that the food worked after they TORTURED him. . . I mean come on people . . .
Right, because every time a politician opens their mouth, the truth comes out. Open you eyes and pull your head out of your ass. If you think that our government and military haven’t gained intelligence that has aided in the campture and killing of terrorists via torture, you are severely mistaken. We simply can’t be seen as publicly condoning it, because that makes us look like monsters. But you would be a fool to think that it doesn’t take place.
you wrote what I was thinking
and I’m sure because in your chair behind your computer screen you declare that torture works in our favor and should continue to be use, than it is so. why do we even need people to research and write a congressional report about the matter when we have you?
thanks for saving us all the time and setting the record straight.
Who’s believe anything anyone in Hollywood or Washington says? All are compulsive liars who refuse to take responsibility for the results of their actions while snatching any kind of credit they can get.
While it may be historically true that torture may have aided in the overall mission, the problem is that the movie seemed to have no issue with presenting it as the ‘good guys’ torturing the ‘bad guys’. In comparison, if you take “Django Unchained”, that’s a movie that shows some of our ugly history, but it presents slavery and our past attitudes in a way that makes you see it as despicable. “Zero Dark Thirty” makes no attempt to make you even feel conflicted about torture because, hey, we got our man in the end and Bigelow got her movie. All that aside, “Zero Dark Thirty” shouldn’t get Oscar votes because it wasn’t as good as some of the other nominated films.
Yikes! You never saw slavery as a bad thing until Quentin Tarantino made an exploitation movie about it?
Of course I did, but I hope you realize that not everyone does. Regardless, what fuels “Django Unchained” is that Tarantino makes you feel a deep dislike for some of these characters and presents them as villains. It affects you as an audience so that you want to see Django blow these people to smithereens. Bigelow presents “Zero Dark Thirty” almost as cops and robbers story where the cops can go beyond the law and do what they want to the robbers to get to the kingpin. The problem I have is that she doesn’t even want you to feel internal conflict about it. A better film would have.
A filmmaker shouldn’t have to spell the internal conflict out for you in order for you to feel it.
Reads like a studio threatening an individual in the industry for expressing their right to free speech because it might affect an opening weekend more so than any protection of an artists rights to express themselves. Seems like an ironic statement about commercial speech versus free speech in that regard.
When Miles Drentell says you’ve gone too far…
Thank you Amy for saying what so many of us feel. Zero less thirty, ms. Bigelow and her whole team made an excellent movie. And to blatantly dismiss it the way this member did is outrageous…the film is riveting, since when do political views affect out appreciation of art? Shame
I guess this AMPAS dude didn’t see Django and the dog-eat-man scene? How would he express himself if he saw THAT movie?
Well, Leo’s not the protagonist we are rooting for so I don’t think he’d have a problem with it.
I saw the movie and thought it was very well done. I did not feel that those particular scenes were disturbing because we are all aware that it does happen. Unfortunately it does happen and it is part of history. I enjoyed the film and think that it certainly deserves to be nominated amongst “Best Film” for the Oscars.
Whether they wish to acknowledge it or not, the film appears to advocate torture because it gives us heroic lead characters who torture without remorse and makes us side with them unquestioningly. By beginning with the voices of the dying on 9/11, the film sets up a desire on the part of the audience for revenge at any cost. There is no voice on screen from a credible, sympathetic character raised in opposition to the torture, and there were such voices then as now. For me, the most questionable moment came when Chastain’s character was informed that the existence of the courier had been known for 5 years, and simply lost in a bureaucratic shuffle, and this information was originally obtained without torture. The moment is tossed away as of no importance. But my own belief is for great drama, it is crucial. Would any person who had taken part in water boarding not have a reaction of either denial, outrage or doubt in the light of this revelation? No film simply presents the facts as they happened, even documentaries. Truth is cherry picked in every instance and subject to different views and interpretations. The viewpoint taken in Zero Dark Thirty is exclusively that of those who tortured.
You summed it up perfectly — especially the part about Bigelow lathering up the audience for revenge at any cost right out the gate. Bravo.
I disagree with your first sentence. Not all audience members are so naive as to unquestioningly support the protagonist – some are mature enough to know that the protagonist is not always right.
Any audience instinctively bonds with the lead and sides with them. Hence, in part, the success of shows like Breaking Bad and Dexter. It is a well known trick of screenwriting that the lead can do nearly anything and be forgiven, as long as he or she remains the lead and has to battle strong antagonists. If a new, oppositional lead is created, audience loyalty can shift. In Breaking Bad, the DEA brother in law has become that second lead, rising in importance as Walter White’s sins have become insupportable. There is no oppositional character in the face of the torture in Zero Dark Thirty. 24, for all it’s glorification of torture, did raise more questions about its use than this film. I think you can, in this case, trust John McCain, a man who suffered torture and knows first hand what we never will.
