Paul Conroy on A Private War inspiration Marie Colvin: 'She was about truth at any cost’

Dedicated: Paul Conroy with Marie Colvin, the subject of new biopic A Private War
Simon Hemelryk4 February 2019

Journalism has had a very rough time recently. The US President has dismissed well-respected news broadcasters as biased. Saudi hitmen murdered a writer in one of its embassies. Invented stories have plagued Facebook, making it hard for the public to know which media sources to trust.

It’s perhaps a relief to many, then, that a major new film focuses on the hugely acclaimed war correspondent Marie Colvin, who lost her life uncovering the truth about a story the world needed to hear.

A Private War, which stars Rosamund Pike as the Sunday Times writer, also features Colvin’s long-term photojournalist colleague Paul Conroy. The 54-year-old was badly injured in the same government airstrike that targeted and killed Colvin in Homs in 2012. The pair had been exposing Assad’s siege of the Syrian city, where 28,000 civilians were being deliberately bombed and trapped in brutal conditions. Since first working together in 2003, the pair had formed one of the most formidable partnerships in British newspapers, reporting on everything from Taliban attacks on the public in Afghanistan to mass graves in Iraq.

“There are journalists who cover war well from the geopolitical or military angle,” says Conroy. “Marie and I both wanted to portray it from the point of view of the women and children on the receiving end of all the bombs — the people with the least-heard voices.”

Conroy was in many ways the practical one in their partnership. Having previously served in an army artillery regiment, he could work out the pattern of incoming airstrikes during a battle and was frequently pulling Colvin out of harm’s way. The American writer, who was 56 when she died, had already lost an eye while covering the civil war in Sri Lanka in 2001. But her ability to find great stories for them both was, he says, “an incredible thing to be part of”.

“Covering a conflict was like peeling an onion, to her,” he says in a warm, enthusiastic Liverpudlian accent. “There was always another layer to the facts that meant she brought events alive by getting details others didn’t. After the death of Gaddafi in Libya, for instance, she took us into the town where he’d been hiding, which was still full of his soldiers. She discovered the little house he’d been in and that he’d been handing out signed photos of himself as a dashing young colonel. It gave a great picture of what he’d been reduced to.”

One real-life scene in A Private War sees Colvin and Conroy, played by Fifty Shades of Grey actor Jamie Dornan, enter a basement in Homs. It is full of mothers and children hiding from the shelling.

“You could smell the fear in there,” recalls Conroy. “It was my job to capture that feeling with my camera, while Marie did it with her words. I can always tell when a war story is being reported from 100 miles away. It’s lacking that sense of the journalist really being part of what’s happening. Marie and I didn’t want to have to brave explosions to get to somewhere like Homs, but it was par for the course for creating a piece that was powerful enough to make the world take notice.”

Biopic: Rosamund Pike and Jamie Dornan in A Private War

The film portrays Colvin as a steely personality who was quite happy to confront rebel leaders in interviews and boss her editor around. But Conroy says part of the reason they worked so well together was that they made each other giggle.

“Whenever things got tense, one of us would say something and a laugh would happen,” he says. The night before she died, the pair were trapped in Homs and, though they didn’t know the building they were in with several other journalists would be deliberately fired at by Assad’s troops, there was so much indiscriminate shelling they realised they’d probably be killed next day anyway. Determined to get out the story they’d been working on, Colvin did a live broadcast on CNN.

“Afterwards, we went to bed in this freezing little room with just blankets thrown over us, and she suddenly said: ‘Paul, I think I’m going deaf.’

“I said ‘What? You’re half-blind already!’

“So I looked in her ear and pulled out the bud from the earphones I’d lent her to do the broadcasts. We just pissed ourselves. We had to be up at 5am to try to escape. But one or other of us kept erupting in laughter, like kids on a sleepover.”

After seeing so much bloodshed during her career, Colvin suffered from PTSD and is seen in the movie recuperating in hospital.

“I’ve often heard her called fearless, but she had a healthy fear of the battlefield,” says Conroy. “Her strength was in her bravery to carry on with her job. When she was feeling anxious she’d go quiet. I’d crack a little funny and lighten the mood.”

Conroy was a consultant during filming of the movie. Dornan and Pike, whose films include Gone Girl and Die Another Day, would frequently ask him: “We’ve got the words in the script but what the hell were you actually thinking at this point?”

“I’d talk them through it so they could really express the emotions,” Conroy explains. “I brought in my old cameras from Libya and Syria for Jamie to use in the film. They still had sand in them. That really helped him connect with the part, too, I think.”

Conroy also showed Dornan that you have to be fairly ruthless to be a successful photojournalist. “During a scene by the mass grave in Iraq [where hundreds of victims of Saddam’s regime had been buried], Jamie was hesitantly trying to shoot around the mourners. I told him that, to get the best shots, you had to use your elbows and push people out of the way. You can console them afterwards.”

Conroy also helped Pike capture the Long Island drawl and mannerisms of Colvin by showing her films he’d made of his colleague. But what particularly helped bring Colvin’s personaility to life was giving Pike the journalist’s cigarette lighter.

“We were both heavy smokers, so I was used to seeing it a lot in the field. In the film, to see Roz moving like Marie, looking like her and then lighting a cigarette with her lighter was emotional. I’d think, ‘God, I miss Marie. I miss the work we did together.’”

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Conroy sustained a badly wounded leg during the Homs attack and spent six months in hospital. Since then he has devoted his life to spreading the word about the horrors of Syria, giving numerous talks and interviews, and writing Under the Wire, a book about his escape from Homs, which later became a documentary.

“The Farouq Brigades [anti-Assad] fighters who got me out made me promise I would tell the story of the slaughter.” Many of them died helping him, so it became “a debt of honour”. With Colvin’s killing now exposed as a deliberate act by the Assad government, he’s even more determined that the film and his work will emphasise that “we shouldn’t be dealing with this murderous regime, and the Syrian people shouldn’t have to live under it”.

But he hopes the film will also honour Colvin’s memory.

“She’d have been self-effacing about it in public but so flattered. The film shows she was about truth at any cost. She didn’t die deliberately for it, but she did die trying to achieve it. What better legacy could someone have?”

A special screening of A Private War, with a Q&A session featuring Rosamund Pike, Jamie Dornan, Paul Conroy and director Matthew Heineman, is live in cinemas tonight (aprivatewar.film). The film is on general release from February 15

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