Tim Hetherington, Sebastian Junger on “Restrepo”

MakingOf:The buzz words around this movie is it’s “Raw;” people don’t elaborate, they say “Raw.” What brings you guys to a project like this?

(Tim Hetherington): I think many years of war reporting. Sebast and I have covered a lot of combat, a lot of conflict, and in some ways this film is the distillation of what we know about conflict and it brings together an algorithm of all those experiences. You know for many years, you know I was covering wars in West Africa or in Asia and I was always really interested in young men in conflict. You know, what happens to young men that experience.  And eventually after 10 years of covering war I hope that this film is the most honest film that I’ve made or that we’ve made. I think it’s definitely the most visceral war films I know of.  And I think it’s because of its non-political nature, it doesn’t seek to give you an easy political explanation or to tow some party line; it just says you know, here’s the experience and we think that that experience, the young men go through in Afghanistan and Iraq needs to be digested and experienced and understood and honored that’s it.

(MO): You have graphic footage; you now have relationships that you’ve developed with this platoon, and your now you know heavily experiencing this chaos and tragedy. Where were the dark moments for you looking at “what am I doing here?” Or did you have those moments?

(TH): No, I think that for sure I had those moments; I think that as a war reporter you do have those moments. I call them, I joke to Sebastian, my term for those “The terrible sense of impending doom.” That’s the moment when not only are you in combat and you know people are getting killed and you’re in a pretty bad scene. But that the moment where you’ve gone so far beyond where you thought you could go, that you’re literally sitting there like “This is it, I’m going to die and, and my mums going to be so upset. Like I’m really going to disappoint everybody. I’m going to hurt everybody.” And you’re kind of reckoning those situations. And you know I mentioned to you about when I broke my leg, I mean it didn’t just end. We got to a village and we’re waiting to get attacked by the Taliban two days earlier they overran American lines, shot a guy point blank range, killed, injured two others and took weapons. And so I’m sitting there with a broken leg and on the radio they’re getting communications that the Taliban is coming to attack, and I’m sitting behind a rock with a broken leg, high on medication, just thinking like “This is a bad scene. I’m in a really really bad scene, and if they’re trying to overrun us then I’m dead.” And that makes you afraid and so there are and I’m sure Sebastian, you had your own doubt moments too you know, but yeah.

(Sebastian Junger): Yeah, you know there was a time in September; it was our first trip together, my second trip. There had been a lot of fighting at Restrepo, I think we had been in 4 fire fights that day, and then there was intelligence that came into the, single intelligence, that picked up, that the Taliban were saying on their radios that their was 20 hand grenades in the Valley and 2 suicide vest, and everyone at Restrepo was like “Those are for us. And they’re going to try and breach the wire and they’re going to try and overrun this position” because there weren’t that many guys there, there were about fifteen guys and me and Tim. And it was dusk and the mood turned very dark and grim and I was just like “Whoa, what are we doing here?” But that experience is part of how we incorporated the story into ourselves and it became apart of how we made the film and if you don’t shed some tears over something, it’s not important to you. If you don’t get scared, it’s not important to you. You know it became part of the movie; our feelings became part of the movie in a very important way.

(TH): You know with all good stories and we all know this, is there comes a point where emotionally the best ones are where you just give in; you’ve just let yourself go into it. And you know, I think definitely in all the stories I’ve done, all the war reporting I’ve done, I’ve gotten to a point where I’ve lost it, where I’ve given in. It’s like that’s when I’m making the most powerful form of communication. Which begs the question “how long can you do it for?” And I have to say that you know having been through the grinder on various long-term documentary projects I’ve come to a point where I’m exhausted; I mean emotionally exhausted. I mean my body has been battered to pieces, but emotionally it really it takes a lot of time to regroup. And to have people say “What are you going to work on next” well, it’s like “I have no idea.”

