Interview: Andrew Niccol

There are few certainties in military conflict. Win the battle, you can lose the war. Win the war, you can lose the peace. Win the peace, you can blow it by the reckless pride of a presumed invulnerability, moral or military. In recent times there has been growing uncertainty about the most significant innovation in aerial warfare: drones.

Opening in the UK this week is a documentary, Drone, followed next week by Good Kill, a fiction feature. Drone, overtly partisan, harnesses fact and history to present a case for the prosecution. Good Kill, like all good drama, gives the devil his due and his reasons. Its "hero", Tom Egan (Ethan Hawke), is a Las Vegas-based drone pilot whose heart, mind and married life are torn apart by the ravagings of doubt.

I sat down with writer-director Andrew Niccol, the Hollywood-based New Zealander whose filmography includes Gattaca (1997) and Lord of War (2005). It very nearly didn't include Good Kill, whose script and premise were turned down by almost every major studio. "No one would back a film on this subject. We had no help from the military either. We sent requests to the US Department of Defense, with part of the screenplay, and they politely declined." The fair-haired 50-year-old, whom I meet in a location aptly equidistant (give or take) between Washington DC and Afghanistan, explains how he got some assistance from the military even so. Under the radar.

"I had former drone pilots, whom I relied on quite heavily. None wanted to be named. When I asked them if they flew missions for the CIA," - a prominent contention, and bone of contention, in both films - "they said, 'We can't talk about that.' Which for me is tantamount to saying yes.

"But, in fact, even when I got these guys drunk they still wouldn't use the three letters CIA. They called them OGAs: other government agencies. One of the offshoots of the drone programme is that the CIA has become a new military arm which didn't officially exist before. They've gone from the spying business to the killing business. That's the really big sea change."

It's also the core of Good Kill's most tensely troubling scenes: the pilots holed up in their cockpit-like cabins responding to orders - often conflicting - coming in from the distant CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and close-by officers. That tug of war, combined with the emotional corrosion of each day's work, tells on Egan's home life. A wife (January Jones) and two children in the Vegas suburbs don't provide a getaway, just a mirror in which the hero sees his own stresses redoubled.

Marital strain could seem like apt payback. "We've struck several weddings and wedding parties," Niccol observes. "It's the custom in Afghanistan to fire guns in the air in celebration. That can look like anti-aircraft fire."

So who is calling the shots at these times - the air force or the CIA?

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The film's combination of eye-in-the-sky omniscience and fateful fallout is surreal and perturbing, even by the standards of a film-maker whose Hollywood calling card was the script for The Truman Show (1998). "All the incidents we depict were based on true events. There was a funeral in 2009 where 60 people were killed. Although George W Bush began the drone programme, it has been escalated by Obama. In fact, on his third day in office a drone hit was ordered and it hit exactly the house targeted. Only it was the wrong house."

Mistakes happen. But it's no accident - it's true to actuality - that the film's mordant vision of drone war as a giant video game played for real is set in the gaming capital of the nation. Creech Air Force Base, the model for Niccol's fictive 61st Attack Squadron base, is near Las Vegas. "It was intentional. When they train pilots, they want terrain that looks like Afghanistan. So they use the Sierra Nevada." It fits, too, with the film's thematic territory. "A lot of these guys are younger than Ethan's character and they go home to their apartment overlooking the Strip after doing a mission in Afghanistan with a joystick and play video games. How do you separate the things?"

Is it a sign of indifference? Or of a numbness indicating burnout? Part of the onus on drone pilots, moral and emotional, says Niccol, is being a warrior with no vulnerability. You haven't bought the right to take others' lives by putting your own in danger. To add to the irony mix: whatever do you call an air force that doesn't take to the air?

"I'm the son of a pilot, so I really feel the grieving of the loss of flying," Niccol says, adding that the contradictions for some drone warriors become too much. "These guys get post-traumatic stress disorder, they quit the program . . . A lot of the work is dull, waiting and watching. And yet it's punctuated with this hideous violence. The government was going to issue a medal at one point for drone pilots. But the rest of the military said, 'No, no, no.' There's no valour to it. Medals are for acts of courage."

No one in Hollywood was ever going to promote Good Kill for its feel-good factor. "Unpatriotic" is an adjective Niccol could have expected, if he didn't have the get-out response of not being American. Has he worked in the US long enough, though, to feel American?

"I've lived out of New Zealand longer than I've lived in it. So I'm a foreigner everywhere, including my own country. It does give me greater perspective. I'm not sure an American would necessarily have made this movie, exactly because it could be seen as anti-American. But, for me, it's just about an uncomfortable truth. I'm not trying to be anti or pro. I'm just trying to shine a light and say, 'This is what is.' "

Like Good Kill's most effective supporting character, the base's ambivalent-minded senior officer played by Bruce Greenwood, Niccol is ready to damn the drone programme one moment and defend it, albeit tentatively, the next.

"It may well be the least worst option. But then my question would be, 'If it's the best option, there must be ways to make it better.' It should be more transparent. But look, there's Isis today. Is anyone going to say, 'If we could take a drone strike on this or that guy, and make a difference, and not take any civilian casualties . . . ?' "

He leaves the question unfinished, though we know what it is. And a lot of us might settle - until better military means come along - for the uncomfortable and clearly implied answer. Take the strike.

'Good Kill' is released in the UK on April 10 and in the US on May 15

Main photograph: Isabella De Maddalena

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