‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Set Based On ABC Report

By Alex Weprin 

On last night’s “Nightline,” the producers of the new movie Zero Dark Thirty Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal were interviewed by Martha Raddatz. The film is a fictionalization of the operation that killed Osama Bin Laden. Among the revelations: the producers used footage from an ABC News report to reconstruct a full-size version of Bin Laden’s compound in exacting detail.

Kathryn Bigelow: That’s the compound we built. 

Raddatz: The floor, the tile, the carpet. Mark said you took that…

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Bigelow: From your footage

Raddatz: From the original ABC video

Bigelow: Yes.  Yes. The bed all of that. The rug. Everything we could find from that video we replicated. 

Raddatz: So you froze that ABC video and …

Bigelow: Yeah frame after frame after frame and found tile that was identical to that.  And built the house with everyconceivable piece of information that we could find we replicated. 

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