Two-time Academy Award nominee Jeremy Renner leads an all-star cast in Kill the Messenger, a dramatic thriller based on the remarkable true story of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Webb. In the 1990s, Webb’s quest for the truth took him from the prisons of California to the villages of Nicaragua to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. — and his investigative reporting drew the kind of attention that threatened not just his career, but his family and his life.
Webb’s career as a respected reporter at the San Jose Mercury News takes a startling turn when a cocaine trafficker’s girlfriend, Coral Baca (Paz Vega), slips him a Grand Jury transcript which reveals a link between U.S. intelligence and Central American cocaine smuggling. Webb begins shadowing Alan Fenster (Tim Blake Nelson), the defense lawyer for Los Angeles crack kingpin “Freeway” Ricky Ross (Michael Kenneth Williams). The journalist soon realizes that he has stumbled onto a story which leads to the shady origins of cheap, seemingly limitless cocaine on the nation’s streets, all too apparent in South Central Los Angeles, and which further alleges that Nicaraguan rebels working directly with the CIA were smuggling cocaine into the U.S., using the profits to arm Contra militias back home. Webb makes a risky run into Nicaragua to get crucial information from imprisoned drug baron Norwin Meneses (Andy Garcia). With the backing of his paper’s editor Anna Simons (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), Webb’s reporting runs in print and online as a series of articles entitled “Dark Alliance,” and executive editor Jerry Ceppos (Oliver Platt) welcomes the nationwide attention that the stories generate.
But soon Webb himself becomes the story and a target, as jealous rival reporters who missed the CIA-Contra-cocaine story move to discredit his work and reputation in an increasingly vicious smear campaign. His wife Sue (Rosemarie DeWitt) tries to stand by him even as, despite warnings from drug kingpins and menacing surveillance intended to deter his investigation, Webb keeps digging to prove a direct link between cocaine smugglers and the CIA, a conspiracy with explosive implications.
Kill the Messenger, based on the books Dark Alliance by Gary Webb and Kill the Messenger by Nick Schou, was directed by Michael Cuesta from a script by Peter Landesman. I sat down with Jeremy Renner in Los Angeles.
Danny Miller: What a powerful film and performance! It reminded me of the best of the films of the 1970s.
Jeremy Renner: Thank you, I love those movies! My favorite cinema comes from the 70s.
I think that when films are based on true stories, you can say the words “based on” until you’re blue in the face, but many people are going to believe this is exactly how things went down. Does that make you feel a special kind of responsibility?
Yeah, it does! I mean, you have to be accountable to the truth, that’s my job as an actor. Especially when you’re portraying a guy like Gary Webb who was all about the truth. So I did feel a responsibility, including to his family, to represent him accurately. This was a man who was flawed and brilliant and lovely and a pain in the ass. The story of what he actually uncovered is very dense but there was a lot more to tell here than the facts of “Dark Alliance” since that was a rabbit hole that is still bogged down in a lot of confusion. My responsibility was to focus on Gary’s journey and being accurate to that.
The dynamic with his family was beautifully portrayed. I have to admit I started sobbing during that scene between Gary and his son.
Ugh, it was heartbreaking!
Was that hard to shoot?
Yeah! Especially being a father now, personally, I know if my son told me he was disappointed in me — oh, man!
Would you say that one of the purposes of the film was to redeem Gary Webb’s reputation?
I’m not sure that I’d talk about “redemption.” I think it’s great that people will learn about the smear campaign against him but nothing is going to make what happened okay or make Gary come back. But awareness is always good.
What Webb uncovered in his “Dark Alliance” reporting was shocking, to say the least. I find that when I watch movies like this I vacillate between this place of idealized naivite where I can’t believe my country would ever do such things and a total cynicism where I think, “Oh, come on, if we only knew what our government is doing every day!”
Right. You know, we faced some big challenges making this movie. It wasn’t our goal to villainize the government or the CIA or, for that matter, The Washington Post or The L.A. Times. But they were definitely all involved in contributing to Gary’s downward spiral.
It’s clear that at some point his editors at the San Jose Mercury News threw him under the bus, but what I liked about the film is that they weren’t portrayed at all as black-and-white villains, you can see why they felt they had to do what they did.
It’s true. You know, I’m from that part of California and grew up reading that paper. The story that Gary uncovered was sort of like when Jed Clampett discovered this huge amount of oil. This was not a huge paper and they weren’t used to dealing with anything that size that would get so much attention. This obviously became a huge news story around the world and I think they were doing their best to navigate through that storm. It doesn’t mean that what they did was right. And it just points up the sadness for Gary — a man whose whole life was about his job which gets taken away from him. It was tragic.
Did you get the chance to talk to Webb’s wife Sue and their kids?
Yes. I purposely didn’t speak to them at first because I wanted to get my own take on Gary and really understand him but I met with them later on during the filming. They were really generous with home videos and answering any questions I had. The videos that they gave us helped a lot.
Would you say in retrospect that in some ways Gary Webb did overstep in his reporting?
You know, he definitely wasn’t perfect — we wanted to make that very clear in the film. Even within the “Dark Alliance” articles, there was some hyperbole and maybe some over-simplifications that led to some serious misinterpretations of what he said. But it all spun out of control in this media frenzy that had little to do with the facts of the story. Gary wasn’t perfect but he was still right about what went down.
I have to say that it’s weird for someone my age to realize that a film set in the 1990s is already a period piece!
I know, right? Everything looks so strange! But I think we got it right. You know, the film is supposed to be set in the area where I grew up in California but we ended up shooting in Atlanta. So as a producer on the film, I was the one who’d say from time to time,“No way, this is definitely not NorCal!”
It must feel very different making a smaller movie like this compared to the juggernauts you’ve been involved with lately.
Yeah. I guess the biggest difference for me is that with a movie like this it feels like you shoot a lot more in a day and the whole schedule is so much more condensed. But I love that! I want to go to work and really work instead of sitting around all day waiting for them to set up some action piece. I love working really hard over very long days. I definitely want to continue doing films like this because that’s where my heart lies.
Although it’s a credit to your skills as an actor that even in the gigantic movies you’re in, like The Avengers, you almost make your scenes feel like they’re from a smaller indie film.
Thanks, man, I got really lucky with that. I got great roles in some of the big ones which frankly aren’t always available in those kinds of movies!
It must be nice that you’re at a point where your involvement can help some of these smaller films get made.
That’s a beautiful scenario for me to be in. I can still do the big franchises which I love and then I can afford to do smaller movies. The truth is that when you have less money riding on a movie, you can often take some more risks with the storytelling. You don’t have to pay back $150 million or more, it’s more like $10 million. To be honest, I’m more challenged as an actor by the material in those films. I learn a lot.