Jennifer Weiss and Simone Urdl are known for protecting a director’s creative control on films they produce.

Together under the Film Farm banner or separately, they have worked with Atom Egoyan (Ararat), Guy Maddin (The Saddest Music in the World), Don McKellar (Childstar), and Sarah Polley (Away from Her), cases in which the directors get enough money to pay the bills as well as the creative space to make personal and experimental films.

So the fact that Weiss and Urdl were handpicked by Hollywood heavyweight Brian De Palma, the mind behind Scarface and The Untouchables, to produce Redacted, his indie HD anti-Iraq War movie, may turn out to have been a poisoned chalice for the Canadian producers long resistant to creative interference.

‘It hasn’t soured us, but every production is a learning experience,’ Urdl says, after Redacted was censored for legal reasons by Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, who financed the $5-million film, and who is distributing it via his Magnolia Pictures and exhibiting through Landmark Theatres and his HDNet Movies. Maximum Films distributes in Canada.

That’s some pull, as De Palma and his Canadian producers found out when Magnolia requested that the faces of dead Iraqis in a disturbing photo montage at the end of the documentary-style drama be blacked out. The irony lies in that the film’s very title refers to government interference in the reporting of unsavory events.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way.

HDNet Films’ Jason Kliot and Joana Vicente first approached De Palma in 2006 to make a film with only two strings attached: it had to be shot for $5 million and on HD.

The Hollywood director had an idea: a fictional retelling of the real-life murder of an Iraqi family and the rape of their 14-year-old daughter by U.S. soldiers. And De Palma had Weiss and Urdl in mind to produce. They had just coproduced Sarah Polley’s $5-million Away from Her, which De Palma saw at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2006. So he penned the script and pitched it to HDNet, with Weiss and Urdl by his side.

The Los Angeles producers bought it, and Redacted started shooting in February 2007 on location in Jordan. Weiss and Urdl employed around 250 locals and scoured local refugee camps for Iraqis to join the movie’s no-name cast.

Besides securing locations, crew and cast, Weiss and Urdl were asked by De Palma to secure real photos of dead and wounded Iraqi civilians for the film’s horrifying closing montage, which De Palma hoped would change the minds of anyone who supported the U.S. involvement in Iraq, and possibly even end the war.

So Weiss and Urdl returned to the refugee camps and found Iraqi photographers who could provide the appropriate images.

‘There was such an appreciation that we were going to get these photos out. They trusted us with their photographs,’ Urdl recalls.

The montage and its tragic faces were thought to be the most powerful part of Redacted, and certainly impressed jurors at the Venice Film Festival, where the film bowed last September and went on to win De Palma a Silver Lion Award for best director.

But those same horrifying photos made Cuban, or his lawyers, or both, wince. And that’s when Weiss and Urdl got a lesson in Hollywood hardball.

‘We were under the impression that HDNet Films was an autonomous company. It became very clear that that wasn’t the case,’ Urdl says.

The fear was that families of the dead Iraqis could sue, and so Magnolia was instructed to tell De Palma to remove or edit the final montage, or the film would be shelved.

HDNet executives were not available for comment, but Magnolia president Eamonn Bowles, at a press conference with De Palma at the New York Film Festival, said the film’s montage was censored to prevent lawsuits.

‘It is legally indefensible to use someone’s unauthorized photo in a commercial work. Any claim to the contrary is either hopelessly naive or willfully false,’ Bowles argued.

The redacting of Redacted shocked Weiss and Urdl. By instinct, they sided with De Palma against the request. But Cuban owns the negative, so they reluctantly censored their film on legal grounds.

‘We never agreed with that decision. We fought it. In this case, Brian is relying on his final cut. We believe it is an issue of final cut, and not a legal matter,’ Weiss argues.

Not De Palma, Weiss nor Urdl ever got a face-to-face with Cuban to discuss their concerns, so no one knows for certain whether his lawyers bent his ear or he got cold feet over the harsh message of a film about American soldiers committing war atrocities.

The Film Farm producers sense it was a bit of both. And they’re left wary about taking money from wealthy studio bosses like Cuban, who not only covet creative control, but own a movie outright.

‘It’s immediate gratification. They cash-flow the film. At first, it’s so much easier. But in the end, it becomes more difficult when you’re fighting for the creative in the film,’ Weiss says.

For her part, Urdl has newfound respect for the Canadian film industry, where you cobble together investors who afford filmmakers artistic freedom.

‘You can protect the director much more if you have a number of investors,’ Urdl says.

Maximum Films’ platform release of Redacted launches Nov. 16 in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver.