Despite the lack of awards from the Academy (it only received one for Sound Editing), Zero Dark Thirty will go down as one of the definitive films of the 2010s (and missing out on Best Picture is almost a confirmation of this; see also: The Social Network). The film's awards season momentum was slowed by a nonsense controversy over torture (people who didn't understand movies thought the film was promoting it), and one could think that screenwriter Mark Boal's conversations with the CIA may have "softened" the depiction of movie's harsher scenes. Recently revealed documents reveal that this is only marginally true. Hit the jump for details on the CIA's comments on the script for Zero Dark Thirty, and changes that were made in response to those comments. In documents released under the Freedom of Information Act [via Gawker], Boal acquiesced to some of the disputes the CIA had with the script. Specifically, in the original draft, Maya (Jessica Chastain) was going to participate in the torture scene, but the CIA said this never happened: "For this scene we emphasized that substantive debriefers [i.e. Maya] did not administer [Enhanced Interrogation Techniques] because in this scene he had a non-interrogator, substantive debriefer assisting in a dosing technique." While I don't think the CIA was trying to make Zero Dark Thirty artistically better, this change did improve the story since it helps slow Maya's descent to the dark side. If she had started out torturing a suspect, it would lessen the impact of a later scene ...
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