Mark Boal was the screenwriter for Zero Dark Thirty. The movie received five Oscar nominations including best picture, best original script, best actress for Jessica Chastain, and it was directed by Kathryn Bigelow.
For a decade, an elite team of intelligence and military operatives, working in secret across the globe, devoted themselves to a single goal: to find and eliminate Osama bin Laden. “Zero Dark Thirty” reunites the Oscar® winning team of director-producer Kathryn Bigelow and writer-producer Mark Boal (“The Hurt Locker”) for the story of history’s greatest manhunt for the world’s most dangerous man.
Zero Dark Thirty movie trailer
About The Film
The hunt for Osama bin Laden preoccupied the world and two American presidential administrations for more than a decade. But in the end, it took a small, dedicated team of CIA operatives to track him down. Every aspect of their mission was shrouded in secrecy. Though some of the details have since been made public, many of the most significant parts of the intelligence operation––including the central role played by that team––are brought to the screen for the first time in a nuanced and gripping new film by the Oscar®-winning creative duo of Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal.
Their account of bin Laden’s pursuit and capture, vivid yet faithful to the facts, takes the viewer inside the hubs of power and to the front lines of this historic mission, culminating in the special operations assault on a mysterious, suburban Pakistani compound.
But it is the lead-up to the raid that truly distinguishes Zero Dark Thirty from other accounts. The quest to find bin Laden was fraught with danger from the start, and not every U.S. operative survived. Some intelligence experts came to believe that the assignment was impossible to carry out, but on the ground a determined team of analysts and interrogators defied the odds and proved them wrong. For the first time, their struggle to find Osama bin Laden is told on the screen in electrifying detail.
Zero Dark Thirty movie script
Zero Dark Thirty movie script pdf download
The initial, self-imposed creative challenge Bigelow and Boal faced in developing Zero Dark Thirty was how to tell this multifaceted story in the compressed time frame of a motion picture. The film encompasses sweeping events spanning nearly a decade, journeying across multiple countries and involving a precisely chosen cast of hundreds along with a devoted crew whose objective was to capture the on-the-ground reality of this mission as truthfully and viscerally as possible. To that end, it pulls no punches in documenting the moral lines––including torture––that were crossed. The intention was to create a cinematic work with the sweep and human emotion of a historical novel.
Zero Dark Thirty (the title is military jargon for the dark of night, as well as the moment—12:30 a.m.—when the Navy SEALs first stepped foot on the compound) marks Kathryn Bigelow’s most ambitious production to date. Deploying the full arsenal of filmic art, from the naturalistic performances of an ensemble that includes Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton, Jennifer Ehle, Mark Strong, Kyle Chandler, and Edgar Ramirez, to innovative cinematography in extreme low-light conditions, to the painstakingly layered art direction, every facet of the production became a proving ground for Bigelow to make living history come alive on screen.
ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
The hunt for Osama bin Laden preoccupied the world and two American presidential administrations for more than a decade. But in the end, it took a small, dedicated team of CIA operatives to track him down. Every aspect of their mission was shrouded in secrecy. Though some of the details have since been made public, many of the most significant parts of the intelligence operation––including the central role played by that team––are brought to the screen for the first time in a nuanced and gripping new film by the Oscar®-winning creative duo of Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal.
Interview with screenwriter Mark Boal and producer Mark Bowden
