'Zero Dark Thirty' Criticized For Waterboarding Torture Scenes

Zero Dark Thirty, the latest look at wartime by director Katherine Bigelow which was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, has forced the subject of torture back into the headlines — and left audiences wondering, was that really how we caught Osama Bin Laden?

While the main piece of intelligence in Zero Dark Thirty is collected from a detainee who is waterboarded, he does not reveal the crucial information during the waterboarding interrogation. That information is extracted from him during a separate questioning. This is a plot point that both Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal want to be recognized. “The film shows that the guy was waterboarded, he doesn’t say anything and there’s an attack,” said Boal in an interview with The Wrap. “It shows that the same detainee gives them some information, which was new to them, over a civilized lunch.”

At the New York Film Critics Circle awards ceremony, Bigelow also defended the notion that her film is pro-torture. Accepting an award for best director, she said, "I thankfully want to say that I'm standing in a room of people who understand that depiction is not endorsement, and if it was, no artist could ever portray inhumane practices.”

Bigelow's comments could be interpreted as a dig against those not in that room with her—namely Sens. Diane Feinstein, Carl Levin and John McCain—who sent a letter to Sony Chairman Michael Lynton. In the letter, the senators charge Zero Dark Thirty and its creators with presenting fiction as fact.

It’s tempting to write off the complaints of politicians voicing their concern about the depiction of politics as a ploy to hide an unpleasant truth. And afterall, Zero Dark Thirty isn’t a documentary—it’s a theatrical blockbuster. However, as the senators say, the film “opens with the words ‘based on first-hand accounts of actual events.’“

The opening credits is not the only place where claims of professional accuracy crop up. “What we were attempting is almost a journalistic approach to film,” said Bigelow in an interview to the New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins. She went on to say, “I felt we had a responsibility to be faithful to the material.”

With such claims, it becomes easy to be led into believing that the scenes in Zero Dark Thirty explicitly depict the events that unfolded to lead US forces to Bin Laden, which could arguably be seen as manipulative on the part of Bigelow—especially if they are patently untrue.

Watch what actor Jason Clarke had to say about his simulated waterboarding experience while preparing for his role as a CIA investigator in Zero Dark Thirty below: