Bin Laden Film Stirs Controversy
SAMBOLIN: Welcome back to EARLY START. It is 51 minutes past the hour. The film "Zero Dark Thirty" about the hunt for Osama bin Laden will be a major Oscar player, but even before it opens, the film is courting controversy with questions about unprecedented and some say inappropriate access to classified information. Our Pentagon correspondent, Barbara Starr, spoke to the filmmakers.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Don't think she's a little young for the hard stuff?</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Washington says she's a killer.</s>BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It's a Hollywood spy thriller with as much Oscar buzz as it has controversy. "Zero Dark Thirty," the story of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, from the Oscar-winning powerhouse team of Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, recreates how it all happened from the female CIA analyst who finally figured out where he was hiding to the NAVY SEALs who killed him.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: There are two narratives about the location of Osama bin Laden.</s>STARR: The controversy? The Obama administration has faced accusations it gave undeserved access to the filmmakers. In real life, everyone involved in the hunt for bin Laden remains sworn to secrecy. But the filmmakers say they got firsthand accounts. They just won't say exactly how that happened.</s>MARL BOAL, WRITER/PRODUCER "ZERO DARK THIRY": I think as a reporter, you would understand that we take protecting our sources and sort of the exact methodology of our sourcing pretty seriously, just in the same way if I asked you, how exactly did you source that story.</s>STARR: Kathryn, when you hear Mark talk this way, do you -- are you a journalist or a filmmaker?</s>KATHRYN BIGELOW, DIRECTOR/PRODUCER "ZERO DARK THIRTY": That's a good question. Well, I certainly tried to be as faithful to the research as possible and make a good movie and make a film that was timely.</s>STARR: But, how much access they got is the issue.</s>REP. PETER KING, (R) NEW YORK: Obviously, things went wrong here.</s>STARR: Congressman Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, first called for an investigation at both the CIA and the Pentagon.</s>KING: There was an event where operatives were involved and they did not know until they got there that the Hollywood people were going to be present. So, which means their identity would have been shown.</s>STARR: King questions whether the military was pressured to cooperate on the film.</s>KING: What access they were told to give, some resisted, some acquiesced.</s>STARR: But a senior military official denies the SEALs were pressured. CIA and Pentagon officials say no secrets were given away.</s>KING: My understanding is that the Hollywood people got access to CIA operatives, to CIA locations, that they had access to the Navy SEALs which they should not have had. And I can't really go beyond that other than to say that now this investigation has gone on and it's been expanded.</s>STARR: Boal says he and Bigelow were very aware of national security concerns.</s>BOAL: We're acutely aware that there are sensitivities around this material. And I think we approached this with a lot of respect for those sensitivities.</s>STARR (on-camera): Congressman King makes clear the movie makers are free to do as they wish. His concern is whether the government is getting too close to Hollywood at the risk of the nation's secrets. Barbara Starr, CNN, New York.</s>ROMANS: So interesting.</s>SAMBOLIN: Makes me want to watch it.</s>ROMANS: Yes.</s>SAMBOLIN: All right. He's an Olympian, he's bobsledder, he was also blind at one point. Up next, we asked Steven Holcomb about the best advice he ever received.