Movieline Interview Flashback: Restrepo Directors Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington

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.

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