Path of Blood: New
documentary explores jihadi extremism, radicalisation and al-Qaeda's
target, Saudi Arabia
Aimen Dean was
just 19 when he pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden – until the
brutal reality of mass murder led him to be flipped by the Qataris,
and return to Afghanistan as a spy for MI6
In the years following
9/11, documentaries such as Restrepo and Armadillo gave
us intimate and unflinching accounts of the daily lives of troops
fighting the war in Afghanistan.
Jonathan Hacker’s Path
of Blood now offers a similar kind of insider’s eye – only
this time we’re taken behind the scenes of al-Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula, during their bid to topple the Saudi government in 2003.
Raw, uneditorialised
footage, shot by the jihadis themselves, captures the young men at
play and in action, complicating the popular image of fanatical
“death to the West” extremists. The overall effect is harrowing
and fitfully hopeful.
By showing how the
Saudis quashed the insurgency using tough counter-terrorism measures,
and then offered a rehabilitation programme to jihadis capable of
changing, the film offers a valuable lesson about how to address the
frightening phenomenon of radicalisation and terrorism.
Path of Blood is in cinemas now, and available on demand on iTunes on 16th July
Raised in Michigan by a Calvinist family, Paul Schrader has often written films in which a tormented central character descends into a personal hell.
In his latest film, the religious thriller First Reformed, which many consider to be the writer-director's late-career masterpiece, Ethan Hawke's boozy, diary-writing priest, experiences a crisis of faith which threatens to have catastrophic consequences.
I met Schrader, whose back catalogue includes the Martin Scorsese collaborations Taxi Driver and Raging Bulling, at the Venice Film Festival in 2017.
You have said something like this
is a film you have been making for a lifetime.
"No, actually only
a little more than two years. But it is the culmination of a
lifetime. Before I became a screenwriter I was a critic, and I wrote
a book on spirituality in films [Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu,
Bresson, Dreyer], which has just been reissued. So it was always the
kind of film I was interested in. Never thought I would actually make
one."
Why not?
"I was more interested in some
of the aggressive qualities of film: action, empathy, stuff like
that. I just never thought I would make a film like I wrote about.
And then a couple of years ago, I was having dinner with Pawel
Pawlikowski, who had done Ida, and he was talking about that film. And
then I left that dinner, I was walking, and I thought to myself,
'Time for you to write one of these movies.' Once I sort of
acknowledged that, it became easy.
"And also it had to do with the
financial realities. It's now possible for me to make this film
financially in a way it wasn't 10 years ago, just because the budgets
have come down so much. So, you know, 20 years ago this film would
have taken 40 days. Now it took just 20 days. That's a whole
different financial reality. And it applies across the board to all
films. So the upside is it's very to make a film now; the
downside is it's almost impossible to get it seen."
It's funny you mention Pawlikowski
because the film is reminiscent of The Woman in the Fifth, which also
has Ethan Hawke in, where he's also a writer and he writes the story.
"Yeah. No, the format is from
Ida, which is the traditional 1:33. In fact I wanted to do it in 1:33
black and white, but the financier blocked that with delivery
requirements for colour. So I made it in colour, but not
colourful."
Can you talk more about the
spirituality in this work and what it means in the state of America
today, people hiding behind religion, etc?
"Well, ah, I mean I was raised
in the Church. I still go to church. So you don't escape that kind of
programming. But you have to be careful when you
talk about The Church, because it's not a monolithic thing, and we
tend to describe the bigoted and bombastic evangelicals as if they
were The Church. They are not. They are a very vocal part of it, but
there is a mainstream liberal humanistic Christianity as well. And
so you have to be careful not to tar Catholicism or Protestantism,
whatever, with a brush of the fanatics. Just like you have to be
careful not to tar Islam with a brush of the fanatics."
Picking that up, First Reformed is about radicalisation, isn't it?
