Kathryn Bigelow and CBS News, “It’s a Movie, not a Documentary.”

Bigelow talks torture with Charlie Rose but also talks about her Oscar snub.

The only way around the controversy is to remind people that Zero Dark Thirty is a movie, an interpretation of history, a version of the story – someday the truth will come out but for now, this is the story that their sources gave them. It was probably the wrong choice to say it was history because there are many different interpretations of that history and those different versions are what is at the heart of the controversy. Many people wrongly assume that the complaints about the film are that it shows graphic scenes of torture, therefore it endorses torture. Charlie Rose in this clip asks Kathryn Bigelow to answer the question: did torture lead to finding Bin Laden. It’s a tough question to ask but it isn’t really her job to answer it. She made the film based on first hand accounts of the story.

The best way to discuss it is as a work of art, a statement on war, not as a literal interpretation of history.  However, everyone has learned so much more about history, about torture, and about finding Bin Laden than many of us knew before.  That is the power of art.