hello, everyone and welcome to amanpour and company. here's what's coming up. international pressure mounts on saudi arabia over the shocking story of jamal khashoggi. the journalist hasn't been seen since entering the consulate two weeks ago. i'll hear from former senator bob graham who says the u.s. has p placated saudi arabia for nearly 20 years. then we'll hear from a professor who has contact with bin salman. and a journey from school teacher to prominent civil rights activist. plus actor paul dano tries his

hand at directing to great reviews. we hear from him and his lead actress carrie mulligan in the film wildlife.

welcome to the program, everyone. i'm christiane ammanpour in london. the kingdom faces intense diplomatic pressure to explain the whereabouts of the missing journalist jamal khashoggi amid reports of his possible murder, the saudi kingdom continues to strongly deny any wrongdoing. without, though, providing any evidence or credible information about what happened after he entered the consulate in turkey. turkish investigators have now entered that consulate. it's the last place khashoggi was seen. meantime, the saudi crown prince mo ham mad bin salman is facing a direct backlash as an array of leaders and business partners pull out of his economic summit. the burning question, though, remains, what action will the united states and the world take

if saudi arabia is, in fact, found to be sculpable. president trump's latest public comments reflect evolving explanations in some quarters of this case. >> we are going to leave nothing uncovered. with that being said, the king firmly denied any knowledge of it. he didn't really know. i don't want to get into his mind, but it sounded to me like maybe these could have been rogue killers. who knows. we're going to try getting to the bottom of it very soon, but his was a flat denial. >> while some worry that donald trump is placing business deals before traditional u.s. moral leadership on the international stage, the outrage over khashoggi's disappearance has put u.s. saudi relations in the spotlight. from backing the saudi war in yemen to the kingdom's high

profile diplomatic spats with qatar and canada. my next guest, the former senate bob graham says the u.s. is now paying the price for decades of failing to confront what has been a steadfast ally for nearly a century. senator graham, welcome to the program. >> thank you, christiane. i would withdraw the word steadfast ally. in fact, i think saudi arabia has been extremely profidious mostly for its involvement in 9/11 and the e normonormous cov what has kept that from the minds and people of the world. >> i would like to get to your views on that and the immense amount of work you did as chairman of the senate intelligence committee and the whole lead up to the 9/11 commission. first i want to ask you, because it has been for decades, since the days of president roosevelt,

an ally over many, many issues in that region. i want to know from you, what do you think the united states -- you know, what position has this left the u.s. in today? >> it's left us in a position of an innigma which must be resolved. the turk have a reputation of having an excellent intelligence capability by international standards. this murder occurred on their territory. i think the first step should be to ask the turks to conduct a full investigation. let all the interested parties share in that information. and then see where the facts lead in terms of criminal responsibility. >> senator, you seem to be absolutely sure that a murder has taken place. the saudis deny it vigorously. as i said, there is no evidence

to prove what did actually, you know, that their answer, that he came out of the consulate. i want to ask you what you make of president trump's latest public statements we just aired, that obviously the king denies it, but he felt that there was a story of rogue elements coming out, rogue killers. what do you think about that? is that credible? >> well, it seems that one of the responses that the president gives to any questionable attention to his own action is to bring other people in as responsible parties. remember back during the presidential campaign when asked if he thought the russians were involved, he said it could be the russians, it could be the chinese, it could be an overweight man in new jersey. i think this is the equivalent of the overweight man in new jersey. >> well, let me play this, then. this now goes to the heart of

what yourself and many across both sides of the aisle in congress are saying, how best to hold saudi arabia accountable, should that become necessary. and they've talked a lot about banning arm sales and sanctions and the rest. here's what the president said to to "60 minutes" last night. >> it depends on the sanction. they are ordering military equipment. everybody wanted that order. russia wanted it. china wanted it. we got it. >> so would you cut that off? >> i'll tell you what i don't want to do. boeing, lockheed, all these companies, i don't want to hurt jobs. i don't want to lose an order like that. there are other ways of punishing to use a word that's a pretty harsh word, but it's true. >> so senator, it is complex, because no leader wants to take economic measures that will hurt