First of all, the story DID need it in the same way it needed to show the horrors of what the terrorists did on 9/11. It’s what happened then and by the way, it’s what needed to happen in order to find Bin Laden. But more importantly, this is an argument about freedom of expression. How dare anyone at the Academy penalize a filmmaker for depicting actual events in a film? So The Passion of Christ shouldn’t have been made? Or Sleepers, Precious, The Woodsman? The point is we live in a free society where freedom of speech is a fundamental right. We live in a world where ugly things happen sometimes and all Bigelow did was accurately tell the story of an ugly period in our history where unfortunately torture was a necessary evil.
David Clennon is that stone-faced, humorless hack from several TV shows. He did not need to give his opinion as to why he wouldn’t vote for it – but he is a leftist, so there you go. He is now on a campaign to destroy the future of the film, so I will go see it again this weekend.
Just shut up, Clennon. Nobody cares what you say.
Well you cared enough to get lathered up and comment here…
Well, if the head of the studio that will profit from the movie says it, it must be true.
Haha, nice.
Thank you 30something for your consideration. The cultural memory is getting shorter with every passing day.?
This is really getting ridiculous. This film does not promote torture, it presents it–as if it has never been done in real life. 24 would be considered more pro torture, this torture led nowhere
It seems like no one wants to consider the possibility that information obtained during torture really did play a role in the death of Bin Laden. Approve or disapprove, this movie is based on a true story, and that might very well be the truth. If anything, the jittery reaction from DC makes me think they don’t want the ugly details of the “means” taking the shine off the “end”. Bigelow and Boal made brave choices. I’ll take a brave filmmaker over an agenda any day of the week.
No one wants to consider that possibility because it’s not true. The filmmakers got it wrong. You can knock politicians like Dianne Feinstein, but Dianne Feinstein has already forgotten more about the role the CIA and torture played in the hunt for bin Laden than Bigelow and Boal will ever know. Sure, they did some homework, they interviewed some people, Feinstein has been IMMERSED in this stuff for YEARS, this is her JOB and her life, not a “it’s for a movie” homework assignment. She and other high-level officials had (and have) access and intelligence that Boal and Bigelow never had or even came close to having. A few off-the-record interviews does not equal a Congressional inquiry. A few interviews by filmmakers is not equivalent to the access chairs of Senate committees have. Who have access to everyone and everything. Who have all said they got it wrong.
“So based on that view, I guess Schindler’s List shouldn’t have shown gas chambers? Django shouldn’t have shown slavery? Magic Mike shouldn’t have shown a penis?”
The argument is not against SHOWING torture but passing along the FALSE information that torture works and was invaluable in getting the name of Bin Laden’s courier. That’s not what happened according to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Amy Pascal is using a straw-man’s argument to avoid the real issue. No one objects to the showing of tortue, gas chambers or showing slavery. However if you were to make a movie showing Jews deserved to be gased or claiming the holocaust never happened or a movie that Blacks deserved to be enslaved or LOVED being slaves yes there would be people protesting that FALSE depiction.
Sony, Bigelow and Boal won’t address the REAL issue in interviews: that their film is not factually accurate. They keep going around the issue to pretend the problem is a mere showing of torture.
“That’s not what happened according to the Senate Intelligence Committee.”
So, case closed? Or maybe Boal (a former reporter embedded in war zones) heard a different version…
The seemingly popular “government said so” argument is pretty disturbing.
I don’t know what was said in interviews, but I noticed that the disclaimer at the beginning of the film said something to the effect of “This film is based on personal accounts of actual events” as opposed to “This film is based on actual events.” That distinction is important as to what claims on truth the filmmakers are making.
Look, Amy Pascal, Kathryn Bigelow, and others are saying what they need to maximize how much they can get from putting this movie out. In Pascal’s case she has to maximize revenue to keep her job and not be sued by stockholders, and Bigelow has similar responsibilities, plus reputation and the Oscars to keep in mind.
Hollywood and TV revel in dehumanization, murder and torture every day, turning men women and children into bloody piles of shredded flesh in various brutal and imaginative ways for our entertainment, so this movie hardly exists in a vacuum. Lying to the public by telling them torture is an effective and necessary technique in intelligence gathering gets you big bucks, whether you make movies or write articles as part of its PR campaign to make it a core American value, like hating people who are different than you. We’re great at it, the best in the world, and we make tons of money doing it — what’s not to like?
As Walter Matthau instructed his student in the’60s sex farce A Guide for the Married Man, per the show and tell by Joey Bishop: “Deny, Deny, Deny.” And who can forget Bushtail’s solemn, absurdist declaration that “we do not torture.”
IT
IS
A
F*****G
MOVIE
DON’T
STRESS!
Exactly. It’s a movie. There are horror movies, war movies, R-rated this and that movies. They’re all works of creativity and (mostly) fiction. It’s unlikely we’ll ever know the REAL bin Laden take down facts and this is an interpretation of events in a MOVIE script. Needs to be judged on its cinematic merits, not as a political polemic.
Not only does ZD30 insist that torture lead to capture of UBL, it also states it inversely: accroding to the film, because of Obama and the pressure NOT to torture, characters say they can NO LONGER garner info about UBL’s whereabouts.