(TH): I think that the importance of this film and it’s something we’ve just come to realize in Sundance more fully I guess, is that there are twenty-two million people in America who are currently serving or have served in the military and that those people don’t come out of the war and go back to their loved ones and tell them what happened. And so there’s basically maybe fifty-sixty million people connected to those people in America that want to know what it’s like. They don’t want to know like the politics of it because they can read the paper for that. They want to know what it feels like; what their husbands or their brothers or their loved ones go through. And that in making a film that seeks to be non-political, to be visceral, to take you into the experience, not just to tell to a story with talking heads, but to really take you into that experience, that we’ve created something that is extremely powerful and is applicable to a huge sector to this society. And that I think is something really remarkable and is something we are just starting to understand the distributor is just starting to understand.

(SJ): As journalist our job, it feels like our highest calling is trying to represent reality in a faithful way, and reality can be used politically and should be used politically, but we got to a point in the making this film where we realized that we could do something radically different because we were refusing to point it into a political context, and when we understood that it answered any question, every filmmaking question we had, “Should we have the families in this movie?” And Tim was like “They can’t talk to their families, so we can’t to their families. Should we interview a General to understand why were in a Korengal Valley? They can’t, so we couldn’t.” So, once we figured that out, it answered every single question we had. And even for an outside narration, we don’t want to break the dream that you’re in the Korengal Valley for ninety minutes, so even if you have Sidney Poitier narrating, he’s great, but he wasn’t in the Korengal Valley. So, we did these interviews in Italy at their base, three or four months later initially so that we would have a voiceover that was their voices. In the end it became its own kind of powerful experience. But that guiding principle really like clarified literally every ambiguous point, filmmaking point for us.

(TH): It’s funny also because people said “Well, there’s no, where’s the political, where’s the context, there is no political context.” And we said yeah, but look how much human context there is. You know news reports show firefights but theirs no context of human emotional context of firefights of what those guys are feeling. I feel our film is full of context, but it’s just full of human context it’s not full of political context. You see what the guys are feeling when they are bored when they’re happy. You hear them talking about their loved ones. And then when you see them in a firefight, then you’re going to understand that’s the context to that action and I think that is also pretty unique you know.

MO:  Was there a common trait among the men in terms of changes of emotions from the beginning of their tour to the ending of their tour? And then what was those changes?

(SJ): One thing that happened was that the rules got dropped more and more and by the end it was kind of Lord of the Flies.  I mean they were fighting you know, literally fighting bare-chested with cigarettes, smoking cigarettes on, you know in firefights, shooting heavy weapons out of the gun ports. You know they killed a cow and ate it, and that didn’t go over so well. It got pretty funky out there and you know there were times when you look around you and you weren’t even sure you were looking at American Soldiers. They beat their Lieutenant as an initiation right. When he took command in January of 2008, he took command he replaced another Lieutenant and they had this initiation right in the Platoon for anyone who’s new coming into the Platoon any Private anyone who was replacing a casualty you got beaten. And when you left the Platoon, if you went on leave you got beaten, and you get beaten when you came back. And the Lieutenant came up, this is a West Point Grad, the Lieutenant came up took command and they came up grabbed him held him down and beat him. It’s pretty wild.

(TH): It was kind of funny because they would, the guys would be in Restrepo, and even going out into the Korengal outpost on the Valley floor for them was like a culture change a culture shock. The whole Valley was kind of funky in that way and then, but it was funny when the guys would tell stories of them going out of the Korengal outpost after a short helicopter trip they’re back at Bagram Air Base where there’s 5,000 soldiers posted who basically never got inside the wire never seen any fighting. Occasionally once a month a mortar dropped somewhere and the closest they got to fighting and some of these guys come out and they’re not wearing regulation boots, they have their own badges made up with their own saying, you know instead of ISAF, you know International Segway Force for Afghanistan, their badges say PTSD, you know for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. And they come out of Bagram and they get shouted at for being so looking like out of the wild.

MO: All of that footage, how do you even begin to start organizing that footage in some sort of order for how you’re going to create the film?

(SJ): Some of the trips we were apart and some we were together, but we talked a lot about the content. We talked a lot about the material we were gathering and even before we finished shooting, we were having conversations about how we’re going to structure the film. And just on the practical matter we hired an amazing team. We hired Michael Levin as an editor, and Maya Mumma and an Associate Editor. And Maya started logging the tape and we roughly had the idea, I mean we experimented with other things but basically this is the portrait of a deployment; this a Platoon in a deployment. And we a had rough chronological sequence, I mean from you know they arrive, guys get killed, a year later, 15-14 months later they leave. And that was sort of the paradigm for us. What was difficult was choosing what in that chronology, what moments to emphasize and dwell on and what moments that maybe didn’t need as much attention. And that we just felt our way through. Tim and have, I think this pretty instinctive feel for a narrative arc and you know it was pretty clear when the movie was working and when it wasn’t and that was part of our guiding principle.