their own people as president trump put it. but on the other hand, many cases have to be stood up, for instance, what the europeans did putting sanctions on the russians, a lot to the detriment of their own economy. what the united states should be signaling and what should it not be signaling at this precise time? >> i won't suggest what the forms of the sanction could be. there are a wide range of those. but what we should not do is what we've done for the last couple of decades relative to 9/11, and that is we should not ignore and play an assertive role in covering up for the role of the saudis or any other nation state which might be involved. you questioned my use of the word murder. i certainly don't have any facts in that matter, but responsible journalists from the united

states and elsewhere have used that word. and given what we do know, almost two weeks of disappearance with no idea of where this man might be, it appears that something serious has happened and someone or some nation state should be held accountable. >> now, senator graham, you keep mentioning 9/11 because, of course, you were heavily involved in the aftermath of that and trying to get to the absolute bottom of it and hold those responsible accountable. as we remember, 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were saudi, but to this day, there's not been, as far as i know, any evidence that the saudi state, the saudi kingdom actually sponsored it. i want to ask you why you believe or what do you believe about that? modify you what jus

said to say that the people of the united states and the world have not been given the information which exists which shows the very strong linkage between saudi arabia and the incidents of nine 11. i personally, what i know, would say with no hesitation that 9/11 would not have occurred without the complicity of saudi arabia and it may well be that without that complicity, the murder of the journalist would not have occurred. >> why do you say that? based on what? since you're very, very, you know, strongly sticking to that, and you did look at whatever evidence was available during the 9/11 commission hearings. >> the answer is i cannot go into the fullness of what i know because that would be a

violation of our intelligence standard. but i will say that there is ample evidence which the government of the united states has in its possession and which it should make available to the public which would draw the strong linkage between saudi arabia and 9/11. if you'll recall, immediately after 9/11 president bush said that we will go to any lengths to find who was responsible for this tragedy and that we think that it was a nation state. then almost immediately the government said that it was iraq which was responsible for 9/11 and that's where all of our attention went until at the end of a very gruesome and high death toll war it was admitted that iraq was not, in fact,

responsible for 9/11. >> so senator, i just want to try to get down to why america is constantly standing with saudi arabia. clearly, there are geostretra ti can -- reasons for it. in that region they sell a lot of oil, not just to the united states, but to the rest of the world, and they do actually have a huge influence over the price of oil. how much beholden still for oil, for instance, and for security in the region is the united states? actually, factually, how much does it depend on saudi arabia for that? >> probably less than it has at any time since the end of world war ii. the united states has become

much more self-sufficient in terms of its oil production and has the capability of being even more so. that has leveled the geoeconomic position and it should have put us in the place where we are no longer so subservient to saudi arabia and can make decisions in the interest of the united states. i hope that this tragedy may be the turning point in our recognition of what our relative self-sufficiency and power, economic and military and otherwise is. >> i want to know what you make of crown prince mohammad bin salman came to the states many months ago, whether it was oi

hollywood, silicon valley, all over the place, the top, top titans of every aspect of american corporate and hupublic life and business life met with him and were happy to do so. i want to know what you think about his reforms at home, his policies policies abroad and how you evaluate him at this moment? >> the united states, throughout its history, has stood for certain values of human rights, dignity, freedom. we have not, until the statement that president trump made last week, ever indicated that money and specifically sales of military weapons trumped our long-held values. i think that's maybe one of the

things that is going to be at most at stake in this matter. will we put $120 billion, an enormous and i think inflated figure, of arm sales to saudi arabia above the values that we have represented throughout our nationhood. >> over the weekend there was a strong sort of angry comment by one of the saudi newspapers saying that if the u.s. even dared to consider sanctions the retaliation would be fierce. sort of economic retaliation. they've since walked that back. but do you fear that the united states could pay a price for any kind of accountability should that become necessary? and do you believe that senators, congress people are in a state where they will hold president trump to, you know, and make him impose sanctions?

