Story of movie Zero Dark Thirty :
Zero Dark Thirty is a 2012 American political-thriller film directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by Mark Boal. Billed as "the greatest manhunt in history", the film dramatizes the nearly decade-long international manhunt for al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden after the September 11 attacks in the United States. This search eventually leads to the discovery of his compound in Pakistan and the military raid that resulted in bin Laden's death on May 2, 2011.
| Zero Dark Thirty | |
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Theatrical release poster | |
| Directed by | Kathryn Bigelow |
| Produced by |
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| Written by | Mark Boal |
| Starring |
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| Music by | Alexandre Desplat |
| Cinematography | Greig Fraser |
| Edited by |
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Production company |
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| Distributed by | Columbia Pictures |
Release date |
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Running time | 157 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $40 million |
| Box office | $132.8 million |
The film stars Jessica Chastain as Maya, a fictional CIA intelligence analyst, with Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton, Mark Strong, James Gandolfini, Kyle Chandler, Stephen Dillane, Chris Pratt, Édgar Ramírez, Fares Fares, Jennifer Ehle, John Barrowman, Mark Duplass, and Frank Grillo in supporting roles. It was produced by Boal, Bigelow, and Megan Ellison, and was independently financed by Ellison's Annapurna Pictures. The film premiered in Los Angeles on December 19, 2012 and had its wide release on January 11, 2013.
Zero Dark Thirty received widespread critical acclaim and appeared on 95 critics' top ten lists of 2012. It was nominated in five categories at the 85th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actress for Chastain, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing, and won the award for Best Sound Editing, an award it shared with Skyfall. The film also earned Golden Globe Award nominations for Best Motion Picture – Drama, Best Director, and Best Screenplay, with Chastain winning the award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama.
The film's depiction of so-called "enhanced interrogation" generated controversy, with some critics describing it as pro-torture propaganda, as the interrogations are shown producing reliably useful and accurate information. Acting CIA director Michael Morell stated, "The film creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques ... were the key to finding bin Laden. That impression is false." Other critics described it as an anti-torture exposure of interrogation practices.
Republican Congressman Peter T. King charged that the filmmakers were given improper access to classified materials, which they denied. An unreleased draft IG report published by the Project on Government Oversight, in June 2013, stated that former CIA Director Leon Panetta discussed classified information during an awards ceremony for the SEAL team that carried out the raid on the bin Laden compound. Unbeknownst to Panetta, screenwriter Mark Boal was among the 1,300 present during the ceremony.
Screenplay
Maya (Jessica Chastain) is a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency analyst, recruited "out of high school" around 1999, tasked with finding the al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden (Ricky Sekhon). In 2003 she is stationed at the U.S. embassy in Pakistan. She and fellow officer Dan (Jason Clarke), attend the black site interrogations of Ammar (Reda Kateb), a detainee with suspected links to several of the 2001 hijackers in the September 11 attacks, who is subjected to approved torture interrogation techniques. Ammar provides unreliable information on a suspected attack in Saudi Arabia, but does reveal to Maya the previously unknown name of the personal courier for bin Laden, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. Other detainee intelligence connects courier traffic by Abu Ahmed between Abu Faraj al-Libbi (Yoav Levi) and bin Laden. In 2005, Faraj denies knowing about a courier named Abu Ahmed; she interprets this as an attempt by Faraj to conceal the importance of Abu Ahmed.
In 2009, during the Camp Chapman attack, Maya's fellow officer and friend Jessica (Jennifer Ehle) is killed. On the same day, a case manager that likes the Abu Ahmed lead shares with her an interrogation with a Jordanian detainee claiming to have personally buried Abu Ahmed in 2001. Maya learns what the CIA was told five years earlier, that Morocco caught Ibrihim Sayeed traveling under the name of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. Realizing her lead may be alive, Maya contacts Dan, now a senior officer at the CIA headquarters. She speculates that the CIA's photograph of "Abu Ahmed" is that of his brother, Habeeb, who was killed in Afghanistan. Maya says that their beards and native clothes make all of the brothers look alike. This would explain Ammar's account of Abu Ahmed's "death" in 2001.
Maya wants the telephone number of Ibrihim Sayeed's mother, and it comes from a Kuwaiti prince for the price of a Lamborghini. CIA operatives use electronic methods to pinpoint a caller in a vehicle who persistently exhibits tradecraft behaviors that delay confirmation of his identity. The vehicle is physically tracked to a large urban compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, near the Pakistan Military Academy. Gunmen attack Maya while she is in her vehicle; the action indicates to the agency that her cover is blown, so she is recalled to Washington, D.C.
