Interview: Kill the Messenger Director Michael Cuesta

In 1996 the San Jose Mercury News published (in print and on the nascent World Wide Web) a series of investigative articles entitled “Dark Alliance” by journalist Gary Webb.

In the articles, Webb stated that in the ’80s the CIA not only supported cocaine smuggling out of Nicaragua in order to fund its clandestine war against the Sandinista Government, but the Agency also turned a blind eye to the spread of the Los Angeles crack epidemic.

Soon after its publication, other newspapers, including the Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times began attacking Webb’s story, trying to poke holes and discredit his reporting.

A passion project of its star and producer, Jeremy Renner, the new drama Kill the Messenger follows both Webb’s investigative legwork and publishing triumph and his subsequent fall from grace as his character and integrity are attacked by both the CIA and other news organizations. The gripping film is not so much about vast, shadowy conspiracies, but a view from within an individual of the self-destructive cost of a personal, passionate pursuit of the truth. (Webb’s claims would eventually be vindicated by a 1998 CIA report, and in the 2000s, several of the newspapers that had attacked him and his story published mea culpas.)

Starring Renner as Webb and written by Peter Landesman (based on Webb’s own 1998 book Dark Alliance and Nick Schou’s 2006 book about Webb, Kill the Messenger), the film Kill the Messenger is directed by Michael Cuesta, whose work includes the 2001 feature film L.I.E., extensive directing duties on Six Feet Under, Dexter, and an Emmy for Homeland).

The film also features Michael Sheen, Andy Garcia, Ray Liotta, Barry Pepper, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Rosemarie DeWitt, Paz Vega, Oliver Platt, Richard Schiff, and Michael K. Williams.

I spoke with Cuestra last month in Chicago about his film, working with Renner, and how he went about telling the real Gary Webb’s story.

Kill the Messenger opens this weekend in select cities.

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The interesting thing about Webb’s story is that it wasn’t so much the CIA that tried to crush him as it was other newspapers.

Michael Cuestra: The CIA is part of it, but it’s much more about other journalists, the papers, and the bigger media monster that was created in the ‘80s, when it became more for-profit.

All those papers that wrote disparaging stories poking holes in Gary’s investigation didn’t print the story when it should have been investigated in the ‘80s.

So I saw it as those papers being really jealous that they missed the scoop or were afraid or were diverted and they didn’t dig. So it took a guy like Gary at a smaller paper that wasn’t really part of that conglomerate.

This took place in the early years of the Web, when everyone thought it would really open up investigative journalism. Instead, the film feels almost like a eulogy for investigative journalism.

Cuestra: Gary and the Mercury were the first to use the Internet, using it for that story. It was Gary’s idea to do that, letting the readers into his notebook and all his sources. Gary was very much a watchdog and was encouraged to dig as deep as he could. They brought him to San Jose because he had a reputation of going after corruption and government scandal. He was hired to do exactly that.

The film does have a swan-song feeling for investigative reporting. I did approach it like that. We don’t have those guys anymore, and I wanted to present Gary as kind of rock star with that cock-of-the-walk swagger. He was the end of an era.

But he was also really a stickler for detail, spending hours at night going through archives and old files. He checked everything—he was that guy. Especially in the first half of the film, I wanted to get that rhythm, of the cop on the beat. I approached it almost like a procedural.

That’s the challenge of a journalism movie, like any film about writing–you might have a big story and big themes, but you still have to figure out how to show the legwork, the research, and the actual writing.

Cuestra: That was tough, but it was obviously my job. The original script didn’t have the writing process, so I wanted that moment of catharsis when after all his investigation, he finally gets to sit down and write the story.

I added that scene in, where he sits down and puts on The Clash and gets to writing. He was a rock guy, and you can see his excitement for writing; he’s making the painting. I wanted to bring the audience into that process and make it exciting.

How did you and Renner go about creating a character version of Webb that was compelling on the screen but still true to the real-life person?

Cuestra: It’s really about two film-making techniques.

For me, I want to make the character as complex and real as possible. It’s not about being entertaining, but being completely truthful in the scene and not over-characterizing anything. I’d worked with Jeremy before, so we could work together to make his performance real and not just a character.

Then as a film maker you work to structure the film as a dramatic piece, using the real-life facts as story beats—for example Gary getting this mysterious call from this woman, Coral Baca (Vega), that sends the story off to the races.

That’s the way you put a movie together—once you have the performance, it’s my job to structure it, subtly, to figure out the movement of it all. Get his performance into the path of the story beats, where the story needs to go.

For example, the third act of the movie slows down a little bit because Gary goes into Purgatory, getting further and further away. He’s alone in this. I always wanted the film to come from him and his point of view.

How do you then capture that intention through visual style and camerawork?

Cuestra: It’s the subjectivity of it; it’s from inside, it’s his story and what happens to him as a result of his investigation. That was always the intent, to keep the camera on his shoulders, so to speak. The camera should reflect his feeling.

So the first half is more optimistic; it’s looser, scrappier, focused on Gary. That was a conscious effort by myself and my Director of Photography Sean Bobbit—we would discuss the script every morning and go through each scene.

Then the second half of the film gets bigger as a bigger thing is imposed onto Gary, and the film and the camera becomes more omniscient. There’s something else surrounding Gary that’s way more powerful than him, so the swagger starts to get stripped away and he starts to get lost in an open ocean, in uncharted waters.

The battlefield gets wider and wider, and I put more and more space on the screen—he’s alone. He knows he’s going there, and he chooses to go there.

It’s Gary’s journey, and the film has to tell his story as best it can. It’s all about getting the audience to feel what it’s like to carry that burden; that drive and passion to get at the truth. And the cost of it, the sacrifice.