“People are yelling at me about rape and corporate greed, but really, it’s climate change. It was a really good play with a really good actor, and I was like, ‘Oh, that could be cool.’ And then I opened it and it was a play where you have to be naked”, Fey explained. That’s not terribly surprising, since Robert Carlock wrote the screenplay, based on the nonfiction book The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Kim Barker. Tina said that she genuinely enjoyed Kim’s story and felt like it was a character that she could play and execute well.
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In the movie, Fey’s Barker is not a newspaper journalist, but a TV reporter stationed only in Afghanistan.
“Also, in the film Tina tends to run towards explosions”. “What I like about the movie is that I expected to laugh, but I didn’t expect to tear up”. In the movie, my boyfriend cheats on me and that’s why we break up.
While 70% of the events and characters are modified from the book, it delivers by maintaining the integrity of what real-life Kim experienced while overseas. He was a good boyfriend. “But this movie is, at its core, a human story”.
Tina Fey thinks this it’s a “terrible time” for women in comedy. “Within two weeks, Tina found out about the book from that review”. “I got to fire an AK-47, which a lot of my guy friends thought was so awesome, and I was like, ‘It was fine.’ But it’s interesting – it’s a complicated thing to be a woman anywhere, but especially over there”. Chasing things that go boom gets her face time on the news. Doing the rounds of the press in the run-up to the film’s release, Fey told Town & Country magazine how annoyed she had been getting when interviewers tried to tell her and “Sisters” co-star Amy Poehler that “this is an wonderful time for women in comedy”.
On Leonardo DiCaprio: Despite calling out the B.S., Fey said she supports DiCaprio using his acceptance speech to bring awareness to the environment. “There were certain things that would happen that would shock you out of your scaredness, but it was more like I was excited”.
Baker angers a few of the military people at first, but they quickly warm up to her. They also like her spunk, as in one of her first moments of gunfire, she jumps out of the vehicle to film.
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At the premiere, Fey posed with her costars Martin Freeman and Margot Robbie. “Like we’re going to fix everything tonight.’ And also, like, ‘You’re all rich. Why are you yelling at me about corporate greed?'” It felt like we were actually at a big all-night party. “When I told people over there – expats, Afghans, Pakistanis – they completely got it, right away”. This is a movie!