"In a way. I mean this guy has a
sickness. A sickness Kierkegaard called 'the sickness unto
death'. Lack of hope. Despair. Angst. And this sickness has
manifestations. The cloth of the clergy is one manifestation. The
diary is another. The alcohol is another. And finally the environment [Environmentalism] is a manifestation of his soul's sickness. He grafts this cause onto
himself, in fact picks it up like a virus from another person; but if
it wasn't the environment it would be another thing."
Why did you choose the
environment?
"Well,you know, theologians and
philosophers have beeen having discussions for four or five thousand
years and all those discussions are now in boldface because we are
actually at the point in human history where there may be some end to
those discussions. I mean you start talking about what is the purpose
of life? What is the purpose of humanity? What does it mean to be
human? What does it mean to have consciousness? You know, if you
stand on your tippy-toes and look, you can start to see the end of
that conversation. And therefore it's a very exciting time to be
alive, and a frightening one as well. So the environment takes these
classical religious and philosophical debates, and puts them in neon
flashing at you."
Do you share any of the views of
the character concerning the world?
"Well I don't think we, as a
species, will outlive this century. You know, the world is going to
be fine; we're not."
So what do we do then?
"Oh no, we'll be evolved. There
will be a post-human species. Which we already seem in bits and
pieces already. Carbon-based intelligence is now giving way to
silicon-based intelligence, and eventually carbon-based intelligence
will be seen as a period of history on the Earth."
Will these films survive? Will
your work survive?
"[Laughs] Well I tell ya, our
antecedents, they're going to have one hell of a museum. A museum to
humanity [laughs]. That'll be a great museum. And hopefully movies
will have a room in there."
Speaking of conservation, this
movie is extremely cinephilic. It's full of references to your
passions.
"Well, I mean, for me it's kind
of easy. I'm probably part of the most privileged generation in the
history of the planet. The baby boom generation. We have lived in the
cone of affluence and ease, leisure time. No one in the history of
planet Earth had it easier than we have. And we responded by fucking
it up. So the harder choice is for our children and the children
after them, which is what this one character says. What do you say to
your child when your child looks at you and says, 'You knew this was
happening and you did nothing about it'? What do you say? You say,
'Well, too bad for you. We had a good time.' So yeah, it is kind of
bleak in that way."
How did you choose the actors?
"Um, normally when you write a
script you don't think about actors because it makes you a lazier
writer. But I did start thinking about Ethan because when you have a
man of the cloth in this way, you like to have a haunted actor - that
way they don't have to play haunted. And Ethan has that haunted look.
So it's easier to do it with Ethan than, say, to do it with Brendan
Gleeson in Calvary, because Brendan had a very hard time looking
haunted. But Ethan looks haunted the moment you see him. So it was an
easier task and he was finally just about the right age. Three actors came to mind, one was Oscar Isaac and another was
Jake Gyllenhaal, and they were both, like, 10 years too young. Ethan
was just the right age."
Plus he reminded me, even
physically, of Gunnar Bjornstrand, in Bergman's Winter Light.
"Yeah, he is also reminiscent of
Monty Cliff in I Confess."
Was Winter Light a big referential
film, because I saw some nods to that?
"Well if you saw some nods you
would probably be right. In fact there are quite a few nods in this
film. I should do a 3D version where the footnotes come out at you
boom, boom, boom, boom. This is from this. This is from this."
Is it difficult for you to
visualise this inner turmoil? We see a lot of different ways of doing
it in your work, in Taxi Driver talking to the mirror, here with the
journal. How do you work around that to be effective in making the
audience feel that turmoil?
"I've done a number of
these films. I call them 'monocular films', because it's like looking
at life this way. You don't see any other life but your character's
life. There is no other life. And in fact if you saw another reality
other than the taxi driver's, you would break the spell. So you lock
into a kind of a person and the goal, hopefully, is to get the viewer
to start to empathise, because we do this naturally. Just like we
form constellations out of stars: the stars don't actually look like
a dog or a lion, we do that. That's how our mind works.
