'Pride and Glory" is a New York City cop movie about police venality, but it also might become the first Iraq war-inspired feature to make a dent at the box office and win mainstream awards.
How does a story based in the Upper Manhattan neighborhood Washington Heights resonate with the atrocities at Abu Ghraib? Credit the collaboration between a gutsy writer-director, Gavin O'Connor ("Tumbleweeds," "Miracle"), with family roots in the New York Police Department, and his audacious star, Edward Norton.
Over the phone from a getaway spot in Ontario, Norton recalled telling O'Connor, "I have to ask the question, what's going to make it worthwhile for me to make a very good example of another cop-corruption movie?"
Then the Abu Ghraib scandal broke.
"We started saying to each other that the institutional lying at the center of 'Pride and Glory' mirrored the crucible the country was going through. What's so fascinating to me about Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo or any flash point is that somewhere around it there is a person who surely has deep feelings of loyalty to his fellow soldiers, his unit, his army, his country.
"Yet he reaches a moment where he says, 'I'm going to distribute a disc with the pictures because they show a corruption of the things we're supposed to be standing for.' For an actor, that's an incredibly interesting tension."
The movie, which opens Friday, was personal for O'Connor, who called last month from Pittsburgh, where he's preparing his new picture ("Warriors," set in the world of mixed martial arts).
"My dad retired from the NYPD as a detective sergeant," he said. "My uncle was a cop; my mother's father was a cop. There are a lot of things we got right in the script, including having cops talk as cops talk.