the whole magnitsky law and other things at their disposal? >> yes, i think we would. the united states has historically been willing to put its nation at risk. think world war ii. in order to defend our values. i think if we were willing to do it in the second world war, our generation of americans would be equally prepared to stand for what america stands for and not capitulate to threaten economic blackmail. >> senator bob graham, former governor bob graham, thank you very much indeed for joining me this evening. >> thank you very much. so, let us turn now to prince and professor bernard hey

co. welcome to the program. >> thank you. >> you just heard a lot of what senator graham said. he's elected many, many decades as governor and senator in the united states and feels very strongly this is a turning point or could be a turning point in u.s./saudi relations. how do you view it and potentially see it a little bit from their side? >> well, i mean, i think that senator graham put his finger on it in that, you know, the u.s./saudi relationship is at risk and this is an extremely important relationship for not just the united states, but the global economy and for stability in the middle east. and that should be first and

foremost in the mind of president trump and his secretary of state, which is why i think the president spoke to the king and is now sending the secretary of state to saudi arabia. this is a country that i believe senator graham mischaracterized. it has been an ally of the united states. it played a very strong and important role during the cold war in fighting communism. it has played a stabilizing role in the global economy and has been a reliable supplier of oil. has not used oil as a weapon. these are all important points. you know, in the middle east today where you have at least four states that are failed and with chaos raging in yemen and in syria and in libya and the sinai, we cannot afford to have another unstable state. certainly not a state of the importance of saudi arabia. it's extremely important that we focus on stability and on order

of that country. >> i want to know what you feel about what president trump said when asked, you know, what he might do. he started to talk about rogue killers. we've all been reading, you know, in the press that potentially in the beginning there was going to be some sort of quote, unquote, face saving agreement between saudi arabia and turkey to potentially call it a rogue operation, absolve the saudi authorities and the like. i wonder what you think about that. i just want to play for you what a former u.s. ambassador to saudi arabia told cnn this morning. it really was about how he interacted with them in the direct aftermath of 9/11. >> let's remember this is the same king salman who told me after 9/11 that the attacks were an israeli plot. did i believe that? of course not. i don't think you can go in with wide eyed acceptance of anything some of these world leaders say.

it's also, by the way, quite possible that king salman didn't know about this. it was in the hands of his son the crown prince. >> so professor, what do you make of that? and what would you advise them to do? i mean, there's a lot of filibusters right now. they deny it, but they haven't shown any counter weight evidence to back up their claims. >> yeah. well, i mean, you know, anything that i say about what happened is mere speculation, because i don't know actually know what happened. i think that, you know, the killing, if that indeed happened to jamal khashoggi is a crime and someone should pay the price for that. by the way, jamal was a friend. he's someone who has come to princeton, has spoken here. i had regular exchange with him. he's been described as a reporter. he was really more of a dissident and had clearly lost

his patronage in saudi arabia. having said all of that, what i've been telling the saudis is that they have to come up with a narrative, with a story that is plausible, that rebuffs the leaks that the turks have been deliberately engaged in, that they lost the narrative thread because of the turkish leaks. they have to explain what happened to him. and that, in fact, if this was an operation that involved an abduction or interrogation, they should explain. i don't believe the saudis would have tried to kill or murder a journalist or a dissident even in their own consulate. i mean, no one does that. there are many other ways to do it. and this may have been, you

know, an operation that went badly. i don't know. president trump seems to be intimating that may have been the case. whatever it is, the saudis are not in the tradition of killing a dissident. they abduct them. they have abducted them in the past, but they do not kill their people in foreign lands. >> i think this is why this case and all the grisly details that have been leaked and the lack of any evidence to show us what might have happened to jamal is exactly that. that's why it's so -- it's grabbed everybody to such an extent. nobody's heard of this kind of thing before. but i do want to ask you, you know, you talked about him being a dissident. he obviously would strongly reject that. he always did. he said i'm a patriot. i know that people are trying to say he's a muslim brotherhood and he's an islamist, potentially trying to say he's a

r radical extremist which he also denied. i want to play a little bit what he said just this last august in conversation with a friend. >> i'm not an extremist. i disagree with those who are called in for regime change and stuff like that. it's ridiculous. we don't need that in saudi arabia. i believe in it. i just want a reform system. actually, i want the system to give me a voice. allow me to speak. >> and that's in your view monarchy can also encompass free expression? >> yes. yes. it should. kuwait has that. why can't we? morocco has that. why can't we? >> you know, these are really interesting to hear these words at this time. that was obviously in may.

