CHRIS NEUMER: You mentioned about how you like to write a narrative. And it’s hard enough writing a fiction narrative, but when you have to have to do a non-fiction narrative it seems impossible. How do you flesh out the “truth”?
MARK BOWDEN: It would be what I understand to be true, or my best effort to tell you what’s true. I fully understand that another writer would see things different than I do. I still say that there’s a great book to be written by a Somali about the battle of Mogadishu and it would be completely different from what I wrote. Even if it was totally accurate it would complement what I’ve done, but it would be totally different from what I’ve done. So within the limitations of who I am and what I can do and my values and how I see the world, what I offer is my best understanding of what actually happened in this case. Reconstructing past events gets into craft. And ideally… long passages of Black Hawk Down for instance; where there’s dialogue going on it’s taken from actual radio transcripts. Listening to what people were actually saying: it’s recorded. So, that’s the perfect solution for a non-fiction writer: to have an accurate record of exactly what happened. It doesn’t solve all your problems, but it’s a huge help. And where you don’t have it, you have to rely upon memory and documentation. It’s a fun process. I think that because I was a newspaper reporter for most of my life and learned to be diligent about reporting and learned to love reporting that I get as much pleasure out of the research and going and collecting the information that I need to make the story as I get out of actually crafting the story. Although I still think I prefer the writing part better, but I like both aspects of it.
CHRIS NEUMER: Now in the two books that you’ve had… Black Hawk Down is already a movie, and Killing Pablo I know is currently undergoing this, did you have any hand-in-hand, because Joe Carnahan is writing and directing Killing Pablo, do you have any input into what he’s creating for his shooting script or is it something that you’ve washed your hands of it?
MARK BOWDEN: I’ve been very involved with Killing Pablo. Originally Killing Pablo was purchased by an outfit called Miracle Productions and...
CHRIS NEUMER: If it’s a good picture it’s a miracle. I know them well.
MARK BOWDEN: Gregory Novice was the director attached to it and I wrote an adaptation for Greg with their input, and then they sold the project with the script to Paramount which bought it for Joe, because Joe read the book and fell in love with the story and wanted to make it. And then Joe and I sat down and developed a detailed treatment of the movie.
CHRIS NEUMER: How detailed? How long?
MARK BOWDEN: Forty-seven pages long.
CHRIS NEUMER: That’s detailed.
MARK BOWDEN: Very detailed. Scene-by-scene. But things take time and that ended up being delayed. I don’t remember why. Joe was off doing something else, or Paramount dragged its feet on it. When it came time to actually write the script, I was engaged in writing my next book and I told them I couldn’t take time to do it. So, Joe wrote the script based on our treatment and did a great job. I think he’s a really good screenwriter. I learned a lot about screenwriting. If you’re that engaged in the development of the project you can fully appreciate the steps that were taken from the treatment to the script. Joe was very artful the way he did it... And I like that script. So, as it now stands, I guess that’s Joe’s. I’m thankfully successful enough and my reputation is out there that I don’t really need to get—I mean, I would get paid a little more and my agent would probably like it, but... Well, it hasn’t been made. It’s still there. I’m hoping that Joe will get someone to finance it so he can make it. It’s one of a number of projects in Hollywood I have going at the moment. I did originally work on Black Hawk Down. I did the original adaptation of Black Hawk Down and then they hired Ken Nolan to make it a real script. That was the first script I had ever written and it basically sucked. It did bridge the gap from the book to the movie and I think it made it easier for Ken to take that step. And then Ken did a great job.
CHRIS NEUMER: It’s interesting that you say that because I’ve had this ongoing vendetta for probably the last two years, ever since Monster came out with Charlize Theron. I realized that I was just sick of the based-on-a-true-story thing because it’s like, “Let’s take a regular movie and then let’s put it on crack. We need drama? We have this? Let’s ramp it up a little bit. We need that? Make her a lesbian.” Whenever you run into a wall, you can just make up whatever you want. I’ve always said though that Black Hawk Down is one of the few movies where it didn’t feel inflated at all. Even if the incident never happened, it would still be a very solid movie and I think a lot of these others movies make people think, “Why the hell are we watching this?”
