Kimberly Peirce's first feature, the 1999 Boys Don't Cry, starred Hilary swank as Brandon Teena, the cross-dressing woman who was murdered by a couple of male associates who had met her when she was presenting herself as a man. It was one of the biggest indie success stories of the period and made a star of Swank (who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance), who had previously been best known for The Next Karate Kid. Of all the up-and-coming filmmakers who managed to get their bids in just before the millennium turned, Peirce has been perhaps the most conspicuously missing in action since. Now, nine years later, she's back with her new film, Stop-Loss. The title refers to the "loophole" in American soldiers' contracts permitting for "involuntary extensions" of their tours, as "national security" is deemed to require it. Peirce learned about the so-called "back door draft", which the military has been relying on in the face of a drop-off in recruiting numbers during the Iraq war, from her half-brother, who enlisted after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Peirce herself had responded to 9/11 by "traveling the country in 2003, interviewing military men and women and recording homecoming parades for a potential documentary about soldiers from sign-up to return." Then she started tinkering with a script for a fictional film called "AWOL." It wasn't until she'd listened to her brother's stories, and watched his cache of videos made by soldiers overseas, that her ideas began to focus around the idea of a patriotic soldier (played in Stop-Loss by Ryan Phillippe) who wanted to serve his country and has done his time but now wants to be allowed to move on and live his life. The army has other ideas.
Peirce hasn't just been kicking back for much of the nine years since Boys Don't Cry. Even before she began grappling with this new subject matter, she'd flirted with making movies based on Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Arthur Golden's novel Memoir of a Geisha, and the notorious inside-Hollywood murder of William Desmond Taylor. She also considered adapting The Ice at the Bottom of the World, a novel by Mark Richard, before instead inviting Richard to collaborate with her on the script of what became Stop-Loss. A self-described "Southern conservative," Richard may have counterbalanced Peirce's politics and helped prevent the script from turning into a screed. But if Stop-Loss is one more Iraq movie, it also has core similarities to Boys Don't Cry. “When I talked to a wounded soldier who lost his limbs and still wants to go back," says Peirce, "he told me, ‘It’s not the war, it’s the men." As in Boys Don't Cry, Peirce has caught hold of a story of small town kids who risk their lives out of a need for a certain kind of camaraderie. The heroes who feel that they've fulfilled their duty and now expect to be dealt with honorably have only their tiny support network to rely on. “There was a sense of deep, deep longing before Stop-Loss," says Peirce. "Boys set the bar very high artistically for me. I wanted to be that much in love with my next character. I wanted to feel it was taking over my whole life. I was lonely when I wasn’t able to work on a movie at that level again."