MO: Were you able to separate yourself as a filmmaker during the experience, or were you so entrenched in what was going on that you almost felt as if you were a soldier?

(SJ): I mean I never, I shot about an hour of video in my life, I’m not a filmmaker. Maybe I am now, but I certainly wasn’t when I was making the film. So, I wasn’t thinking like a filmmaker out there. I mean Tim had to explain to me what a “cutaway” was you know about halfway through, so no I wasn’t thinking about light. I just knew that if it was, you know if there was a lot of light in front of me and there was a lot of light in the background, then the guy would be a silhouette, I figured that out so. It was really very instinctive storytelling in terms of how I shot stuff. Tim is a different matter I think.

(TH): Yeah, I mean I cut, I’m a photographer by trade, you know and it’s interesting somebody was saying that they expected me because I was a photographer by trade that you bring a photographic sensibility to the framing and somebody said that they thought they couldn’t see the film anymore, it had this very formalistic photographic sense, which it doesn’t. I think there are some images of great beauty; I think there are a lot of images of just rawness and utility because that’s what it’s about. It’s not about having the most beautiful pictures. So, definitely I think I bring to it that sense. But  I think in terms of documentary photojournalist, what I think the quality you bring to that isn’t necessarily this formalistic commercial type framing. What you bring into it is an emotional closeness to your subject matter. I mean in both our works, what we’re really good at is were good at  meeting people and breaking down those barriers so that we could get close to them record them and be with them and  I think that that’s really what the film has.

MO: And could you talk a little bit about what types of cameras you used to shoot on and was it just one camera a lot of the time?

(TH): We, when we first arrived in the Korengal we weren’t even sure that we were even going to make a film. Sebastian was there for the first time in June and I then I went with him in September, it wasn’t really apparent that we were going to shoot a documentary. It was quite haphazard the first time here with a small camera, then we took a V-1 the second time and we had a small 3-chip and a V-1 and then it got to a stage because we were shooting in NTSC SD and we were like for TV purposes, and then we started to get this footage and we were like “Holy cow, like this is incredible kind of access and combat footage” and we were like and I turned around to Sebastian and “We got to shoot this in HD what the hell are we doing?” And so we got ourselves a Zed-1 and we picked the Zed-1 because frankly you could smash it up and then say “Well, it’s not going t break my bank balance to get another one.” We couldn’t shoot on P2 cards because we couldn’t get the battery power because we couldn’t get the computers and stuff to be able download and deal with that kind of like complexity. We needed to shoot on tape. So we shot on Zed-1’s you know and we shot the rest of it on 1080i and there’s one bit which we actually haven’t mentioned in interviews before which is we actually lost 16 hours of tape. It was on one of the last trips I was coming off the back of a Chinook helicopter down in the Korengal it was a day when the outpost of what not ten kilometers away came to be overrun in which nine guys died and I was coming to resupply ammunition helicopter and I get back of the helicopter and theirs hydraulic fuel and I slipped bad on my leg and I had been operated on in Bagram, and I got back up and walking and slipped and twisted my ankle really badly and the camera had been in my hand I didn’t have it clipped on to my vest and it smacked and hit the ground. I started filming and normally I don’t play back my tapes but I played back the first tape to see if there’s any damage to the tape and I’ve played it back and it’s absolutely fine, but what had happened was the tape had moved slightly so when I gotten back to New York after shooting 26-27 hours, 16 hours of those were dead. Basically tapes 3,4,5, rubbish then 5, 6, 7 would be ok, 7, 8, 9, would be dead and you know the end of those 26-27 hours were such a treasure trove of material. You know we had the flares going, it was all the leaving, and it was by the skin of our teeth that we managed to pull out the footage the right footage happened to turn out having the flare or leaving Restrepo that was there, I mean we were so close to the end to having all that lost.