in august he actually talked about the issue of the muslim brotherhood. he said the irrad indication of muslim brotherhood is an abolition of democracy and guarantee they will live under corrupt regimes. fast forward, he said there can be no political reform in any arab country without accepting political islam is part of it. you would agree. you're a professor and an academic. there's a difference between political islam and radical violence islam. >> absolutely. yeah, absolutely. jamal was not an extremist. he was not a member of al qaeda. he was not -- he was against isis, but he was an islamist. when he came to princeton, he asked me whether it was possible for him to return to saudi arabia as an adviser. the system saw him as a dissident and you would ask me initially how the system viewed him. they saw him as a dissident. they saw him as working for an

organization that was aiming to topple the saudi royal family, the muslim brotherhood was, and there was no place for him in the system. he had looked for patronage elsewhere. he never criticized qatar or erdogan in turkey ever. >> as you say, one system locked him up and he was trying to get patronage from another system. the question, though, is really profound, i think. he was always so in with the royal family. they let him set up a news organization in bahrain before that collapsed. he was a radical muslim brotherhood they wouldn't let him do that. he was an adviser to the former intelligence minister. i guess i'm trying to figure out what's changed and do you think that crown prince mahammad bin

salman represents a different form of leadership in saudi arabia? he is the power behind the throne. how would you evaluate and describe what he's been doing? >> let me explain first, the saudi monarchy was a place of asylum for muslim brothers from the 1950s and '60s onward. many muslim brothers worked with the saudis and in fact worked with the united states in the fight against communism. bin salman has decided that relationship with the islamists, with not jihadists, but moderate mainstream islamists is unacceptable because these moderate mainstream islamists have a political agenda which is revolutionary ultimately. he has separated himself from the islamists. you can see bin salman is clamping down on all islamists inside the kingdom. he wants to get rid of their

influence. that's why jamal could find no p patrona patronage inside saudi arabia. >> he's been all over the united states and britain and everywhere with this reform agenda. what is going to -- how severe of backlash and how bad is this for his effort and how bad is this for u.s./saudi relations and what should the u.s. do? >> well, a whole series of questions there. first, i do see him as a social reformer and economic reformer. he wants to diversify the economy away from oil. he has socially reformed by allowing women to drive, by opening up the place to movies and to entertainment, clamping down on the religious extremists and the religious activists in the country. so there's definitely a social reform agenda in the direction of greater openness.

he's not a political reformer. and he never claimed to be a political reformer. he's an authoritarian. he feels it is important because if you politically liberalize, the country would split apart. that's a self-serving argument, but it is how he feels about politics. he is not going to liberalize politics anytime soon. in terms of the effect of all of this on him and on his agenda, his reform agenda, it's extremely costly. you can see a lot of people are withdrawing from relationships with the kingdom, not showing up at conferences, wanting to withdraw from business deals. so the saudis have to come up with a plausible narrative and try to put this crisis behind them. i think as far as the relationship with the united states, that is a structural relationship. it's not just a transactional relationship. it is a profoundly structural one because of the importance of

saudi arabia and the global economy in region stability in the geopolitics of the world and that's not going to go away whether bin salman is in power or not. it is a permanent feature of american policy. >> professor, this is a story that is not going away. thank you very much for joining us this evening. now, back to the united states where the fight for truth and justice is a battle. my next guest knows all too well. following the fatal shootings of african-american teenager michael brown, deray left his job as a sixth grade math teacher to join the 400 day long ferguson protest wearing the same blue vest. he became one of the most prominent faces against u.s. police brutality spurring on the black lives matter movement. his new memoir, on the other side of freedom, the case for hope is a powerful and personal

