Jordan's Brave Take

"I approached the landscapes and cityscapes that I shot in New York as if they were a set, as if they were a part of a kind of city of the mind, the place she knew that was familiar and comforting that was changed into something violent and paranoid, you know?"

In The Brave One, as the film progresses, there's a kind of almost supernatural quality to Foster's anger. As she loses her resolve to get her life back on track, she becomes a kind of avenging angel.

"The thing for me is that from being herself - this NPR type of sophisticated radio critic - she becomes this thing, this monster, and she doesn't know what it is. She describes it as the stranger at the start. But by the end she's become something almost mythical, you know?

"It's almost like out of one of those Batman or Superman movies. The thing about the way Jodie plays it is that you kind of know what she's become without having to put words on it. She becomes something out of the landscape, out of the comic strips in a way."

The film intentionally and effectively challenges every comfortable assumption the person watching it might make about how they would behave under similar circumstances. For one thing, the violence of the initial mugging scene is so extreme that it shocks you out of your complacency, implicating you alongside the character.

What if this happened to you, you wonder? Would you behave like she does? Would you want to kill the people who had destroyed your life?

Says Jordan, "It had to be violent. And it was actually much more violent when I originally shot it. But there is only so much that viewers can take, you know? When you do stuff like this you end up filming stuff that you know no one in the world would be able to see.

"It had to be violent, it had to come from nowhere, and in my mind I structured it around those little phone cameras the kids have, you know? As if they were making a snuff movie. If you've spent much time in England lately you'll have heard of this thing called 'happy slapping.' (A schoolyard and council estate phenomenon where a group of teenagers will attack two unwitting passers by and film the attack with their cell phones). I did the scene like that."

Although he's obviously aware of the parallels between the themes of this film and the timely issues it confronts, Jordan eschews making pronouncements.

"I wouldn't want to make too many grand intellectual claims about the film. It's a revenge story, you know what I mean, and it comes from the territory of exploitation movies and stuff like that. The generic kind of film and the generic kind of storyline.

"The reason they're still around is that they hit something kind of primal and they operate on the simplest possible level: there's action and there's consequence and there's action and there's consequence. That structure allowed me to just push her actions almost to the point where I was daring myself and the audience to lose sympathy with her.

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Nster.com