Battle in Seattle, the directorial debut of Irish actor Stuart Townsend, is a well-meaning history lesson that looks at the 1999 WTO protests in Settle through a series of exceedingly conventional fictional stories. The film, which premiered a year ago at the Toronto International Film Festival and later became the most apropos opening night film in the history of the Seattle International Film Festival, is finally getting its release, to fairly tepid and critical reviews. And while I can understand the criticisms — the sloganeering, the mundane fictional stories, the inevitable simplifications, not to mention too many embarrassing performances and a script that substitutes symbolic gestures for action and debate — I’m also impressed with what he got in there, namely the sense of organization and planning that turned this loose confederation of activists and protest groups into the most effective organized protest in recent history. He makes a serious effort to explain what the WTO is and the criticisms of the organization that would rouse tens of thousands of protesters to gather in Seattle, and he celebrates the success for what it is. I’m not quite sure what to make of the irony of Townsend shooting largely in Vancouver, Canada, a necessity given the Canadian financing (he couldn’t find American support – what does that say about our film culture that Canada is more willing to make a film about American political protest than Hollywood is?) but an irony in a film that tackles issues of globalization and then outsources an American story to Canada. (I wrote about the film in my SIFF coverage for GreenCine and review it this week for the Seattle P-I.)
I had the opportunity to talk with Townsend in a phone interview for a feature story for the Seattle P-I. What was scheduled as a twenty minutes interview continued for almost twice that long and we covered a lot of territory that I couldn’t fit into the P-I piece, so here is the balance of the interview.
You’ve said that you didn’t interview anyone involved in the WTO protests. How did you research the film?
It was one of the first major events that was really covered by the Internet, so there was a lot of research there. There were a lot of books, a lot of documentaries made, a lot of news footage to see. I would have loved to have talked to activists and authorities but I just didn’t really know how to go about doing it. And actually, in retrospect, I think it was good because I didn’t have any interference from any other political viewpoint or anything like that, I just came out from a very non-partisan place.
I researched it for a year and a half and I was reading globalization books, like pro-free trade book by people like Thomas Friedman and other books that were critical of free trade, and trying to balance the arguments and find out where I stood on this and what I wanted to say, and then I wrote the script and went shopping and people seemed to gravitate toward the idea but no one jumped at the script, so then I went back and I spent a year and a half doing some pretty substantial rewrites. And I took the three documentaries made about the event and I made my own 15-minute film, cut to music, as a visual to the script, and I think that’s really what helped: people could suddenly see what this film might look like, visually, and how intense it got. That’s when I got financed.
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