Director Ridley Scott was fine-tuning his modern-day war film BLACK HAWK DOWN with an eye toward releasing it this March when that plan, like so much else in the world, suddenly seemed to fall apart last Sept. 11.
American soldiers under siege in BLACK HAWK DOWN
© 2001 Columbia
"I was looking at what you call a director's cut on about the 11th or 12th of August, and we thought that it had come together quite well all you're doing is going through the refinements and what sound and music and editing you're going to put onto the final mix," Scott explains. "Then the 11th happened, and we met again quickly with a view to, frankly, postpone it indefinitely until we could see what to do you know, what was most appropriate."
After their initial hesitation, however, Scott and Columbia Pictures decided to move forward with the film as planned in fact, to move its wide release up a couple of months to last weekend.
"Within about 12 hours, it all came back together because I kept thinking that I wouldn't alter this film at all because of what happened [on Sept. 11] if anything, what happened distills the appreciation of what these guys do for us," Scott says. "And I thought, 'What better thing to do than to actually run the film as soon as possible?' It shows what these guys do on the ground, and most people have no idea. They think that [soldiers] are a war-mongering bunch of bloodthirsty lunatics, and they're not at all. I've met a lot of them over two projects [BLACK HAWK DOWN and Scott's 1997 Demi Moore-starrer G.I. JANE], and found them to be the antithesis of that. These guys are right now out there working on your behalf in Afghanistan and doing what they have to do."
Director Ridley Scott
© 2001 MGM
Based on journalist Mark Bowden's best-selling non-fiction book, BLACK HAWK DOWN chronicles the U.S. military's ill-fated 1993 mission to support an emergency U.N. famine relief program in the civil war-torn East African nation of Somalia. The effort took a tragic twist when U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force commandos attempting to snatch minions of a local warlord blocking the food relief deliveries got pinned down in a hostile part of the country's capital, Mogadishu. As night descended, approximately 100 U.S. troops engaged Somali militia fighters and angry civilians in what was at the time the longest sustained firefight American troops had faced since Vietnam. By the next day, 18 U.S. soldiers and untold numbers of Somalis were dead in a place few Americans could find on a map.
Pretty intense subject matter, but it comes as no surprise that a director who has staged memorable action set pieces from the distant past to the not-so-distant future in ALIEN, BLADE RUNNER and last year's blockbusters GLADIATOR and HANNIBAL would be up to the challenge of tackling the screen adaptation of BLACK HAWK DOWN.
"I think that I always tend to look for stories that are examining people under pressure, under extreme conditions, because it either draws out the best or the worst of people under those circumstances," Scott says. "Doing a film about recent history was really most attractive, and in a funny kind of way it was easier."
BLACK HAWK DOWN
© 2001 Columbia
In the end, Scott thought Bowden's book was "a great yarn. I'm a mainstream film director and therefore I just look for a great story, and I thought, 'What a great idea' real time, half-hour turns, and 18 ½ hours of hellish behavior."
Stay tuned for part two of CINESCAPE's profile on Ridley Scott, in which he discusses the influence SAVING PRIVATE RYAN had on BLACK HAWK DOWN.
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