reflection on racism today. he speaks to alicia menendez about it. >> thank you for joining us. >> it's an honor to be here. >> there are suddenly way too many young black men who are killed by the police. what was it about michael brown's death that motivated you to get in your car and drive to missouri? >> i had my own experience with the police in baltimore in about 2009. an officer pulled his gun on me at a traffic stop. i thought that was an isolated experience. i had no clue it was happening around the country. when mike brown got killed i remember hearing the story and they killed a kid, a teenager. i spent my career in public education. the least i could do was go to st. louis and stand and respond to a call when they said thigh need -- they needed people to come. when i got there i was tear gassed. i had been told that part of american history was something we had lived through, that we wouldn't have to experience. >> you mean civil rights? >> you know, the dogs being

sicked on people and the tear gas. i was told that that was in the past. then i lived it and was, like, i'll do whatever i can to make sure that nobody has to experience this again. >> what did you learn on the streets of ferguson? >> i learned so much. one, i was one of many people. there was so many people on the street and being part of that community was one of the most important sort of places i've ever been. the second is that people in the streets had gifts already. part of our organization was helping people find the gift and being able to access the gift. there were so many people who had never led a meeting, never led a march, but they had the core skills and we could find them. the third thing is i know so much more about the data. i know a third of the people are killed by a police officer. i know so much more about how accountability works and doesn't work with regard to policing that i didn't know four years ago. >> how do your lived experience of what happened in ferguson differ from the imagined

experience of what happened in ferguson? >> it's interesting. i think that some people think about the protests in ferguson as a long weekend. they're like wow, that happened. nope. 400 days. it was a long time. people also forget in the early days if you saw us marching it wasn't that we thought marching was cool. it was illegal to standstill in st. louis. if we were stood still we were arrested. i was one of the plaintiffs in the court case that got that overturned. people forget those things. >> what was the theory of why you had to keep moving? >> the police are like if we make it so it's illegal to standstill, they'll go home. instead we were like if we've got to walk all day, we've got to walk all day. that's what it became. we walked in circles essentially night and day and they had to stay out there marching with us. i think they weren't ready for that. we don't know everything, but we know one thing really well and that's that mike brown should be alive today. >> when did you realize that protest was going to become a

movement? >> interesting question is i didn't know. one of the things that was so beautiful about the work that we were all doing is we had tunnel vision. head down, focus on what's in front of us. you know mike brown's name. the police killed nine people in st. louis right after mike brown. they killed one the next weekend right during the day. there was so much happening i didn't realize the world was watching us until much later, until some of the first wave of protests. i traveled to other places and said wow, people have been seeing what we've been doing. >> how has the work changed over time? >> i think in the beginning, it was about awareness. i know protest isn't the answer. protest creates space for the answer. we were in the street to force people to deal with the issue of police violence, to force people to think about systemic violence and state violence. if we hadn't shut down the streets, people would have ignored it. now the question is how do we turn awareness into impact. we think of some of the work we've done and laws in

california, there's a law that says any investigation of an officer that lasts more than a year can never result in discipline regardless of the outcome. in cleveland they destroyed police officer disciplinary records every two years. in maryland there's a law that says you can file an anonymous complaint against an officer for everything except brutality. that doesn't make sense. there's a focus now on data and focus on policy and structure since we built the awareness. >> it feels like there is a constant drip, drop of these stories both in terms of black individuals killed in their own home. stories about officers being allowed to go back and be on the streets again after an incident. >> tamir rice just got rehired. >> how, in light of that, do you keep on? >> you know, i'm mindful that so much of the work is how do we

uncover and how do we respond? the uncovering work is work we've undertaken to say what's the reason behind it? 99% of officers are never even charged. 99 are never convicted. so what we know now is there are law, policies and practices that almost make that impossible. we've been trying to attack those. we think about the organize in austin to get the city council to vote against the last police union contract. that was really powerful. you talk about this little drip. we actually don't have any great official data on police files. if you get killed in this country by a police officer and a newspaper doesn't write about you, you just don't exist in the data. that's why we think the numbers we have are probably underreporting. that's even more wild. the third is i have this unwavering sense of hope. i think about hope as a belief that tomorrow can be better than today. when people say the system is broken and some people respond by saying that no, it was designed to be like this, the

