After the incredible and unexpected success of her first film, Boys Don’t Cry, which won Hilary Swank an Oscar for best actress as a troubled, transgendered teen, the writer-director Kimberly Peirce had Hollywood at her feet. But that was eight years ago, and only now does she have her second film, Stop-Loss, ready for release. Starring Ryan Phillippe and Abbie Cornish, it’s a tough drama about a charismatic army sergeant who goes Awol when, under a policy called Stop-Loss, the government unilaterally extends his army service and wants to send him back to Iraq.

“What happened to me?” laughs Peirce. “When all of Hollywood says, ‘We want to work with you, we want to pay you a lot of money,’ creatively and professionally you want to do it. But the bureaucracy of Hollywood kind of pares down creativity and productivity.” After Boys, Peirce was, as they say, “attached” to a number of high-profile films, including Memoirs of a Geisha. She also had a couple of pet projects she just couldn’t get off the ground at the studios. “They even get you to cast the whole thing,” she says. “Do you know how much time of your life that is? Casting, meeting actors? I would get these big new projects because I represented a certain cachet. But as we moved forward, the studio would say, ‘We’re going to turn it into a musical’, or ‘We’re going to have a clothing line.’ It wasn’t culturally authentic. For me, it’s all about the emotions and the relationships.” In the aftermath of September 11, Peirce became fascinated by the reasons young American men were signing up to fight, including, to her family’s shock, her younger brother. So, initially intending to make a documentary, she just started interviewing people. “It was fascinating to get inside the thinking of this generation.” Peirce was amazed when she found that her brother, home on leave, had cut together a kind of Iraq war home movie, driven by intense rock music. “Some of it was very patriotic, all standing there, saluting. Some of it was comic; some of it was in the streets, blood everywhere, a gore-fest. There were 20 different home movies, all made by kids in his unit.”

Soon, Peirce felt the stories she was collecting – Boys Don’t Cry had originated with similar, on-the-ground research – were instead a way into a feature. She wrote a spec script, which she sent to producers, accompanied by a five-minute trailer of interviews and war footage from the young soldiers. The self-starting process rekindled her enthusiasm for film-making.

“There hasn’t been a moment – and it was the same with Boys – where I haven’t been completely fascinated,” she says. “There are a lot of reasons to work. It’s fun to shoot; it’s fun to work with actors. But at the end of the day, the way I work, I go to bed with it and I wake up with it. If I can’t make it emotionally truthful, I’m just going to be tortured, so it’s, like, why bother?”

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