In May of 2002, handsome football player Pat Tillman turned down the fame and fortune of the NFL to enlist in the Army and fight in Afghanistan. "We might want to keep an eye on him," then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wrote to a colleague, and indeed, when Tillman was killed almost two years later, the administration advanced the narrative that Tillman had been shot while bravely defending his troops from the Taliban.
Only, that's not what happened. Tillman had actually been killed by his own troops in a case of friendly fire, and the Army's cover-up was so outrageous (Tillman's body armor, uniform and vest were burned) and all-encompassing (as leaked memos from the highest levels of government would show), that Amir Bar-Lev's Sundance documentary The Tillman Story can't help but compel. Movieline spoke to Bar-Lev this week about the film's deleted moments, the influence of the Greatful Dead on his style, and his outrage that a key conspirator is an important part of President Obama's administration.
When did Pat Tillman first start to interest you as a subject?
I knew about Pat Tillman what everyone else did: just the barest sketches, and I got really intrigued. I got a little more intrigued when I started to realize that he had been lionized by pro-war, very patriotic elements, and I started to find out things about his personality that sounded like people I grew up with -- and I'm from Berkeley.
Like the fact that he wanted to have a meeting with Noam Chomsky?
Yeah, the Chomsky thing, and the way he was raised, and stuff like that. What really got me going, though, is when I realized that what I was doing to Pat Tillman was what the right was doing to Pat Tillman: admiring the hell out of him, and then trying to appropriate him and make him emblematic of one group or another. That was my intellectual journey with it, to realize that this guy's more complicated [than I'd thought] and that he challenges us to think outside the box. I think it's a natural human condition to put boxes around things, and I was doing that myself.
Do you think part of that is because he's such a potent example of American masculinity? He was a football player, after all, and he's so handsome and square-jawed that he's almost a caricature of an American man.
But he isn't. He's been made into a caricature, but there are sides of his personality that don't fit into that mold. One thing that I admire a ton about Pat Tillman is that he was a charismatic guy and always the center of attention who had almost a preternatural sense of when someone was being excluded. He was the kind of guy who would always widen out the circle of chairs to include whoever was being marginalized. These are things that aren't part of the jutting-chin American hero cartoon of Pat Tillman that are just as heroic, if not more heroic.
I could tell that you were trying to protect Pat's desire to never reveal the reason he enlisted. Were you curious?
Oh yeah, listen, I am very curious. We were faced with this challenge of making the movie, which is that he asked for privacy and his family respects that even after his death. I could have disrespected that and decided that it was more important for me to dish out the facts, or I could have not. At the same time, I wanted to dispel some of the caricatures about why he enlisted. It was a challenge, and I hope we've done it the right way. You know, people keep asking me about the Jon Krakauer book (Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, released in September 2009), and I wasn't given access to that until we had basically locked picture. When I got the book, before I read it beginning to end, I flipped through it as quickly as possible to get to the diary entry of why Pat Tillman enlisted. I'll just say that when you look at the diary entry, there's no mention of 9/11, there's no mention of patriotism, there's no mention of America -- none of the things that his decision is associated with are in that diary entry. I feel like we've treated it right in the film.
Since Pat cherished his privacy, did that make it difficult to coax his family and fellow military men to talk to you?
It was a problem that I think raised the bar for the film and actually helped it. The family has a very healthy sense of what's private and public at a time when nobody seems to have that sense anymore. I think film watchers and television watchers have been taught to expect that narrative will reach all the way into every private corner of every edifice of our existence. They want to see a person cry at the moment they find out Pat dies. They have this expectation...
But you must be used to that. Your last documentary, My Kid Could Paint That, didn't have any easy answers, either.
Right. Well, I don't think easy answers exist anywhere, except for in the mainstream media. You know what I mean? I think it's extremely frustrating for the family because they've basically lost Pat twice: once to death, and once to the people who turned him into a cartoon. And it's not the just the military and the government who did that, but also the media.
So was it easy to convince them that you wouldn't do the same?
No, it wasn't easy. That's a good question. Making the film was a process of making sure we weren't doing that, and we edited the film for a year, in part because of that. We didn't want to engage in that hagiography that has flattened Pat Tillman.
Did you have to cut moments or story threads that it hurt to lose?
