Moment of Truth: Spend Some Quality Time With Osama bin Laden's Bodyguard

Without spoiling too much, he's shown in the film asking you to "delete" a potentially damaging comment. Yet you didn't. Did you contemplate it?

Of course I did, and we talked about it quite a bit. It's a need-to-know as a filmmaker. As a journalist, you can't not ask the question that I asked. And I feel like he's pretty media-savvy. He's very brilliant, and I think he's fully capable of giving consent. He was very clear that he was answering the question from his own perspective and not from within al-Qaeda. He distanced himself from it, and I think that is very clear in his response to the question.

The Oath won a cinematography award this year at Sundance. What was your approach to making a "cinematic" documentary?

We did want to make it cinematic -- it's a story. We really wanted a novelistic quality of the storytelling and these reveals and reversals and mysteries. It was very intentional.

I've read you were also influenced by Don DeLillo.

I had read Underworld twice. There's some kind of a dialectical relationship between primary documents and crafting a story that I love in his work. I think we felt the same way about this. There are some really pivotal primary documents that locate the protagonist in history -- and the history of 9/11. We wanted those to really resonate. I mean, we've all seen archival footage of bin Laden and the camps, but they sort of bounce off of you. We wanted to embed these primary documents within a story so they have greater weight and meaning and significance. For instance, Salim Hamdan is driving, and you hear his voice. It's pretty mind-boggling: This is someplace in Afghanistan; there's a Western journalist in a car who's blindfolded; and there's a conversation unfolding in Arabic, and it's Salim Hamdan. It's pretty extraordinary.

Whether its Flag Wars or The Oath, the durations of your shoots often last for years. Is that just a byproduct of the specific stories you're telling, or is that time you prefer to take to tell a story?

I think if you look at most documentaries -- with the exception of Alex Gibney's, who seems to make films faster than everybody else, and whose work I have great respect for -- it takes most of us more than year to make a movie. Tw
o years, you're at a pretty good clip. My Country, My Country I did in a year and a half; this one I did in two years. That's a relatively fast turnaround given the fact that stories take time to unfold, and most feature-length documentaries are edited for six months at least -- if not a year or longer. So it kind of goes with the territory to take this much time.

And I do think that in the dwindling absence of investigative journalism, it's great to have this work out there. I mean, I think Alex's film [Casino Jack and the United States of Money] is extraordinary. We know about Abramoff, but seeing it condensed -- this blatant corruption and criminal activity that's happening in Washington? You see it took the investigative journalist to point this out and create the outcry. As those resources for investigative journalism are dwindling, I think that documentary filmmakers are coming in and taking up some of the slack. We hear these sorts of reports about it, but when something is consolidated into a narrative drama, I think our relationship to the information reaches us on a more emotional level. I think sometimes that's necessary to create a public outcry.

After My Country, My Country and The Oath, you have one more film remaining in a planned trilogy about the aftermath of 9/11. What will that be?

The next part of the trilogy I want to shoot in the U.S. I'm still doing some research into what the focus will be. I've expressed interest in the 9/11 trials, which are happening in federal court on U.S. soil. I think that's an important historical moment. Again, I think an important part of this work is creating primary documents -- rather than focusing on the ideological debate around these issues, to actually create primary documents and see how things are playing out on the ground and how people are actually living through these times in a direct way. So I'm interested in the 9/11 trials, I'm interested in domestic surveillance and various other themes. But I'm not sure yet.

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