The lovely Rachel Weisz digs into intense territory with her latest film The Whistleblower. Weisz plays the real-life Kathryn Bolkovac, a UN police monitor in Bosnia who exposes a sex trafficking ring involving employees of a private military contractor.
Q. How did you get involved with The Whistleblower?
I was first sent the script by Amy Kaufman, the producer of The Constant Gardener. I was pregnant with my son at the time (he’s now five). I remember thinking that this was one of the most brilliant pieces of material I’d come across. But I just couldn’t get my head around it. It was too intense for me. The strange thing is, two years later, I still hadn’t forgotten it. So I called Amy up.
Q. Did you meet Kathryn Bolkovac?
I did, but only after we started filming. She came to the set in Romania. There was also a lot of footage of her, which Larysa (Kondracki), the writer-director, had made. So I had a sense of Kathy’s accent and of her spirit. We look different: She’s blond and much more voluptuous than I am. But I wanted to be able to capture her spirit.
Q. You don’t meet many people who are as brave as Kathryn...
That’s why I wanted to make this film, because she’s extraordinary. She thinks she’s ordinary. When I met her, she said, “Look, I was doing my job”. If I were there, I would have turned a blind eye, because I’m not that brave.
Q. You won an Oscar for playing another humanitarian, albeit fictional, in The Constant Gardener. Do you think art should inspire action?
I would never make that statement. I think it’s wonderful if art can inspire people, but I don’t really see it as a piece of dogma or a call to action.