King of "Kings"

With dark horse Oscar candidate "Three Kings" trotted out for another showing, director David O. Russell talks about Michael Jackson, visual studies and George Clooney's Cary Grant turn.

By Michael Sragow

Jan 13, 2000 | When writer-director David O. Russell made "Spanking the Monkey" (1994) and "Flirting With Disaster" (1996), critics compared him to Mike Nichols at the time of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (1966) and "The Graduate" (1967). Russell's debut, like "The Graduate," depicted a confused collegian who falls into Oedipal sex (with his actual mother, not his mother's friend). And Russell's second film treated subjects like post-childbirth sex with a barbed satiric style recalling early Nichols at his best.

Nichols stumbled his third time out, when he leapt into epic moviemaking with his adaptation of Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" (1970). For his third film, Russell has made a sardonic adventure comparable in scale to "Catch-22": the Gulf War caper flick, "Three Kings." But unlike Nichols' clinker, Russell's film is a triumph. Maybe not commercially: It cost $46 million and in three months has grossed only $59 million. But artistically it's a giant step forward, both for Russell and for his whole Sundance graduating class of mid-'90s independent filmmakers. "Monkey" (which left me cold) was a Freudian thesis; "Flirting" (which I liked) was a Freudian funhouse. "Three Kings" is its own critter, a sweeping political action film that jumps and slithers through minefields without ever losing its aplomb.

The movie's richness and sureness stem partly from its connections to Russell's intellectual past. As he detailed in the interview contained in his book of screenplays ("Flirting With Disaster & Spanking the Monkey," Faber and Faber, 1996), he was an upper-middle-class kid from Westchester who studied political science and literature at Amherst College. Among his favorite writers were "the satirists: Thomas Pynchon, Evelyn Waugh and Mark Twain."

After college Russell did "literacy work" in Nicaragua, taught English as a second language in the south end of Boston and did community organizing in Lewiston, Maine, to improve low-income housing. (His first film was a video documentary about the problems of Central American immigrants in Boston. He followed it with two shorts, including "a surreal little nightmare in a bingo parlor" and a ditzy piece of Dada about an out-of-control Marge Simpson hairdo, "Hairway to the Stars.")

"Three Kings" is no knee-jerk left-wing anti-war tract. To summarize brutally, it's both anti-Saddam and anti-Bush. It views the U.S. military without illusions and without rancor. Actually, it's about four kings, American soldiers all, including the grizzled vet George Clooney, the intelligent, green Mark Wahlberg, the fiercely Christian Ice Cube and the ignorant, good-hearted Spike Jonze. At the end of the war, Wahlberg and Jonze find an Iraqi treasure map rammed up the rear end of a prisoner. Clooney horns in on their discovery. Clooney has the know-how to mount a private expedition to retrieve stolen Kuwaiti gold. (Think of Clooney, Wahlberg and Cube as Three Musketeers and Jonze as an unlikely D'Artagnan.)

The chaos of Bush's immediate post-war policy -- encouraging Iraqi freedom fighters without aiding them -- makes the American soldiers' initial success possible. It also rouses their conscience. They face the dangers of a ground war while they come to understand the Iraqi point of view. They risk their hides to do some good.

I spoke to Russell, 41, in December, shortly before "Three Kings" won best picture and best director honors from the Boston Society of Film Critics. Last week, Warners booked the film into theaters again as part of an Academy Award campaign. Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening's slick sick-suburbia film has been dubbed the favorite in the Oscar race, but "Three Kings" is this year's real American beauty.

To me, the master stroke at the core of "Three Kings" is putting four guys, after the war, into the kind of horrific episodes that the pre-war "publicity" warned us the Gulf War would contain.

The exposi was a big part of it for me. I knew there had been a whole side to the conclusion of that war that had been buried under a sea of yellow ribbons. I thought it was scandalous that it hadn't really been told. Many of the soldiers I met who had experienced it felt -- strongly -- that there was something hypocritical about the end of the war.

And then, when I continued my research, I found, to use your analogy, that some of the stuff the media had "previewed" had happened, to a degree never brought into our awareness. Everybody's image from the war was of computer images, which dehumanizes the whole thing. So I wanted to show what it was like to live with a gas alarm and know that different kinds of gases are in the air. I wanted to show what it was like to meet Iraqis face to face, and what it was like to see all this stuff stolen from Kuwait. Getting the information out was a powerful motivation for me.

You can't go to a public library and try to research this war and get anything except establishment military views of what happened. At the end of the final credits, there's a citation that "scenes of Operation Desert Storm" were "derived from photographs by Kenneth Jareke from his book, 'Just Another War.'" Even that book is out of print now.

I decided I was going to take risks visually, so a lot of my research was visual. I didn't just go through books and newspapers -- I did things like watch films by that Russian director who made "The Cranes Are Flying" and "I Am Cuba" [Mikhail Kalatozov]. I had to storyboard a lot of the movie, just to know what was achievable. But I wanted to take a journalistic approach, so there was a lot of hand-held camera work and Steadicam. I wanted the film to be as kinetic as could be the whole time, and I wanted to let it be sloppy.

"Just Another War" was pretty amazing. There was another book called "Telex Iran" by Gilles Peres, which had an incredible collection of photographs from around the time of the Iranian revolution, presenting chaos with a lot of depth of focus -- people big in the foreground and a lot of people very far away.

And the Los Angeles Times had a day-by-day of the war on its front page. That's where you saw Bart Simpson on the grille of a truck. That's where you saw bizarre tableaux of soldiers being stripped in the middle of nowhere. And that's where you saw weird saturated Xerox color. It was the first war that had color photographs in the newspaper. We sought to reproduce the odd color of the newspaper images by using Ektachrome -- not a movie stock, but one in which the colors are very saturated -- and the bleach bypass process, which leaves a layer of silver on the film, so when the colors do pop through they get a harsh, blown-out look.

Tom Sigel, my cinematographer [billed as Newton Thomas Sigel], had shot some seminal documentaries in Central America in the '80s, when civil war was tearing up all those countries, including one called "El Salvador: Another Vietnam," and another called "Guatemala: When the Mountains Tremble." He had been in the middle of firefights; he knew what it was like to be in that kind of world. So he understood exactly what I was talking about. And he was also somebody who was happy to say, "Let's look at a menu of processing choices and test some of them and see what you like."

Next Page: Peckinpah! Archie! Sandinista!

• View blog reactions