I can't tell you much about director and co-writer Larysa Kondracki beyond the fact that she has directed an extraordinary film called THE WHISTLEBLOWER, starring Rachel Weisz in one of her absolute best performances as Kathy Bolkovac, a realy-life small town cop who takes a job as a contracted U.S. peacekeeper for the United Nations. During her short time in Bosnia, she uncovered a particularly brutal sex trafficking ring that involved many of the people she worked side by side with every day in the UN, all of whom would do anything to keep their involvement a secret.
In addition to Weisz, the film co-stars Vanessa Redgrave, David Strathairn, Benedict Cumberbatch, and an almost unrecognizable Monica Belluci as a soulless bureaucrat who puts in danger the very women she is supposed to be protecting. Although Kondracki is Canadian, she has Eastern European roots, and the general practice of sex trafficking was all-too familiar to her and her extended family, but she never dreamed the practice included UN workers until she learned Bolkovac's story.
By the director's own admission, she borrowed a few actors from the cast of the masterpiece Romanian work 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, 2 DAYS to play Bosnians and made this exceptional work, based on a script derived from conversations she and co-writer Eilis Kirwan had with Bolkovac. THE WHISTLEBLOWER is sometime horrifying and outright impossible to comprehend as something that actually happened. The film is in limited release now and opens in more cities this weekend. Those with strong minds and stomachs should see it immediately. In the mean time, please enjoy my conversation with Larysa Kondracki, who opened our talk with a remembrance that Copernicus gave her film a positive review after its premiere at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival early this year.
Larysa Kondracki: Did they fired him after that review? [laughs]
Capone: Of this film? No No. he lives in Canada actually.
LK: I love him. He liked the movie. Yeah, you guys are quite the powerhouse.
Capone: I don't think I've ever heard us described that way, but thanks. I’ve looked over a lot of the interviews that you did in Toronto, and I couldn't help thinking, “Wow, it’s like each person was reading the same set of questions.” I know we’ve got to cover certain basics, but they were almost identical.
LK: Well you have the answers from there. [laughs]
Capone: That’s true, but I’ve still got to get some of the basics covered for us. I noticed in watching the film the other day that you never let us forget that Kathy is twice divorced and she’s separated from her kids, and that’s a thing that clearly weighs on her, especially being separated from her kids. Although you don’t actually draw the connections specifically, do you think that had something to do with her drive to protect these young women?
LK: Absolutely. Yeah, I think absolutely. The great screenwriter, Waldo Salt, which I will now massacre in my paraphrasing, said some thing like, “Usually human beings know deep down what they want, and they take the longest route possible to get there” and I think that was when he was talking about MARATHON MAN. I think when you really think about it all of these true stories--NORMA RAE, ERIN BROKOVICH, SILKWOOD--they're all mothers and/or they came from husbands that didn’t respect them. I think there’s this need to prove yourself. I know some film critics mash me as if I made this up, that she goes all the way to Bosnia to save these girls, because she feels like a shitty mother. What can I tell you? That’s what happened. I think that’s part of her psychological makeup.
Capone: Did she actually confess to that when you met her?
LK: Well yeah. That was a really painful thing for her. I mean we had to compress it, but she has three kids, two of them are in college right, but one was 15 when she left. She got pregnant when she was 18, she was on a volleyball scholarship, and she got pregnant and had to drop out of college, and she raised these kids. Then from 18 to 28, she just had all of these shitty jobs, and I remember she was saying one of them in particular was she worked in a Holiday Inn--one of those corporate ones--and they would have all of these police conferences. And I’m honest about how she said it: “I loved "Matlock" and I was really athletic.”
So then she joined the police force at 28 and she was a really good cop, but then she divorced her first husband, who wasn’t working, so she was the breadwinner, and we actually have this scene, Rachel did it very well, it just didn’t fit in the film, where she goes it was a small town judge and they said, “You either give up your job as a police officer and go back to menial work or you lose your kids.” She just didn’t do it. She moved into a house three blocks down, she raised those children, and she was like, “I did that already,” and she said, “Okay, find me guilty, but I’m not a soccer mom.”