"So we form
these empathetic relationships with performers. And once you do that,
you end up identifying with someone who you realise isn't worthy of
your identification. And that's a very interesting place to put a
viewer because they're too far in to leave, and they're too invested
not to care. But they no longer believe in the rightness of the
character. So that's the kind of fascination."
A character in the film says the
younger generation is more extreme and more polarised. Is that you
talking and why do you think this has happened?
"Despair. I mean we now have the
first generation of people who no longer believe life will be better
than it was for their parents. It was always a premise of humanity
that things would get better. That if I work, sacrifice, I can
improve my lot. Kids today know they're not going to improve their
lot no matter how much they work. Well that's a bleak cloud to live
under and leads to all kinds of extremism, whether it be drugs, or in
behaviour, or in general apathy. I think that the opioid explosion in
the West has to be, somehow, connected to the sense of hopelessness."
Does that make you depressed?
"Well I'm out of here. I'm in
the First Class car. I'm going to be fine. My kids are fucked."
Some of the characters in your
films have already been to where you say young people are now.
They're often in despair. They're apocalyptic, in a way. Is the
younger generation where they have been?
"Well some of them, yeah. There's a lot
of denial going on. And denial festers. I don't know, if I were 20
years old again, 50 years ago, I'm not quite sure how I would react."
Martin Scorsese made Silence,
which was a film dealing with more or less the same issues. Were you
in touch with one another?
"No, no. I knew he was making
it. And in fact I tried to steal that script from him about 20-30
years ago. But, you know, I think he had a very big problem with that
film, because he set it in the past. Because the premise under which
that film was written, that book was written, no longer applies.
There was a premise that the missionary effort was inherently a
positive one. We used to believe that, 50 years ago. No one believes
it anymore. Now everyone thinks of missionaries as the spear-tip of
colonialism. And so the book was predicated on the premise that the
missionary effort was a positive one, and not even Marty believes
that anymore. So he ends up making a film in which Kundun and Last
Temptation of Christ have a debate, and no one wins [laughs]."
First Reformed opens in the UK and Ireland on July 13
Ari Aster’s debut feature, Hereditary, has been hailed as a future
horror classic. Stephen Applebaum meets a self-proclaimed neurotic
hypochondriac
Ari Aster’s film Hereditary arrives in the UK this week on a wave of critical adulation, the scale of
which few film-makers will ever experience. What makes it so astonishing is that Aster, 31, is
just beginning his career.
When Hereditary bowed in the Midnight section of the Sundance Film Festival in January, its
distressing mix of intense family drama and gruesome supernatural horror left critics feeling
disturbed and shaken. It was “this generation’s The Exorcist”, proclaimed one (a little
hyperbolically, to be fair), and the most frightening films in years, chimed many.
Tellingly, the buzz hadn’t died down by June 8, the day Hereditary opened in the United States,
when it was still rated 98% fresh on film review site Rotten Tomatoes and 86% positive
(“Universal acclaim”) on Metacritic.
'There
was always a darkness about
him': My Friend Dahmer author John Backderf on growing up with a
serial killer
John 'Derf' Backderf (Alain Seux)
Most of us have
wondered what happened to certain kids from our school days, but few
can have had their worlds rocked quite like the comic book artist
John Backderf, when he found out what his erstwhile friend Jeffrey
Dahmer had been up to.
After they’d
graduated from high school, Dahmer vanished. “I can’t say my
friends and I were terribly concerned about it, but we did comment
on it, from time to time,” says Backderf, aka Derf, on the phone
from New York. “We knew his parents lived in town and yet we never
saw him anywhere.”
When Dahmer was
arrested in 1991, he discovered why: Dahmer had already embarked on
a murderous journey that would brutally extinguish 17 lives and make
him one of America’s most notorious and depraved serial killers.
Path of Blood: New
documentary explores jihadi extremism, radicalisation and al-Qaeda's
target, Saudi Arabia
