24 hours after catching Restrepo at Sundance -- a war documentary that offers an unprecedented glimpse at a full year's deployment in the most dangerous region of Afghanistan -- and I still can't shake its startling, enthralling, and frequently devastating images. If anything, they've only embedded themselves deeper. Yesterday, I had an opportunity to speak at length with the two filmmakers, veteran war correspondents both, responsible for bringing Restrepo to the screen: Sebastian Junger, best-selling author of The Perfect Storm, and award-winning photojournalist, Tim Hetherington. Our conversation follows.
MOVIELINE: How did the two of you come together and find yourselves dispatched on this very deadly assignment?
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: We're both pretty experienced war reporters. I've been working for Vanity Fair for a long time, and we were paired on an assignment that I pitched them in 2007, which was to follow one platoon of American soldiers in a remote outpost for an entire deployment. I'm married, we're both civilians, so we couldn't spend the whole year there. So we went back and forth, did a total of ten trips. Tim obviously is a still photographer, I'm a writer, and we decided to make a documentary, so we both had a video camera that we used continually. Some trips I was there by myself, some trips Tim was.
Had you decided before you had met the platoon that you wanted to make the movie, or was there something about them that made you think, hey, these could make pretty good movie stars?
SJ: I had been with Battle Company in 2005 in Zabul. It was my first experience with the U.S. military. I'd covered a lot of wars, but never with the U.S. military. I didn't know anything about it. I was really amazed by these guys. There are good units and bad units, like in anything, and I thought, if these guys go back to Afghanistan, I want to follow it from the beginning. I wanted to write a book and to make a documentary. I had no idea what that meant, to make a documentary. I mean none. It was a naive thought, and it didn't really take a realistic form until Tim came into the picture, and then the project really took off.
TIM HETHERINGTON: I'm a contributor at Vanity Fair as a photographer, and they teamed us up. So off we went to Afghanistan. In 2007, the world was still very firmly focused on Iraq. And I said, OK, we're going to walk around the mountains, we're going to drink cups of tea with the village elders, and we'll be shot at occasionally and that's it. And when we got there, the six-mile stretch of Korengal Valley was seeing nearly a fifth of all combat in Afghanistan. 75% of the bombs being dropped in that valley. There was just an awful lot of fighting going on.
How many fatalities were there in the period you were there?
SJ: Seven. During that deployment there were seven fatalities.
TH: And a lot of wounded. At one point they were running a 25% casualty rate.
One scene that stuck with me was the one in which the sergeant has to break the news that the platoon one valley over lost nine soldiers at once.
SJ: Chosen Company had a casualty rate -- killed and wounded -- of 80%. That wasn't Battle Company, and there are reasons for that. Ultimately it was a different experience.
TH: So there was an amazing amount of fighting going on, and we were immediately shocked by it. And suddenly we're with these guys, and we realize, wow -- this is incredible. This is an amazing story. I mean, nobody knew this was happening in Afghanistan. I mean, now they do, it's common knowledge.
Would you call this the most dangerous war zone of all you've covered?
TH: Every war zone has its own character, and it's very difficult to compare them. Covering the war in Liberia, there were moments of extreme danger. I lived with a rebel army, who were completely unpredictable, heavily armed and high on drugs. In Afghanistan, the Taliban who were going against the Americans were good. I mean they were good shots. I remember one time, we were coming down the side of a mountain, and we were targeted by a sniper. The first targeting rounds took off some leaves from a branch over our heads. And you realized that they're zeroing in their weapons. They're that good. They're firing their first shot, seeing where that lands, then they zero in on you. You realize that these are good fighters.
SJ: They were really good, and the soldiers knew it. And they talked about it. They were like, thank god we have Apaches, because these guys know what they're doing. I mean not all of them -- you had local kids who were paid a few dollars a day to shoot at the Americans and run back to their farm. There was that too. But the real guys who came into that valley to fight the Americans? I mean look -- they were assaulting fortified American positions and almost overrunning them.
There's that moment in the film where a soldier describes the Taliban being so bold as to literally come up to them and take their weapons from them.
SJ: That was in Operation Rock Avalanche [a deadly mission Battle Company undertakes in the film], but stepping outside of the movie for a moment, Chosen Company was almost overrun three different times. Twice at fortified positions with heavy weapons, and they almost overran the positions and killed everybody.
So I'm going to ask the obvious question that will be on the minds of the average moviegoer leaving Restrepo, and that is -- are you guys nuts?