Capone: Right.
LK: I think her kids were scared that she went away, but at that point, again, one was 15 and she said, “Look, the hardest thing was once getting an email of my kid in a prom dress, and I realized I wasn’t there, but ultimately I’d rather be someone my kids are going to be proud of,” and they were. Her daughter was there at Toronto, it was nice.
Capone: When you and the screenwriter first met her, she hadn’t written a book about her experiences, this is something that you found out about. Did anything about her just in that first meeting strike you as extraordinary, or was it sort of her more ordinary nature that struck you that she did these extraordinary things?
LK: Yeah, she’s weird, because she’s totally goofy, she spills everything, and really tall and really warm and pleasant. But the second you start asking her questions about police work, it’s like a different person. And that’s the thing, she had the affair with the guy that was married. She was twice divorced. She’s not perfect and she will say it. She said her father and all of her uncles and everyone were Pittsburgh steelers, and she worked on a farm, and there’s just a right and wrong to certain things and to her. I don’t think she was as sickened by what she saw in Bosnia, because she had worked in sex crimes. So what really pissed her off was that it was her guys, the cops, that were doing it, more than the actual sex. We kept going, “When you first met this victim, how did you…” She was like, “Well, I had seen this before,” but not on such a widespread level.
Capone: Did the subject matter make it difficult to et financing for this film? Or did the fact that you're pointing the finger at people who work for the United Nations hinder you in any way?
LK: I think it made it saucier, to be honest. I think the big problem was me. The script got a lot of attention, and everyone was like, “We want to give it to this director or this director,” and I was just young and I said, “No, it’s mine.” I think that was the right decision.
I love SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. I love SILKWOOD. I think SILENCE OF THE LAMBS was a true corporate thriller element. I think it was, again, what I’ll say is I don’t look at it so much as a movie about sex trafficking as much as it’s almost a corporate thriller with some dark shit in it, you know? I think that’s what people kind of go, “Oh, Bosnia sex trafficking,” but I think Samuel Goldwyn’s been really smart by putting us on all of the film festivals, and audiences really like it. I think some critics have a problem with it. [laughs]
[Both Laugh]
Capone: The other thing you never let us let go of is the character of Raya; this is almost as much her journey, and I’m kind of curious why you decided to tell it about these two worlds that come together.
LK: I think that if you are going to tell the story, you have to really show what sex trafficking is. I have seen it once in Lukas Moodysson’s LILYA 4-EVER, which is a brilliant film.
Capone: Sure, absolutely.
LK: That was a brilliant film, but it’s not the type that’s going to cross over, right? So, we have this story, but I just wanted to sneak in some parts, because I did think that sex trafficking has become like a plot point in "Law & Order" or "24" or TAKEN, which are all good shows and great movies, but this one and--I don’t know how you say this without giving things away--but you need to understand why Raya doesn’t live with her in the end.
Capone: Right.
LK: I think if you look at what PHILADELPHIA did for AIDS just by making is something human, like suddenly Tom Hanks can be gay and all of these white older folks are like, “Oh, well maybe we should look at this disease.” It’s the same sort of thing; you needed to humanize thing, because I think people just go, “Sex trafficking happens over there, and it’s just bad, but it has nothing to do with us.” So if you are going to be pointing to the corporations, the private contractors, the U.S. State Department, and other governments that are involved, you have to kind of put the person in there, because otherwise it’s just an intellectually evil crime as opposed to really understanding what it is.
Capone: And people are talking about a lot of the actors you’ve got in some of these supporting roles too, but the one that freaked me out the most was Monica Bellucci, because I consider her one of the great beauties in the world, and she’s a great actress, but to see her play this soulless thing. I've never seen her do this before and I was really shocked by her.
LK: She was so great. And that’s the same reason why you get these great actors. We paid them scale, so we didn’t break union laws, but they didn’t take a paycheck, and she came up to me and she goes, “I want to wear a grey wig and to be an asshole.” And I was like, “Alright, why not?” You’ve seen her, and she’s brilliant in like IRREVERSIBLE and THE APARTMENT and all of these great French and Italian films, but here they cast her as like the beauty witch or Mary Magdalene--I mean she’s brilliant as Mary Magdalene--butI think everyone wanted to do something different. Her elegance is scary with the way she walks in.
