Ayad Akhtar for The War Within (2005) Interview

The War Within
5th May 2006
Posted by: Ryan Izay

Ayad Akhtar, the co-writer and star of the controversial post-9/11 drama, The War Within, was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He graduated with a theater degree from Brown University, and went on to the graduate film program at Columbia University which is where he met Joseph Castelo, director of The War Within. Akhtar has been a resident of New York since 1997, active in the theater community. I recently sat down at a roundtable with Akhtar, who proved that his education has found practical use in his use of words, both in screenwriting and interviews.

Question: How did this project come about?

Ayad Akhtar: Joe, Tom and myself all went to Columbia graduate film program and we were in New York when 9/11 hit. After 9/11 I think that we only talked about one thing, and that was what had happened and how the world was changing because of what had happened. So this film grew out of that preoccupation and those conversations and that soul searching.

Q: Your family is from Pakistan originally?

A.A.: Yeah.

Q: 9/11 must have changed must have changed something for you aside from living in New York.

A.A.: You know, it’s a very complicated answer to that question, because after 9/11 we were like all Americans, attacked and feeling the suffering and pain of that, and to add to that we were also being looked at with suspicion. So it’s kind of a tricky bind. On one hand you definitely understand that when people are afraid they are going to naturally be afraid of people who look that way, and on the same token, we want those people.

Q: Did you have any personal experiences or was it mostly research to make the film?

A.A.: Well, we did research the film a lot. We spent a great deal of time talking to all sorts of people. I don’t think we ever talked to anyone who was a terrorist, but we talked to a lot of people, we read everything we could get our hands on, and we just tried to immerse ourselves in this world during the time of making this movie, writing the script and making the movie. I can’t say precisely that we spoke with someone who was a friend of a friend, but I hope that we painted a portrait which is accurate to a certain kind of activity that is happening in the world today, and I think its evidence by what happened in Bali just a few days ago and London. We actually locked picture the day of the London bombings, strangely. It’s not really a 9/11 film. It’s a post-9/11 film. Meaning it’s a film about the world that exists because of 9/11.

Q: But did you have any personal experiences put in the film?

A.A.: I’m Pakistani American, so all of the family, Sayeed, the doctor, his wife, his sister, the kid; they eat dinner out back with varying points of view. I think the portrait of Muslim American life that the film portrays is something that is based a large part upon my experiences, but it’s also a function of all of us going out there and meeting those people and seeing how they live and writing about it.

Q: Why did you use Pakistan? Why was Hassan taken back to Pakistan?

A.A.: Well, a couple of things. First of all I think that Pakistan is at a very critical juncture and I think that many people believe that the way Pakistan goes, the whole region will go. It’s an enormous country, it has enormous resources, it’s a nuclear power, and there is very strong fundamentalist population in many parts of the country. So, geopolitically speaking, Pakistan is very important. There is obviously the aspect that I am myself Pakistani and know that culture relatively well, and something I had to learn more about, because I was brought up in this country. I was born and raised in Milwaukee. But I think the main reason really was because we felt that Pakistan was an important piece of the puzzle.

Q: What is it like to be an American but to be of clearly foreign origin in an external sense?

A.A.: Like I was saying earlier with the question about post-911 and how life has changed for people in this continent and also the Middle East, it’s tricky. America is so many colors, but often America is perceived to be white or black. I guess I’ve had all sorts of experiences my whole life, but I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and I have to say that I didn’t really experience any racism. My buddies accepted me like anybody else. But by the same token I think that there is a particular kind of experience for people who don’t fit into either that white or black category, which is almost this sense of being invisible, and that changed after 9/11. I think maybe if it was an understated theme of my developmental years, it was feeling invisible to the culture, not feeling discriminated against, but just feeling not as present. But after 9/11 we were present. We were present as a threat. We existed.

Q: Have you had experiences since 9/11 of discrimination, such as getting on a plane?

A.A.: The film is doing a couple of things. Yes, I‘ve had that experience. Sayeed, in the film talks about having that experience. Yes, we’ve had that experience, but it’s important to understand that the world has changed, and we’re all afraid. I think that profiling is, to some extent, inevitable, and as long as it’s done respectfully… I’ve had police officers profile me, but they do it almost saying, “You know man, I know you’re probably not involved in anything but this is my job and I’ve got to do it” and I’m telling you, I have respect for that. I really do. It does hurt. Of course. But it’s just reality and I think that we are Americans, as you said, and there is no reason why it should be something that makes us feel less American. I think sometimes it does when it’s not done respectfully, but its part of the reality of the world that we’re living in. But I don’t think that the profiling can be taken to the extent that it is in the film, where Sayeed is taken away. I understand that the F.B.I. has a job to do and they haven’t been with Sayeed throughout the film. They don’t know if he’s innocent or guilty, but I think there’s a compassionate, judicious use of justice. A respectful use of justice which has to be maintained. It’s that core human value that’s so important to this movie.