takeaway is that it was designed. people made this up and because people made it up we can make something different. >> what's the difference between hope and faith? >> king says that the bend towards justice is about faith. when we say it's the arc bend, it's a statement of hope. the world can be better. it won't necessarily be better. i think about hope as work, not hope is magic. >> in civil rights history very often marginalize voices even within the movement, women's voice, clear voices, get marginalized pushed out. what responsibility do you think you have to make sure that the women at the center of the black lives matter are included in the narrative? >> i think that in the book it was important to me to make sure that i highlighted all these like you've never heard of but without whom there would be no protest. what was beautiful, it was organic. there was no one, two, three, ten people that started it. there were so many people

without whom there would be no space. i wrote about momma cat who made sure that people were -- i write about elizabeth vega who did art actions and about alexis who planned important things that happened in st. louis. all these people without whom there would be no space for us to talk about. i'm sensitive to that. i know the platform i have doesn't exist just for me. part of my work is to tell the truth, make sure the truth is amplified and not be arrogant enough to think i'm the only person to tell the truth and i also have to keep the door open and open up as much space as i can. >> the kavanaugh hearings have forced us to have really difficult conversations about why survivors don't report immediately following an assault. you came forward with your own story. i wonder if you would tell bus your process of deciding to share it. >> you know, i was sexually

abused when i was 7 and didn't talk about it until i was -- i told my dad when i was 11. i write about it in the book. i tweeted why i didn't report. we often don't talk about men who are victims. we just -- that's not a part of the conversation. i wanted to highlight and model for people what it was like to have the conversation and remind people there are male victims. when i think about in the book, i write about what it means to be a guy black man in this moment. all the work that we've done it's a lot of work and we have to start telling those stories. >> do you think it's homophobia

at large or in the black community? >> i think it's not within the black community. i think it might be towards black men and how guy black men sort of fall in the higherarchyf hauer. they're part of my story and they mean something to me. >> it's interesting reading the book because you definitely open windows into your past and into your private life, but not doors. it feels to me like there is a piece of yourself that you are still trying to preserve. i wonder if you think that's fair. if so, why that is? >> one of the hard parts is that i feel like i've lived a public life amongst my peers for a long time. i was student body president in college and high school and middle school and now i lead a public life in activism and there are so few things that are just mine. there's so few stories, so few things i've not shared before. so the book is sort of hard in some ways because i'm sharing all these things that used to

just be mine, that i share with people i intimately knew and now i'm talking about them broader. there's so few things that are just mine they get to share. my parents being addicted to drugs and my father raising us and my mother coming back when i was 30, left when i was 3. people know those things and i wanted to write about that. the reason i write about my mom and i know we talk into every room caring more than we name. i walk into a room, what does ta mean to be worthy. we all carry things into each room and that impacts the way we organize, the way we build relationships with people. i wanted to model those things. a part of me will always be that sixth grade math teacher that is trying to sneak in something i want people to pick up and take away. >> you write freedom is fragile. is that inherent in the nature of freedom or about the way we construct freedom here in the united states? >> it's a fragile freedom for

there to be rules that you can't standstill. that shows you how pliable this work is. think about the hundreds of thousands of people purged from the voter rolls in florida. you think about fema not doing anything in puerto rico of substance, that shows you how fragile the system is. you can be in enough cool roads sometimes or have a cool conversation and you get lost sometimes about all the things happening in the world. i never want to forget that. i think freedom is necessarily fragile. when we fight, we fight not only to win, but to protect the win. it's great to get a new law and policy, but we need to make sure it's not going to be overturned in one year when we're not paying attention. >> you've had four federal lawsuits. >> five. >> five. one was recently dropped. tell me about the cost of freedom. >> i have had five lawsuits from

officers against me, three from officers in dallas, their families and two in baton rouge. there was a movie that got evacuated when somebody tweeted in a death threat. the first person banned from twitter was raising money to get me killed. i'm always looking over my shoulder. i can't actually focus. the second is how do i plan and strategize, so i'm mindful of safety but not distracted. there's always a fine line. some days i'm really good at it. >> who is the "they". you say "they" want me to be distracted. >> there are a whole set of people on the right. t i think about their readership. i think about the people who think that our calls, that things are racist or being dramatic. the people that say that collin