Capone: It makes a difference that it’s a woman doing this to other women.
LK: That to me is the scariest part. The original version of the script was structured much more like TRAFFIC, where you saw all four stories, but everyone found it mind-numbingly boring, and the anti-trafficking industry was something to me that we found in our research, the aide work and how much money is involved in that. It’s terrifying.
Capone: I’m actually a huge fan of Danish cinema as well, so seeing Nikolaj [Lie Kaas] in that role as the other peacekeeper was very cool. I was trying to explain to the person I was watching with, “That guy is one of the biggest star in Denmark.” Nobody knows him in this country ,and I think he’s great.
LK: And we loved him, and Rachel loved him.
Capone: What made you think of him for this?
LK: I’m the same as you; I’m a big fan of Danish cinema. I mean, Susanne Biers’s films…
Capone: Yeah, I just met her at SXSW this year. She's awesome.
LK: I really want to meet her. BRODRE [BROTHERS] had come out when I was in Ireland, and I just went to the movie theaters, and we had just met Kathy and Jan and because I knew Kathy, I was never picturing an actress, but I saw BRODRE and I’m like, “That’s Jan.” And I swear to God, he’s the only one that I had from the beginning in my head and so I was like, “You have to give it to this guy,” and people were like “What are you talking about?” I was like “He’s got to be it.” And he was great, and that’s another thing we had to trim down a little, because, as Billy Wilder says, “At the end of the day, a movie just becomes itself.” Because Kathy was funny and there was a little more humor, but it just didn’t fit.
Capone: Back to what you were saying about having to show what trafficking is, this thing gets really graphic sometimes; it’s hard to watch at points. Was there ever a point where you just said, “We’ve got to dial it back,” or “We need to go further.”
LK: That was something we tested, and in Toronto the scene that everyone [talks about as being the most intense], it was 45 seconds longer and someone fainted or two people fainted, so that didn’t go well. I wanted to show reality, but I don’t also want to… I think Eilis [Kirwan], my co-writer, said it pretty well when she said, “You want people to be angry at the situation, not angry at the filmmaker,” and I think she's right.
Capone: That’s a good point.
LK: You don’t actually see anything and that I got from the Coen brothers when they were talking about NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and they're like, “Nobody actually shows how exhausting it is to be violent.” Think about holding a girl down, it would take three men. So it was a very fine line, and I think we found it. People stopped walking out of the theater after we made those small adjustments.
Capone: That’s a good goal. In addition to the physical abuse, there’s a tremendous psychological abuse that you do a really great job explaining, and that does go toward why she doesn’t leave at times when she can. Can you talk about balancing those two things?
LK: Yeah, and that’s something that we found in our research, again, that’s stuff you don’t really see much about or read much about over here, how psychologically advanced this crime is. The idea that you can snatch somebody from an airport or off the street and then put her in a brothel and say, “You must now be a prostitute,” it’s ludicrous, right?
Capone: Right.
LK: So the concept or what the academics have termed this period of desensitization, where they just repeatedly rape and burn them behind the ear and under the feet in strategic places so they don’t get visibly scarred, and then they give them this weapon of hope, which is “I bought you. If you earn this amount of money, you can go back home,” and I think that’s almost the cruelest thing there, and they never go back.
Capone: There's that scene toward the end where that woman says, “I’ve almost paid off my debt; I'll be going home soon,” and you are like, “She has no grip on reality. She bought it."
LK: Yeah, but just think about that. That’s why I loved using the two friends, Raya and Luba, and that’s what people said to us, “You handle it a different way.” The movie actually used to end--we had this scene where Luba goes back, she was let go and she becomes a recruiter, and people were just like “No, we can’t have that.”
Capone: That’s too bleak.
LK: But we shot it, and that’s how they would escape. So some would become part of it, because that’s a system of survival, whereas the others would keep their hope alive; it’s a very fine like, and so I think we tried to show a representation But it's amazing, in that situation, where you think you would fight, but look at what they did to these girls.
