Restrepo Directors Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington: The Movieline Interview

You won a photojournalism prize during your time with Battle Company.

TH: I won World Press Photo of the Year, for this story.

Was the soldier in that photo featured in Restrepo?

TH: Absolutely -- it's Olson. The guy on machine gun during the revenge scene.

SJ: "Can I shoot now? Can I shoot now?" That guy.

How did you balance your still work with your documentary work, or were they one and the same?

TH: I had two D-Rings, and on one I had the stills camera and on one I had the video camera. Sometimes it was a crazy kind of Western where I'm shooting like this. [He draws both hands.]

SJ: You can hear the shutter of his still camera on the video. He's shooting stills with one hand, video with the other, and you hear the "kachunk kachunk" on the footage. It's pretty outrageous.

Did the soldiers surprise you with the power and honesty of the interviews you conducted with them in Italy after their deployments?

SJ: Our original idea was to have nothing in the film that wasn't in the Korengal Valley. No generals, no diplomats, and even no narration. That presents a structural problem. So initially the interviews were conceived as familiar voices providing voice over, instead of an outside narrator, and that's how we'd get important information across to the viewer. So we set those up in Vicenza, where they're based. We left the Korengal Valley in August '08, three months later we showed up and set up a little studio. What happened surprised everybody. We assumed the most potent material was of course the verite footage from the war zone. But these guys were able to talk about their emotional state in a way that they couldn't afford to in combat -- it's too dangerous. And they're talking to guys who aren't their shrink, aren't their parents, aren't their superior officers. We're older men, but we went through everything they went through. So it ended up being a series of therapy session, and became the emotional heart of the movie.

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