The doodlebug -- or V-1 flying bomb -- was an early, drone-like cruise missile that the Nazi Luftwaffe aerial force debuted during World War II. The Luftwaffe would use the doodlebugs to attack London, where actress Helen Mirren's parents lived during the war.
"They were by far the worst because [as Mirren's mother told her] you would hear them coming over and if you heard the drone -- the buzz up there in the sky -- if you heard that noise stop, that's when it was dropping its load," said Mirren during a phone interview with The Huffington Post. "So you would just pray it went over your head."
Mirren recalled this memory from her family's history as she was promoting her movie "Eye in the Sky," in which she plays a British colonel tasked with deciding whether to use a drone strike in Nairobi, Kenya. Her character has tracked the location of an extremist meeting, but must choose whether to take out the terrorists at the cost of killing a young girl who is selling bread right outside their headquarters.
Although Mirren's character is a military pragmatist who early on in the movie begins to advocate for the strike in a debate with British politicians, the actress tried to use her family's personal, fear-filled connection to inform her portrayal of Colonel Katherine Powell. As Mirren's mother told her, "The terror was to hear this [doodlebug] and to not know whether it was about to drop bombs on you."
"Eye in the Sky" (which has a 95 percent Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes) skillfully centers around this back-and-forth debate over whether to use the drone strike. The morality of each stance is presented as ever-changing and gray.
"I've likened the film to a courtroom drama, only in this context the audience is the jury," said Mirren. "The film throws up these questions and then says to the audience, the jury, 'You make the decision. What are you prepared to sacrifice for the greater good?' That is a moral question that has always been with us in politics and in war."
Mirren's role as Powell was originally intended for a male actor, right alongside the late Alan Rickman's lieutenant and Aaron Paul's drone pilot characters in the movie. The actress was proud to make the snatch. "War movies are a genre all of their own and women don't often get to be in war movies," said Mirren.
Despite this fact, Mirren believes that, traditionally, women should be more prominent in the chosen storylines of these films. "I always say women have also been on the frontline of war because who were the bombs -- in the Blitz in Cologne, in Dresden, in Hiroshima, in London -- who were the bombs dropping on? They were dropping on women and children," she explained.
The actress signed on to "Eye in the Sky" because, in her mind, it distinguished itself from the more traditional war movie that triumphs on explosive action and clear heroes. Instead, this movie focused on the moral qualms behind those decisions to bomb.
"If it had just been a gung-ho, proselytizing movie about heroes in war that wouldn't have been so interesting to me," said Mirren. "I think those sort of very, very difficult moral decisions have always been taken in war. I think [the movie's line] 'Never tell a soldier that he does not know the cost of war' -- I think that line really says it all."
"Eye in the Sky" is available on Blu-ray, DVD and On-Demand as of Tuesday.
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