Capone: I know this took several years for you to pull this together. But how early on did Rachel Weisz come into the picture?
LK: When she actually signed on? Nine months before shooting. Once she signed on we were going. We did give her the script; she was the first person we went to about four years earlier, but she was pregnant at the time, and we didn’t know. And apparently she kept checking in, and we were at these different studios, and it was tied up, and everybody was sort of going to make it and then she checked in at the right time, and once she said yes, the money came too. It was like we had her, and we were shooting within nine months.
Capone: How did you find the actresses to play these girls?
LK: They're brilliant. I mean I have to say there’s a really great kind of… There’s this phrase that we have in Eastern Europe that’s hard to translate, but there’s like a "light darkness," which is like a sense of gallows humor really. There’s this sort of cultural feeling to things, and Romania had a war as well, not just Bosnia and Eastern Europe--and I’m from Canada--this tortured suffering we carry and they're just so alive, and even like the fourth girl from the left is just brilliant in it. We searched all over the place. One's German, one’s Romanian, one’s Canadian, and they were super important; they’re not just props.
Capone: Did you feel sort of obliged to protect them, to make sure they were okay with what they were doing?
LK: Yeah, everyone asks that question, but what’s so funny is they were dying to do it. Think about, you're a young actress and you’re staring in a movie with these Academy award winners, and you're like, “I want to go there!” That scene, it’s all very choreographed; we weren’t just like, “Here, let’s throw you down and see what happens.” So it’s almost like a dance, so she knew that by heart, so by the time we were shooting, she could just concentrate on the acting.
Capone: I know you’ve got a few things coming up. Can you talk about those for a minute?
LK: Yeah, one is an adaptation that Eilis wrote, my co-writer, an adaptation of a book called BURNING RAINBOW FARM by Dean Kuipers. It’s a great book. Long story short, these two guys in Michigan have a Utopian life and believe in life. They're libertarians. They're gay, but they are actually just two dudes in love. They're kind of motorcycles guys, and they end up having all of these camp-outs and they because really, really famous. They liked their pot, but they were really strict about with “No hard drugs. No selling.” They were very family oriented, and it was really fun and they ended up being No. 14 of High Times 100 best festivals.
And then this one district attorney came in and got a bug up his ass about them and basically came after them and it became this… The details are quite funny. This cat-and-mouse game like he would fine them for no Porta-Potties, and then they would show up to vote down the county building getting air conditioning. Who votes on that? So the whole gang would show up to make sure the D.A. didn’t get air conditioning. It just kept escalating to the point where they took the younger guy's kid, and under Reagan’s forfeiture laws from the '80s under suspicion… if a cop suspected you of having a joint in your car, he could take away your car, and a lot of times that’s incentive for cops to do that. So they tried to take away their farm and it ended in a three-day siege, ATF, FBI, everyone was there, they ended up shooting them both, and they burned the farm in protest. They went out on their own terms. Two days before 9/11, “Where were your nations resources?”
But the tone it totally like THELMA AND LOUISE and BUTCH CASSIDY meets like DOG DAY AFTERNOON. So that one’s actually quite far ahead and then another thing I’m working on called BORDERLAND, which is an epic horror set in WW2 in the fields of the Soviet Union. It’s kind of cool with a little fantasy.
Capone: Is that an original?
LK: Yeah.
Capone: I want to see that.
LK: Yeah, it’s like APOCALYPTO and PAN’S LABYRINTH all mixed together.
Capone: Wow, nice.
LK: It should be fun. I’m just trying to do something different, you know?
Capone: Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with a good director of drama doing a horror film every once in a while.
LK: I know and I love horror films, like the really good ones are fucking terrifying. This was such a run and gun and get the story. Paul Greengrass and things like that were the stuff we were looking at, and I wanted to give the actors the space to do their thing. Do you know the movie 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, AND 2 DAYS?
Capone: Sure, yeah.
LK: Which I stole the whole cast from. I was like “Let’s put 4,3,2 into MICHAEL CLAYTON and shake that up” and I think that’s what we got. So for this other movie, I really wanted to do something a little more formally and controlled.