MARK BOWDEN: I think Ridley [Scott] and Jerry [Bruckheimer] did a great job on it. And Jerry was committed from the very beginning, much to my surprise, given the kind of films that he makes. I like Jerry Bruckheimer’s films, for the most part, but they’re comic books. They’re very well-made, entertaining comic-books and they take place in a sort of hyper-reality, which people love and I like, and it’s fun to go see, but you don’t take it seriously. So, when he bought Black Hawk Down, my thought was, “Woah. What’s he doing?”
CHRIS NEUMER: Did you have a say in who bought it?
MARK BOWDEN: Yeah. I could have refused to sell it to him. But he was the only person offering at the moment. And it was a good offer. I thought, “What the heck?” and if Jerry makes a movie that I don’t like, I’ll be the first to say that I don’t like it. But the truth is that it will be the best two-hour commercial ever made for a book, and the book is out there. That’s my product. And if he makes a movie called Black Hawk Down, it’s gonna sell a million more copies of my book, so to me it was like a win-win situation. And when Jerry flew me out to Hollywood for the first time and I met him, he told me that he wanted to make a different kind of movie than he’d ever made and he wanted to be very faithful to the story and he wanted the movie to have a documentary feel. And for that reason, he said, “I want you to be involved with the project from the very beginning until the end.” And my first thought was, “Yeah right.” That’s what they tell the journalist from the east coast when he flies out. But that was exactly what he did. He was absolutely honest with me and he followed through on everything he told me he was going to do and I couldn’t be happier with the way it turned out. Right up until promoting the movie and travelling all over the world in a private jet with Jerry and all the various actors. It was fun for me and it was uncomplicated because I really felt like it was a good movie. I didn’t feel compromised in any way and there were a couple instances where the studio felt they wanted to spin this thing or that thing and I just ignored them. I did whatever I wanted to and it didn’t seem to damage anything.
CHRIS NEUMER: That is certainly good. I was talking to the director of a new film coming out called Perfume, but it’s sort of a period story about a guy who lived in 18th Century France… sort of a smelling superhero. The lead decides that what he wants to do is create the perfect smell, which he’s going to get by distilling the scents of 13 virgins. He goes about killing these girls to get the perfect scent. He’s an odd duck to say the least. We were talking about the interesting nature of the protagonist and how there were certain times when he had to frame the lead character in a manner to get the audience behind him, even though he is patently horrible. I’m not saying that Sgt. Eversman was horrible necessarily, but was there anything you did when writing the script or writing the book to create a standard lead character persona to that character?
MARK BOWDEN: Well, I chose Matt Eversman to be… if there was a main character in that movie, he was it. And I chose him to play that role for a number of reasons. One: I was intrigued by the idea that he had been put in charge for the first time and so he felt responsible for these other guys that he was with. The essence of the story was that you have a group of young men who are eager to experience combat and who get their wish. That’s what that story is about. And so Eversman, because he was a little bit older than those other guys, and he was put in charge, carried a little more of a sense of responsibility for the people than the other guys and that made him just a little bit more interesting. He was also someone who was roped in, which is a very dramatic way of getting into the story and he was right there at the target house during the raid. And what I did, actually, for the film was, the real Sgt. Eversman in the battle gets on the convoy and ends up driving through the city and getting shot to pieces and then they get back to base. In the movie Sgt. Eversman runs to the downed Black Hawk and gets pinned there overnight. And there is a character who did that named Tommy Tomaso and so I just merged Edwards and Tomaso and made them the same character in the movie so that you have a central character present throughout the film. So, if that answers your question, that’s why I chose him as a character and that’s how I manipulated the reality in order to make it work in the context of the movie.
