"Wait, was that the night we were all pole-dancing at subMercer?" asks director Kimberly Peirce, the visionary behind Boy's Don't Cry and this year's Stop-Loss. She laughs from her belly, and it's incongruous, given that I'm here as her guest, to watch her accept the Andrew Sarris Award at Columbia University, her alma mater. After a montage sequence that projects her most moving scenes for a crowd of aspiring filmmakers and aging professors, Peirce takes to the stage. She scans the room, and says, "People always ask me for advice, for that one thing that might help them 'make it' in film." Aside from truth and passion and all the ideals that one learns in film school, she shrugs her shoulders and jumps into an anecdote about how she found herself hitting rock-bottom on national television.

She watched as her 18-year-old brother packed his bags for Iraq. She listened while soldiers chronicled their devastating accounts of being kept in combat against their will. Simply put, the acclaimed director of Boy's Don't Cry has earned the right to sound off with Stop-Loss, a brutal look at lives lost in war. Below, Peirce opens fire.

When Kimberly Peirce’s 18-year old brother enlisted in the army after 9/11, she was devastated. Suddenly, Peirce was part of a military family and by 2003 her brother was fighting in Iraq. To better understand what he was going through, the Boys Don’t Cry director began interviewing soldiers, en route to making a documentary about the quintessential soldier experience. Back in Iraq, Peirce’s brother text-messaged her the story of a fellow solider who had been stop-lossed, sent back into combat against his will, even though his tour of duty was up. Peirce was stunned to discover that over 81,000 soldiers had fallen victim to the stop-loss policy, and decided to make it the backbone of her film, which would now become a drama. The result is Stop-Loss, a ragged and demanding film that examines the effects of the current war without exploiting the men and women who experience them. Opening this Friday, it stars Ryan Phillippe as a soldier who returns to his small Texan town, only to discover that he’s been called back and has no choice but to return to Iraq—unless he runs.