Q: When they take him away, the term is “extraordinary rendition”. How did that come about?

A.A.: Well, that’s a program that was devised by President Clinton in his administration to enable the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. to forcibly remove terrorist suspects and to return them to their countries of origin or to countries such as Syria and Egypt, which would undertake the job of extracting information from them. So, in a sense it was the United States government’s way of avoiding the Geneva conventions. So what the film does, is it shows that happening, and he is returned to Pakistani intelligence, who resort to a very violent means to extort information that they have no idea that he may or may not have. As is always the case with torture, Amnesty International speaks very eloquently about this, intelligence officers are not living in a world of 24. They don’t know that X person has information. 99% of the time, they don’t know. So extracting information is a much more delicate thing. Use of torture, admittedly by many intelligence officers, they believe that it’s useless, because they don’t even know if the information they have gotten is true or not. So, in a sense, I think that what the film is saying is that although we are living in a geopolitical situation which has changed since 9/11, because we were attacked we have to take forcible action, maybe there’s a limit to the kind of action we should be taking because unfortunately, certain actions are militarizing and radicalizing part of the population of the rest of the world.

Q: Can you talk about the way the film challenges stereotypes.

A.A.: We’ve been asked that question a lot, especially in terms of “aren’t we afraid the film galvanizes a certain stereotype”, and you know, it would be tough to galvanize something that’s already titanium clad. That stereotype is out there. What we are doing is giving it dimension. We are working, in a sense, with the stereotype that the terrorist is someone from Pakistan. Or from the east. Beyond that, I think we are trying to be much more nuanced and more importantly we’re trying to paint a broad spectrum or religious practices and beliefs within the Muslim American experience. And that’s very important. That’s one of the film’s primary intentions, is to differentiate out various elements of this monolithic, treacherous notion of Islam as this very terrifying thing.

Q: Hassan goes in and he lives with his friends in New Jersey and his friend doesn’t have much to do with real Islam.

A.A.: Well, he’s a secular Muslim, like a cultural Jew or a Christian who goes to the proverbial Christmas Eve and Easter morning mass.

Q: The best scenes in the film are when you’re talking to his son Ali, and the kid is asking for explanations of what’s happening.

A.A.: Well, the deeper sub-theme and the real core of the movie, as you rightly identified, is the war within the household and the war within Islam for the next generation’s mind. It’s a war of ideology. The war that we are fighting is not just a military war. It’s a war of ideas and what’s happening with Ali is an attempt to dramatize the battle for his soul. The battle for what he is going to make for Islam in the next generation.

Q: Are you at all worried that the ending with Ali may be construed as somewhat pessimistic?

A.A.: here’s the tricky thing. Unfortunately, the Muslim prayer has become politicized. There are a billion Muslims who pray every day and it has nothing to do with violence. So that last image doesn’t mean what we are afraid it means, but that’s important to us as filmmakers. To present that politicized image of prayer and to make the audience ask the question, “What is he doing? Is he praying for solace or is he praying as a prelude to violence?” And that’s a question we want to leave the audience with, because we want them to ask another question; what can they do in their lives concretely that are going to somehow affect that boy’s future, metaphorically speaking. How can they take actions that are somehow going to help him make the choice to pray the way that we all hope he is praying, and maybe we all do in someway, for solace. For guidance.

Q: There are actually quite a few moments in the film which could be construed in many different ways. Was that intentional?

A.A.: Absolutely. The larger architectural principle of the film was to reach the audience in an emotional way beneath the level of political discourse, because discourse has become so encrusted on this issue that we’re not experiencing the human reality of it at all any more. And all we felt we could really contribute to this…I’m mean, we’re not policy makers, we’re not foreign policy thinkers, we’re not politicians. What can we as artists contribute to the debate? What can we contribute to the culture? We can contribute an experience that the audience has that will bring about their own curiosity to ask this question in a more fundamental and meaningful way. So, yeah, all of those things were left purposefully ambiguous, and I hope that’s effective. I hope that’s not confusing to people. One of things the audiences are doing is connecting with the emotional trajectory of the story, which is very important to us.

Q: When I am with my Japanese friends we speak in Japanese. In this film, sometimes you use our mother language, but sometimes you talk in English.

A.A.: Japan is a very different culture than Pakistan and India. In India and Pakistan, especially in the upper class and the upper middle class, Hindi, Urdu, and English are spoken interchangeably and they move very fluidly out from one to another. If you ever spend time with even with Indian Americans or Pakistani Americans you’ll see the same phenomenon where a sentence will begin in English and end in Urdu. So we were just trying to be accurate to the portrayal of that particular socioeconomic and cultural identity.