CHRIS NEUMER: I’m not sure that’s what my question was, but that’s because I realize that there might not be answers to the things that I talk about. (laughs) Sometimes I just mention an idea and I stop talking. I know it’s not exactly what they teach you in journalism school, but…
MARK BOWDEN: No. I’m interested. I do try to answer the question. Sometimes I fail.
CHRIS NEUMER: No, I know there are a lot of people out there who want very specific answers to the very specific questions you have, but, and maybe you’ve found this, I find the interviews get more interesting when you stop answering the questions I had and we get somewhere else.
MARK BOWDEN: Yeah.
CHRIS NEUMER: That’s where I want to go and I don’t know how to get off topic… if I could get off topic at the start I would, but I have to get on topic so we can get off topic…
MARK BOWDEN: Well, I’ll tell you something that’s interesting to me. I never imagined that I would be working in film. It’s never a thing that occurred to me. My goal was always to write books and ultimately to get into a position where I could pretty much exclusively write magazine articles and books. And the fact that Hollywood got interested in the work that I do and that Jerry Bruckheimer bought Black Hawk Down and made it a success has essentially created a new avenue for writing for me that wasn’t there in the past. Part of me feels, and is convinced, that it’s a bad idea to chuck the career I’ve had for the past 30 years and everything I’ve learned about how to do it and start trying to learn a whole new dance and learn how to do that, But that opportunity is there, if I want it. I’m writing a script right now which is a completely original script…
CHRIS NEUMER: Based on a true story?
MARK BOWDEN: No, I’m making it up and I’m enjoying doing that. I’m trying to juggle in my life, journalism and creative fiction writing; that’s basically what script writing is.
CHRIS NEUMER: If you’re lucky. Otherwise it’s just bad script writing.
MARK BOWDEN: Everybody’s trying to do good work and you do the best you can. I think it’s fascinating. My approach initially towards film work was that there was no way it could hurt me. It was fun, it was lucrative, and it would help sell my book.
CHRIS NEUMER: Right on all three points.
MARK BOWDEN: So, where’s the down side to this? And my friends who are just screenwriters, not journalists, I see their suffering. I see them create an idea very carefully, craft an idea for a film, and then watch it get petered away, sort of…
CHRIS NEUMER: Lowest common denominatored.
MARK BOWDEN: Right. But that’s… I think any realistic filmwriter realizes that making a film is a collaborative process.
CHRIS NEUMER: Compromise.
MARK BOWDEN: So you do end up with some of that naturally. But a lot of that, when you’re dealing with big movies in particular and turning something good into something really awful, for whatever reason, you have a big star in it or whatever or it has a happy ending. It’s calculated to be a safe investment, which is really what a big movie is and I have always been able to be distant from that because I always feel like my creative product is my book or an article, magazine article. The movie is really the creative product of the director and the producer, and if they make a shitty movie I’d be the first to say, “I think that movie is crap.” There was a movie made based on a story that I wrote. The movie’s called Money For Nothing and it had a great cast: John Cusack, James Gandolfini, and Benicio del Toro. It’s a wonderful cast. It’s a crap movie. And I think most of the people involved in it would agree at this point that it’s a piece of crap. The story that I wrote that it’s based on is, I think, one of the most amazing stories that I’ve ever come across as a journalist. We published it as a small book called Finder’s Keepers. It’s like an urban folktale. So, I’ve seen how Hollywood can take a terrific story, a simple, classic story and make a complete botch out of it and…
CHRIS NEUMER: Did that explain your six or seven years between Hollywood projects?
MARK BOWDEN: No, what happened was after that movie was made—before I sold Black Hawk Down—I wasn’t involved in any way in the making of the movie. I did see how much [the studios] were paying people to adapt my work for the screen and how pathetic the results were, so I remember telling my agent, “If we ever sell anything to Hollywood, make part of the deal that I do the original adaptation.” I figured the worst thing that would happen would be that they would pay me all that money that they’re paying this other screenwriter to adapt my work and then throw it away to hire a real screenwriter, in which case I get paid. And the best thing that could happen is that I would end up influencing the way the movie was made in some way.
