March 1, 2010

When Mark Boal arrived in Iraq to cover the Army’s high-risk bomb squad for Playboy magazine in 2004, officials startled him with two unusual questions.

“They wanted to know my blood type and my religious affiliation,” Boal said. “When I asked why, they said ‘In case we have a funeral for you.’ And then they said, ‘Since you’re Jewish, you should really keep that under your hat. They behead Jews over here.’ And Daniel Pearl had just gone missing.”

Boal nevertheless donned his helmet and flack vest to become the first journalist ever embedded with the secretive Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit, whose members risked grisly death up to 20 times a shift. For more than three weeks, he stood as close as 100 meters to a roadside bomb, which could be hidden in a corpse or telephone pole, as a technician wearing a 90-pound Kevlar bodysuit attempted to disarm it, and sharpshooters watched for snipers in the teeming streets. When a device exploded, Boal took cover as the blast wave hit, followed by intense heat, shrapnel whizzing past at 25,000 feet per second and, finally, the deafening sound.

“It was the most terrifying, awe-inspiring thing I’ve ever witnessed,” said Boal, who drew from those experiences to write his Oscar-nominated screenplay for “The Hurt Locker,” which is also up for best picture.

Directed by Academy Award-nominee Kathryn Bigelow, the film captures the relentless tension and fear Boal felt and observed during those harrowing weeks through the eyes of three fictional characters: the cocky maverick Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner, nominated for a best-actor Oscar), who prefers the rush of combat to life at home with his wife and child; and the two sharpshooters — Sgt. J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Spc. Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) — whom James recklessly plunges into a deadly game of hide and seek with insurgents.

The taut thriller follows the team in a nearly nonstop series of bomb calls, providing a hyper-realistic immersion into the soldiers’ world and the mindset of men who voluntarily work with bombs. “On a character level, I was intrigued by the sort of mental and psychological framework that a technician develops: What kind of personality is comfortable with such extreme risk?” the 37-year-old writer-producer said.

Although the fictional Sgt. James seems almost liberated from his fear, the tour exerts a terrible toll on his psyche: “While he is a professional, he also comes to be addicted to the insane adrenaline and the existential intensity of his work,” Boal said. “To me that is symbolic of the plight of soldiers who volunteered to go to Iraq for patriotic or economic reasons, who are forced to continually re-experience these kinds of traumas [in multiple tours] whether they want to or not. In James’ case, he wants to, but that’s a not uncommon outcome of going through these kinds of experiences again and again.”

Over lunch in Studio City recently, Boal described this awards season as “the best of times and the worst of times.” On the one hand, “The Hurt Locker,” his solo screenplay debut, has been widely regaled as the best and most financially successful of Iraq war films to date. The drama received nine Oscar nominations, tied with the number for James Cameron’s “Avatar.” Boal has received a slew of best screenplay nominations for the film, and should “The Hurt Locker” win the Academy Award for best picture he also will be one of the producers clutching a statuette at the awards ceremony on March 7.

But just two weeks before this interview — on Boal’s birthday, Jan. 23 — a call came bearing terrible news: His father, William, a seemingly healthy 79-year-old, had died suddenly of a heart attack. Boal flew back to New York that night to make funeral arrangements and to sit shiva. “I’m just devastated,” he said of the loss. “I miss him every day.”

William Boal, a producer of educational films, converted to Judaism upon marrying Mark’s mother, Lillian. The family attended Reform synagogues, where Mark became bar mitzvah and “loved feeling connected to the community.” He describes his upbringing in Greenwich Village as “leftie and counterculture-y”; a favorite ritual was reading The New York Times with his father every morning before school. 

Boal was reporting for Rolling Stone when the attacks of Sept. 11 hit. In The Times the next day, he read that his close childhood friend, a Marine-turned-firefighter, had died after “charging up a smoky staircase to save a bunch of stockbrokers he’d never met and no doubt would have disliked,” Boal wrote in Written By magazine. “I figured [his] memory somehow unconsciously steered my coverage of the aftermath of 9/11 to be as humanistic and nonjudgmental as possible when writing about other tough young guys who signed up for the Army.” 

There was another reason he strove to cover the human price of the war: “Part of my Jewish upbringing is that when you see something that bothers you or is unjust, you’re obligated to do something,” he said.

Boal went on to write an article for Playboy about a soldier murdered by his platoon mates, which was adapted into the 2007 Paul Haggis film, “In the Valley of Elah.” And in late 2004, he targeted the bomb squad because “they were the guys nobody knew about, on the front lines of what was truly a war of bombs.”

Explosives weren’t the only threat Boal encountered. “It was very interesting and challenging being a Jew in Iraq and also in Jordan, where we shot the film,” he said, adding that the Jordanians were welcoming and professional. “Obviously I didn’t advertise my background. People could be quite vocal and anti-Israel — anti-Jewish sentiments were [high]. But I didn’t let that inhibit me from writing my article or making the movie. I don’t think I could have lived with myself if I had. Yet it was something I was keenly aware of and tried to navigate.”

Boal was especially anxious about keeping the cast and crew safe while shooting some of the film’s most suspenseful scenes in a Palestinian refugee camp near Amman. “I had a lot of security concerns because we had actors wearing American battle fatigues. Symbolically, it was intense to shoot that way on their front,” he said. “But by the end of the shoot, kids were yelling ‘Cut!’ and laughing, and it turned out to be a trouble-free experience. That’s the power of film. At the end of the day, you recognize everyone’s a movie fan.”