Q: You went through fourteen different endings for the film. How did you come to your decision? Did you shoot various endings?

A.A.: We didn’t shoot different endings. We had endings of three different kinds. One is that he doesn’t do it. One is that he does it but doesn’t kill anybody but doesn’t kill anybody else. Kills only himself. It’s an act of suicide. And the third is that he kills himself and he kills other people, and it seemed to us that it was not a responsible choice to pander a fantasy of what was happening in the world. This was what was happening, and it may have vast implications for our movie that this is what happens in the film, but we just felt that it was important to remain true to the political realities.

Q: You got permission to shoot in Grand Central Station, yet this wasn’t gorilla filming.

A.A.: Go figure. We certainly did.

Q: It’s very expensive to film in New York.

A.A.: And the amazing thing is Joe went around and told everybody, all of the national guardsmen, all of the police officers, all of the military present, that we were going to be doing this and that I was going to be wearing a bomb vest, and in the shot when you see me enter and walk up the steps, turning around, and you see Hassan approaching his destination, what you don’t see is two National Guards on each side protecting our right to do this. And that’s amazing. And it’s kind of an image of not only what’s great about America, but also what’s special about the role of an artist in a way, which is that we’re extending an act of understanding. An empathy in a sense, not sympathy, but empathy, to a character who if he was in our shoes probably wouldn’t do the same. In fact, certainly doesn’t do the same. But that is an important thing that we have to do. We have to extend that.

Q: Were you ever worried while making the film that the audience might see the film as showing sympathy towards Hassan rather than empathy?

A.A.: Yeah, we thought a lot about that, and we think, we hope that tit is clear from the human tragedy that is wreaked upon the house, that we’re not condoning this. So, that clear response absolutely eliminates the possibility of sympathy. So what we might be doing is much more complex, which is empathy. Try and put ourselves in the shoes of another person simply to understand their thoughts and feelings.

Q: And why do you believe tat empathy is so important on the war against terrorism?

A.A.: Because the human reality that is being forgotten because of the political discourse is an important part of the puzzle. In Joe’s director’s statement he has this wonderful quote from Emerson. It says, “Great men, great nations, have been perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.” We can’t have a full picture of what’s going on unless we do put ourselves in their shoes.

Q: When I was at the screening everyone had a reaction, but they were all different.

A.A.: Oh, yeah, it’s amazing. We have seen that and we’ve seen that people really reach out to each other after the movie, because they’re looking for someway to frame what has happened and that’s the intention. We want to connect the audience back to that communal experience. It’s not just about being in a movie theater looking at my thing. It’s about all of us together looking at something.

Q: In the film you speak in French and Urdu.

A.A.: I do. I had to learn Urdu because my parents never taught me, so for the role I had to learn it. I speak French, but the decision to have the character speak French was not because I speak French, it was because we thought that it was very important that colonization and the imprint of colonization would be a part of the story, because that’s a part of the story in the global political situation. So it was very important that we have that in the film. We talked about having German or Dutch but we decided on French because I speak French, so it would be easier. I speak a couple of other languages, but not as well.

Q: I was surprised to see the beginning of the film taking place in France, which is very far from the United States.

A.A.: They happen all over the world. Extraordinary rendition is happening all over the world. It’s happening in Europe, it’s happening in Africa, it’s happening in Australia, it’s happening everywhere. 60 minutes has done a couple of pieces on it.

Q: How did your family respond? The making of the movie and the news.

A.A.: My parents have not seen the movie yet. They were at a screening of Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers a couple of weeks ago and they saw the trailer play and they were surprised and shocked to see my big head on the screen and my mother ran out into the lobby and called me from her cell phone sobbing, “my baby, you look so beautiful on the big screen.” That’s how my parents are reacting to this movie. How do they react to the news? Well, they react in different ways. My father just tries to do his job. He’s a doctor. So he really just focuses on his work and doesn’t pay too much attention to the news. And my mother watches the news twenty four hours and has got an opinion about everything, which is not always consistent, but is always very well meaning and intelligent. It’s a varied response.

Q: How do you think this will get resolved?

A.A.: That’s a great question, and it’s so far beyond any capacity I would have to answer it and it would be arrogant for me to even try. One thing that I could say is that what we’re trying to do, is we’re trying to do our part to paint a clearer portrait, and hopefully with more information. The great thing about America, and it may sound corny to some people, is that we have the power to always transcend ourselves, and to always go beyond what we think we are, and I think that generations and generations of people across the planet have had a profound love for our country. Just because there is a lot of hatred out there doesn’t mean they have forgotten what they loved, and we just have to find a way to connect with that again. I don’t know how we do that, but hopefully in some ways this film will help people ask the question.

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