Restrepo Directors Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington: The Movieline Interview

I have personally never experienced any film like Restrepo.

TH: Yeah. And I think by going there, and being willing to spend that amount of time with the soldiers, and doing everything that they were going to do -- we slept with them, we ate with them, we went on patrol with them, we went into combat with them. We did everything essentially except carry weapons or pull guard duty. By the third trip, they were like, wow -- these guys are serious. They're going to do it. And so they just started to open up to us, until a point when we just started becoming part of the platoon. And by then, as you see in the film, there's no filter. They trusted us, and understood was that we sought was not to put forward a political point of view. We just wanted to represent their experience. And they don't talk about politics. They don't go up to generals and say, "Well, why are we in the Korengal? Is Afghanistan a good idea?" They understood we just wanted to capture their point of view, and an honest point of view, which allowed us an unvarnished look at their lives. Which included scenes, which you've seen in the film, which were incredibly touching and funny and open, but at the same time there are scenes that are depressing, or scenes where you don't like them. I hope if anything that's we've made the most visceral war documentary that one can see, and the most honest.

Describe your moments of greatest fear.

TH: There's the scene [during the Rock Avalanche ambush] where they're moving up, the soldier says, "Get the fuck over here, we're moving up! We're going to push through and bum rush people down there, there's dudes down there." It's funny because I was filming it, and they suddenly ran off. If you notice, there's a moment when the camera just stops and goes right. And that was me just thinking split-second, "What the hell am I doing? I don't know what's over there and I'm just going to run with these guys, and I'm just going to find a bunch of Taliban there?" And then I flinch, and my autopilot kicks in and I do it.

You follow them.

TH: I followed them, and then you discover the body [of a staff sergeant].

SJ: The most scared I ever was was in a situation where we were hit very hard, and I was separated from my camera. There was too much gunfire for me to get to my camera, which was like ten feet away. I was completely discombobulated. As soon as you have the camera in your hand, you have a purpose -- a point. Without the camera you're just getting shot at. The camera was its own kind of anesthetic. I felt that my job was to record what was happening as thoroughly as possible, and there was a real sense of purpose to my job. Without the camera, it was a passive situation and I was just getting shot at. It was terrifying. The camera was the only refuge.

From a technical standpoint, how did you shoot? How did you physically hold the camera?

SJ: It was a Sony V1, Tim shot on a Z1. For the most part, I held it at chest-level, autofocus, auto everything. One of the great things Tim told me was, "Hold the camera for ten seconds on everything." Because we'd get into firefights, and the camera would go everywhere my head did. The footage was totally useless.

[Tim laughs.]

And yet there were moments and details that were just so beautifully observed amidst all the gunfire and chaos, you can barely believe you're seeing them. I'm thinking for example of a closeup on a soldier's bare foot in a shoe, and an artillery casing falls inside his shoe and he's trying to shake it out while manning a machine gun. Who shot that?

TH: I did. I'm a photographer by trade, and interestingly enough, being in combat after a while, if you look at the media ... say tomorrow The New York Times is going to run a story about Afghanistan, I bet you I can get what picture they're going to run on the front cover -- the shadow of a guy with a gun, locals in the background -- so you learn the ways and cliches of how to film stuff. After a while you get kind of bored of shooting guys shooting guns, so I look for other things to focus on. That's just the training of many years of making images.

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