should shut up and play football. that whole set of people who are trying to delegitimize both the message and the space are people who are trying to silence both me and a ton of other people who were engaged in this similarly. >> how do you think we'll look back on this moment? time? >> well, i hope that you and i are talking when we're both 70 and we're, like, remember that conversation? and we won, right? that's what i want us to look back. if they can rewrite the tax code on the back of slap paper, don't tell me it's a 400 year solution. we can do that. i believe that. it's why i'm willing to sacrifice whatever because i think that when i'm 70, 80, i'll look back and say that was really hard, pretty dicey. >> thanks so much. >> so good to be here. great conversation. we move now to a different kind of drama, one set in a small town in 1960s montana. the actor paul dano first stab

at directing "wildlife" is one of the best films of the year and will be released this coming weekend. it follows the struggles of the family against the backdrop of a natural disaster, a wildfire. a family falling apart before the eyes of the only son. the film has been praised for the visual splendor and for master fully capturing life in post war america. the actress carrie mulligan is receiving stand out acclaim for playing a complex lead. we talked about what drew them to this beautiful yet somber story. welcome to the program. >> hey there. >> hi. >> it's really good to see you. i watched the film. i know it's coming out later, but it's really quite a dramatic film. i just wanted to ask you, because would i be right in thinking that both the male and the female characters are quite

unsympathetic? >> well, i think it's okay for you to have that opinion, however, i don't think so. i feel like it's sort of about people being human. i remember learning when my parents were actually people that they sort of had past lives and that they struggled and sort of what that felt like. they suddenly realized they had lives beyond me and sort of stepping out of, like, the eden of childhood and into the adult world which i think frankly is quite messy. and even though i experienced that, i still love my parents. something i responded to in the book was the great sense of love there is, even though there's a great amount of struggle or pain. i am not looking to condemn either of these parents. in fact, i feel empathy towards their struggle. >> the way you describe it makes

a whole lot of sense and i'm going to take back what i said maybe. but actually that is the whole other side of the coin to what i just saw. and it's really interesting because carrie, you are the mother in this triangle of mother, father, and child. and i wonder how you saw it then? i saw it from the kid's point of view special make it was a flawed reading of it. i felt so sorry for this child being caught between you two parents. >> yeah. i think that's so interesting because i think we have spoken to quite a lot of audiences who have seen the film and everyone seems to identify with a different character. some people see themselves in the child and the character played by ed and the film is told through his eyes. and then some people really identify with the father or the mother or they see echos of their own experience. i think it's a trait, so you can follow or be with each of these

characters in different moments. from my perspective, i similarly felt despite her flaws and despite the obvious wrong move she makes, she still is hopefully a character that you can feel empathy for. what i loved about what zoe and paul had written was that flawed female character. i think often we have such idealized ideas of what womanhood and mother hood and wifehood looks like on screen and if a mother onis failing on screen, she's only failing. up until that point in her life, she's sort of spent the last 14 years being pretty much perfect. >> right. that definitely came across at the beginning of the film. in fact, it looked like a beautiful perfect family unit and it was sad because the father played by jake jigyllenhl

was fired from a job he was suited for. y you, the wife and mother, confront the moment when the father decides to go away and try to do something, anything, and in this case try to help fight a wildfire that was crashing through their area. i'm going to play this clip and we can talk about it. >> what's going on? >> your father is leaving us to go and fight those wildfires. >> what? dad, why? >> you won't take a job at the grocery store but you'll go out with a bunch of dead beats and get killed. what does it pay? >> what? >> what does it pay? >> $1 an hour. >> oh my god. you don't want to do this. >> it won't be for long. >> not if you get yourself killed. >> what do you think? is this a bad idea? >> don't ask him. >> he's almost grown.