[Both laugh]
I mean at what point do you say, I've done my duty, I've told the story of these guys, and I want to get out of here because people are being shot all around me? People who are better trained, probably, than you are, for this kind of combat. So what is going through your mind? What are you telling yourself that's keeping you there?
TH: We're storytellers, and we're also pretty good at telling stories at the extreme edges. That's what I do. I would love to tell a story about the rain forest in the Amazon, but the reality is that for the last ten years, that's not what I've been doing. And I've been interested in stories about young men and violence, and I've been interested in that idea. In 2003, I was embedded with a rebel army in West Africa, and in some ways, the men were not much different from the men I was embedded with in Afghanistan. The same kind of motivations. So doing this documentary was a continuation, I think, of what both Sebastian and I were both thinking and exploring about war. And if you've invested ten years of life into it or more, then you want to kind of make something, or reach a point where you've distilled something. And I really feel that Restrepo is a distillation of what I've learned about war, and what I've seen of war.
SJ: In the civil wars that I've covered in West Africa, you're on your own in a very volatile, chaotic and dangerous society. That's terrifying -- even low levels of danger in that kind of situation are terrifying. This was new. This was different. What made our work possible, and if fact I think what makes being a soldier in combat possible, is if you're in a situation with a group of men you know very well and that you care about, and you know they're going to look out for you -- if something happens to you, you know they're going to help you; if something happens to them, you know you're going to help them -- once you're in a situation like that, the level of danger can be extremely high, but your fear is greatly reduced. There's almost like a group anesthetic, and it allows people to function in situations of incredible danger, and in some cases, situations of almost guaranteed death. It allows them to function with an almost calmness and a purpose. That's not because these guys are insanely brave. The group bond helps you get through those situations. By the time it got hairy out there, I already felt connected to these guys. I though, whatever's going to happen will happen, but it's going to happen to all of us.
Did you find they quickly adopted you, or did that take a while?
TH: There's been a lot of discussion about the embed system, the ethics of it. The U.S. Military provides a system so that you're embedded, but it doesn't mean that you're emotionally embedded. What we sought to do, like any good documentary maker or storyteller, you want to become embedded in your subjects, and that takes time. Interestingly enough, while everybody thinks they know these stories, no one has ever followed a platoon of soldiers for an entire deployment.
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.
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.
I was winded by a revelation made by the young Latino soldier, the one who's always smiling.
Cortez. Cortez.
And somehow you associate smiling with being OK. And then he admits that he doesn't sleep, and that he doesn't want to sleep because the nightmares are too awful. It was just a very, very powerful moment for me, where you realize the extent of the masks these guys are wearing when they return to civilian life, and just how well they can camouflage profound psychological torment.
SJ: Absolutely. Those interviews gutted us.
TH: The Right Wing believes that young men join out of patriotism and a sense of duty, and the Left Wing wants to present them as joining up because of economic necessity, as if they have no other choices. And often the reality is a mixture of some of those things, but it's also that young men between the ages of 16 and 25 do things because they seek to prove themselves. Young men push themselves. A lot of men join the army to --
"Be all they can be."
TH: Yes, a right of passage to be all they can be. And the film in some ways represents that rite of passage, where they're enjoying it and living and developing that camaraderie. And the flip side of that rite of passage is the loss of innocence, and I think the interviews definitely demonstrate that.
How do you respond to critics who'd argue you can't make an apolitical war film?
SJ: There are 22 million American households who have had family members who have been or are currently serving in the military. And as you saw in the [post-combat] interviews, they opened up to us, but often soldiers don't open up to their families and tell them what goes on. And those 22 million households want to know what they go through. I think this film really can give them a lot of consolation. I mean it will upset them, but it will answer a lot of questions. And that was borne out when we first showed it to the soldiers in December. And their wives -- their wives were so moved, saying, "My husband never tells what happens out there."
Then you take the part of U.S. population not directly connected to servicemen, and for them the war is not a personal thing, it's a political thing. There's Right Wing people who are for it and Left Wing people who are against it, and what we wanted to do was to make a movie where people left their political opinions behind and they experience what the soldiers experience for 90 minutes. Because whether you agree or not with the war, our country is sending young men to fight in the Korengal Valley. Pro or con, we need to understand that experience and honor it.
TH: I'd like to add, because there was a lot of expectations about the film, and people thought the film would explain to them things about Afghanistan, that it seems as if they almost want it to fulfill their political expectations. For me, that's a lazy way of thinking. You have to do the work, do the research. This is part of the research. Honor those experiences of the men who are going out in the name of this country by trying to understand what they're going through, and then think it through. Come to your own opinions, rather than have us serve it to you on a plate.