I could talk your ear off. I mean, that's another reason we were editing for a year. I'll give you a perfect example -- and it's almost embarrassing that this isn't in the film -- but it didn't have a place. We were struggling as filmmakers with the idea that once Pat Tillman dies in the movie, you're ready for the movie to be over, basically. Because we chose this narrative structure that works like an onion, where you're presented with a hero myth that you keep peeling back, we get to the climax of the film where he dies. At that point, you want the film to be over, but it can't, because you have to go to Congress. In a way, you're back at the beginning. In order to get as quickly as we could to the end, we had to skip over some very important chapters in the story. [Tillman's parents] forced several investigations to take place -- you see three, and we kind of conflate them a little bit.
Which was the one in the film's climax, with Rep. Waxman ineffectually presiding?
That was, like, the seventh. The sixth was the one you see that was borne out of the "go f--k yourself" letter [sent by Tillman's father to the Army]. The third was the one that prompted the video you see [that investigates the area where Tillman was murdered], and that guy who went off to Afghanistan to film it was offered to the Tillmans to rectify the problems from their earlier investigations. In fact, Dannie Tillman presented John McCain with 30 questions that she wanted answered, so this guy went off for about a year to answer them. What's missing from the film is this horrible moment where they're going through the transcripts, and they realize that he's part of the conspiracy. It's, like, right out of a 70's movie like China Syndrome or something. You see him stopping the transcript and the investigation when things get too close to the truth, and then they take a 15-minute break and come back and the guy changes his story. It would have been amazing in the film, but emotionally, once Pat Tillman dies, you can't go there.
The pivotal, incriminating memo in the film is authored by General Stanley McChrystal, who has stayed on from the Bush administration and currently commands our forces in Afghanistan. How do you feel about that?
Listen, it's not a complicated answer. No one in the government has ever admitted that there was a cover-up, and to watch the contortions that these public figures go to in order to publicly flagellate themselves without admitting what's pretty obvious to everybody -- that they tried to cover up Pat Tillman's death -- is absurd. General McChrystal is just one of several high-ranking figures who's never been called to account for his role, and the story continues to this very moment. He gets up there at his swearing-in and basically says what has been said all along, which is, "I know what it looks like. I know that it looks like we deliberately covered it up, but believe us that it was this Rube Goldberg-esque chain of mistakes, blunders, and errors that look like a cover-up." The only f---ing idiots who buy that, the only fools who believe that, are the mainstream press. It's just so clear to everyone else, and it's the equivalent of saying, "Honey, I know that it looks like I'm f---ing your sister, but actually I dropped my wallet, and then my belt fell down, and she happened to be there." That's what the military has done in the Pat Tillman case.
Dannie says in the film that she's taken the story as far as she can go, but as a documentarian, you can take it even further. Do you ever feel like the roles of documentarian and advocate are at odds with one another?
Sometimes, but not all the time. I have no problem with advocacy movies or movies that are very obvious about their message. It's not the kind of movie that I would want to make, but I would never begrudge a filmmaker from wanting to do that. I'm a huge fan of Michael Moore's films, and I think there's a place for both kinds of movies. I named my production company Axis Films because I like that duality, that riding a fine line between two opposing viewpoints. Michael Moore came up to us after the film and said he loved it, and I was hugely honored by that, and then a couple hours later, a guy came up to me and introduced himself: "I'm an American exceptionalist, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, I'm pro-military and pro-war, and I loved your film." This is a matter of a few hours, that two people with opposing viewpoints saw their viewpoint in the film. That's the kind of movie I like to make -- not that I don't have a viewpoint, but...
I think people are just sometimes skeptical that documentary filmmakers approach their subject with an agenda already in place. Did the movie you made turn out differently than the one you thought you would make?
I think that if the film you come up with is the one you set out to make, then you've made a very s---ty film. I've made three films, and each time, they turn out very different than I thought. Making a documentary film is putting yourself in a position where you're improvising, and as I learned from being a Deadhead from one of the greatest musical improvisers in all of rock-and-roll history, is that it isn't just "whatever the f--k happen, happens," but you go into it with an idea and you're ready to bounce off of what comes out of your probe.
So you're a "jam band" director.
I learned a lot of my filmmaking by aspiring to the level of Jerry Garcia's music. [Laughs]