>> your father could be burned up and you'll never see him again. >> don't say that. >> you don't know what i'm doing. >> don't i? i'm a grown woman. why don't you act like a grown man. >> so that is supercharged. what do you feel when you watch that? i saw you both look at each other. paul, you're the director and co-writer. what do you think when you see that scene? >> well, first i think how good carrie and jake are. that was a really tough day and that was a big lesson as a filmmaker, actually, because i had sort of blocked the scene in my head a different way. we did many, many, many takes of them just going at it. for me it was so fun to watch these two guys. this time watching it the key line that jumped to me actually was you can't keep running every time something doesn't go your way. because i think a lot of what the film is about, the way the

information is revealed to the kid, the mystery of who your parents are, the little things that start coming out in the film as the character continues to sort. drop, or these things start to come out of her. i guess that really struck me. >> you're absolutely right. you can't keep running. you keep feeling this guy's pain, his pain of rejection, his pain of not measuring up to his wife and to his child, and he keeps sort of running in order to i suppose try to find his fatherly and manley role in the house. at the same time, carrie, your character is left picking up the pieces essentially, trying to keep the household together. your son, the son, joe, doesn't really perform so well in school. he's a lovely boy. he's such a sympathetic character. so adult and so amazing and so loving to both his parents. what do you see happening to your character, the mother, the

wife? >> i think think she spent so many years keeping everything together, and i think particularly in that period. this is a character who is responsible for keeping a really nice home on a lower income, constantly moving and making nice wherever they go, trying to settle her son wherever they go, making due with what they have, and sort of keeping it together every time her husband has to change jobs. i think that's sort of a basic injustice in her mind to the fact that he can leave. i think there's points where she wants to leave and she's trying to figure out and she has an identity, whether her identity is a mother and wife or if there's any kind of person left underneath from her sort of youth. >> paul, this is your first directorial work and potentially your first writing, i think. i'm really fascinated to hear that you had written your version of it and you showed your partner and she was not impressed.

s she ripped it up, and then you got to working together. it's not quite life imitating art or the other way, but it's interesting, because the whole thing is the male/female dynamic. >> yes. thank you for bringing that up. so i took a crack at a first draft which i grew to secretly think was really pretty good once you get invested in sort of what you're doing. zoe being my partner and being a proper writer, she was the first person i gave it to to read. i sort of waited outside the door. she read it and she came out and she was, like, it's good. it was clear she was lying. she had dog ears on every page, notes on every page. we got through maybe five pages before it was like, okay, you know it was too hard. we started fighting. she said why don't you let me do a pass. i see what you're trying to do. i think showing is going to be easier than telling so we don't fight forever.

and for me that was, like, great. i don't know if i was trying to bait her into helping me with it or if i was, great, if you're so smart, you do it. and she did a pass and bought a great sense of structure. we found a really natural rhythm and we trade today back and forth. we would sit down and talk for a few hours, ask questions, why, why, why, and then one of us would take it. because we had optioned it ourselves, we got to kind of look cook it at home for sort of as long as we wanted. one of us might go work on something else and come back to it and our eyes would be fresh. i actually think it turned out to be a really beautiful thing to share such a big experience. making a film is a really big experien experience. to share it i think turned out to be really quite nice. >> i think it's a really incredible story. it's not obvious when partners, you know, have to evaluate each other's work.

carrie, what do you think in terms of that just symbolizing a little bit, if i can sort of exstrap lae extrapolate, the whole post me too, men, women working together. what do you feel being a female actress working in hollywood and around on stage, everywhere? do you see a shift in the dynamic in your direction? >> yeah, i think so. there's concrete change that has come into effect. there are things that have been put into place as i result of that that are really positive. there's a lot more awareness. the first place i worked after all these revelations came out was in london and the artistic director put together a code of conduct immediately after. she was very vocal about everything.

she put together the code of conduct and when you work at the theater you have to sign the code of conduct. >> your comment on that, because i don't know whether onset they've done that in the united states or what. >> no, i don't think so. it sounds like a wonderful idea because it is so gray and because it is scary and difficult to talk about and there's a think a big reaction to the political climate in general. i think it would be really helpful to have more concrete things in place like that. >> thank you so much. >> thank you. on that note about this me too era, that is it for our program tonight. thanks for watching amanpour and company on pbs and join us again tomorrow night.

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