When the compound is put under surveillance, the habits and culture of the inhabitants are analyzed but no conclusive photographic identification of bin Laden is obtained. The President's National Security Advisor tasks the CIA with creating a plan to capture or kill bin Laden. Two stealth helicopters from Area 51 are flown by the Army's 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment to enter Pakistan, insert members of DEVGRU and the CIA's SAD/SOG and raid the compound. Before briefing President Barack Obama, the CIA Director (James Gandolfini) holds a meeting of his senior officers, who assess that bin Laden being there is a chance of 60–80%, rather than another high-value target. Maya, also in attendance, uses the "habits" intelligence to shore-up her conclusion to 100% that bin Laden is there.
The raid is approved and is executed on May 2, 2011. A helicopter crashes, but the SEALs gain entry and kill a number of people within the compound—among them, a man in the building who is believed to be bin Laden. At a U.S. base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, Maya visually confirms the identity of the corpse. Maya is seen boarding a military transport to return to the U.S.; the only passenger in the vast interior. The pilot asks her the destination; she does not reply.
As the plane's cargo-hold door closes, Maya begins to cry softly.
CIA
- Jessica Chastain as Maya, a CIA intelligence analyst
- Jason Clarke as Dan, a CIA intelligence officer
- Jennifer Ehle as Jessica, a senior CIA analyst
- Mark Strong as George, a senior CIA supervisor
- Kyle Chandler as Joseph Bradley, Islamabad CIA Station Chief
- James Gandolfini as CIA Director
- Harold Perrineau as Jack, a CIA analyst
- Mark Duplass as Steve, a CIA analyst
- Fredric Lehne as 'The Wolf', a CIA section chief
- John Barrowman as Jeremy, a CIA executive
- Jessie Collins as Debbie, a CIA analyst
- Édgar Ramírez as Larry, a CIA (SAD/SOG) operative
- Fares Fares as Hakim, a CIA SAD/SOG operative
- Scott Adkins as John, a CIA SAD/SOG operative
US Navy
- Joel Edgerton as Patrick, DEVGRU (SEAL Team 6) team leader
- Chris Pratt as Justin, DEVGRU operator
- Callan Mulvey as Saber, DEVGRU operator
- Taylor Kinney as Jared, DEVGRU operator
- Mike Colter as Mike, DEVGRU operator
- Frank Grillo as DEVGRU Commanding officer
- Christopher Stanley as Vice Admiral Bill McRaven
Other
- Stephen Dillane as the National Security Advisor
- Mark Valley as C-130 pilot
- Reda Kateb as Ammar
- Homayoun Ershadi as Hassan Ghul
- Yoav Levi as Abu Farraj al-Libbi
- Ricky Sekhon as Osama bin Laden
Titles
The film's working title was For God and Country. The title Zero Dark Thirty was officially confirmed at the end of the film's teaser trailer. Bigelow has explained that "it's a military term for 30 minutes after midnight, and it refers also to the darkness and secrecy that cloaked the entire decade-long mission."
Writing
Bigelow and Boal had initially worked on and finished a screenplay centered on the December 2001 Battle of Tora Bora, and the long, unsuccessful efforts to find Osama bin Laden in the region. The two were about to begin filming when news broke that bin Laden had been killed.
They immediately shelved the film they had been working on and redirected their focus, essentially starting from scratch. "But a lot of the homework I'd done for the first script and a lot of the contacts I made, carried over," Boal remarked during an interview with Entertainment Weekly. He added, "The years I had spent talking to military and intelligence operators involved in counter-terrorism was helpful in both projects. Some of the sourcing I had developed long, long ago continued to be helpful for this version."
Along with painstakingly recreating the historic night-vision raid on the Abbottabad compound, the script and the film stress the little-reported role of the tenacious young female CIA officer who tracked down Osama bin Laden. Screenwriter Boal said that while researching for the film, "I heard through the grapevine that women played a big role in the CIA in general and in this team. I heard that a woman was there on the night of the raid as one of the CIA's liaison officers on the ground – and that was the start of it." He then turned up stories about a young case officer who was recruited out of college, who had spent her entire career chasing bin Laden. Maya's tough-minded, monomaniacal persona, Boal said, is "based on a real person, but she also represents the work of a lot of other women." In December 2014 Jane Mayer of The New Yorker wrote that "Maya" was modeled in part after CIA officer Alfreda Frances Bikowsky.
Filming
Parts of the film were shot at PEC University of Technology in Chandigarh, India. Some parts of Chandigarh were designed to look like Lahore and Abbottabad in Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden was found and killed on May 2, 2011. Parts of the film were shot in Mani Majra. Local members of Hindu nationalist parties protested, expressing anti-bin Laden and anti-Pakistan sentiments as they objected to Pakistani locations being portrayed on Indian soil. For a lone scene shot in Poland, the city of Gda?sk was reportedly offended for depicting it as a location for the CIA's clandestine and dark operations.
National security expert Peter Bergen, who reviewed an early cut of the film as an unpaid adviser, said at the time that the film's torture scenes "were overwrought". Boal said they were "toned down" in the final cut.
Music
Alexandre Desplat composed and conducted the film's score. The score, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, was released as a soundtrack album by Madison Gate Records on December 19, 2012.
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