The war in Afghanistan has become highly politicised, but soldiers rarely take part in that discussion. Our intention was to capture the experience of combat, boredom and fear through the eyes of the soldiers themselves. Their lives were our lives: we did not sit down with their families, we did not interview Afghans, we did not explore geopolitical debates.
Soldiers are living and fighting and dying at remote outposts in Afghanistan in conditions that few Americans back home can imagine. Their experiences are important to understand, regardless of one’s political beliefs.
Beliefs are a way to avoid looking at reality.
This is reality.
-Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger
On Friday 8th October Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger’s directorial debut Restrepo opens in the UK*. You may view the official site for the film here. This exceptional slice of cinéma vérité was assembled from the 160+ hours of footage the two shot while on assignment for Vanity Fair Magazine and ABC News deep in Afghanistan’s rugged Korengal Valley. They dug in beside the soldiers of Second Platoon as they manned a strategic outpost at the tip of the spear of the American war effort and filmed at their shoulders as they lived and died to defend the precarious position. The pair returned to the unit’s Italian base three months after the deployment and reunited with the soldiers as they came to terms with the aftermath of their time in the deadliest place on Earth. The haunting interviews they captured came to act as narration and punctuation for the film.
*For the opportunity to host your own regional premiere of Restrepo you can visit Dogwoof’s innovative Ambassador’s Programme Website
Restrepo is one of the most thought-provoking and important pieces of cinema I have seen in recent memory, HeyUGuys were privileged to sit down with one of the film’s directors – award winning photojournalist Tim Hetherington – to learn more:
HUG: Tim can we start by talking about your first impressions of the Korengal. At the height of the conflict it was described as the deadliest place on earth, when you were first flown in to the Korengal what was your reaction?
T.H: I didn’t really know a lot about it, I hadn’t…we arrived there in 2007, the world was very focused on the war in Iraq. I kind of thought I was just going off to do an assignment there you know, I thought I’d be wandering around the mountains drinking cups of tea with village elders. Occasionally being shot at – not really that exciting or interesting or compelling or whatever it is. When you arrive first thing there, first of all it’s really mountainous, it’s not really the desert land or the flat lands, canal lands of Helmand Province. It’s not Opium up there – it is timber that is the cash crop so the place when you arrive is very beautiful. There are huge pine trees on the upper reaches of the mountaintops.
You first kind of realise something is not right when we were just coming in on the helicopter. We got off the helicopter and they were using red smoke – which is because you can’t hear when you’re being shot at with the blades so they use red smoke on the landing zone if you’re being shot at. So as soon as we arrived we were like, “Whoa, what’s happening here”. It was a kind of trend that continued, right up to the end when I left in August 2008, they were mortaring the base when we were leaving. So that was how it was and it was obvious to us when we arrived in Afghanistan that the war was slipping out of control. Something people back home hadn’t really grasped. And I think that that was one of the reasons why the access was given us, because the military in Afghanistan was feeling unloved, as it were, by the Department of Defence that was giving all the man power and money to the war in Iraq.
That kind of immersive experience – the one you guys had – is very much reflected in the film. It’s an incredibly intense experience to watch. As we’ve said it’s not out here in the UK until Friday but it has already been released in America. I wonder if you can talk a little about the reactions you’ve had and if anything has taken you by surprise in the way that people have received it?
You know we wanted to make the most immersive and experiential war film we could. We wanted to take you the viewer on a 90 minute deployment. We designed and edited and made the film so that would be the case. The film came out on 25th June in the States and is still playing on 28 screens – that’s now, in October – so it’s been really well received in America. It’s done very well at the box office and for a documentary war film that’s very unusual. And I think people react really well to it because I think it’s a very honest film. I don’t think it’s a cleverly crafted political thesis – it just takes you and shows you things you haven’t really seen before. That’s at the heart of it really. I think people are curious about – we want to be connected to events out there – we find it difficult to be connected because we don’t really trust what we receive in the media nowadays.
You know we have two to three minute network news pieces that don’t really tell us a lot about the war. We have political op-ed opinions, opinion pieces that we’re kind of suspicious of. What we did, we didn’t let our political judgement cloud your experience of things, we just kind of put you in there and you’re left to make what you want of it.
That leads us nicely on to our next question. You and Sebastian were quoted as saying that “Beliefs are a way to avoid looking at reality. This is reality.” I wonder if you can speak to how that sentiment applies to the film…
Yeah, one of the things I’ve noticed in negative critique of the film is that often it says more about the person making the critique than it does about the film! The far left want you to make a moral condemnation of the war – they feel if you don’t do that then you’re a coward. And the far right they feel that if you question the basis for war, if you discuss it, that you’re somehow not supporting the troops or being unpatriotic. They feel, especially on the left, the film upsets them because they are made to feel empathy for the soldiers and it’s easier for them to dehumanise soldiers than it is to actually make them three-dimensional individuals who you can actually get on with. And that’s a harder reality to deal with and think about the fact that they are also instruments of society for killing.
So they come out of the film and they don’t like what they see and they say it’s nothing interesting or new whereas the majority of people come out of the film and say I’ve never seen anything like that before. That shows you that they already go in with a preformed of what they expect.
Only to be confronted by these multi-faceted people…
Yeah and it makes them angry. It’s funny you know the things I’ve seen written about both the film and my work, my photographic work. I have a book coming out – Infidel – and the negative opinions of that are because you challenge people and they don’t like it.
How about for you, for you guys, you made a total of ten trips to the Korengal…
Ten trips, yeah five each…
And you literally dug in…
Yeah we stayed in this tiny outpost, the outpost Restrepo was on…
So you were with Second Platoon in the outpost – I wonder if you can talk about the physical and emotional demands of filmmaking under those circumstances?
It was very tough filming in that situation, I mean when we got to Restrepo it was literally just sandbagged in placement. There was no running water and there was no electricity, so you didn’t have the power to charge up your batteries. They were under attack nearly every day. I remember once I was there in September and it was like four times in a day – although the record would’ve been fourteen times when they first tried to build it. So it was a pretty extreme situation to be in. You went on patrols nearly every day and every time you went outside the wire you knew there was a good chance you would get attacked. Filmmaking was difficult: you had to carry all your kit, there was no time to stop and set up a tripod, it was all hand-held and you had to be fit. I mean the fighting was at elevations, you’re up in the mountains two and a half thousand metres or whatever it is, it was difficult.
We both sustained injuries – Sebastian tore his Achilles’ tendon, I broke my fibula.
How about the men, how you were received by Second Platoon themselves? Obviously Restrepo is named for their medic…
Yeah, after Juan Restrepo
So they’d had a real emotional crisis, on top of the general impact of being there, then you and Sebastian had to come among them as relative strangers…
Well Sebastian first went in, in May 2007, when Doc – when Juan – was still alive. And then he got shot a few weeks after Sebastian had been there. And when we were there we were also in situations where those traumatic things happened and part of why they opened up to us is we were able to go and be among them in these traumatic situations.
At what point did you feel that shift, that acceptance, that they realised you were going to be literally side-by-side with them?
After Operation Rock Avalanche which happened in October 2007. I filmed that and that’s when I broke my leg and I had to walk out of there, I walked out and down the side of a mountain on a broken leg. They had seen that I had been around filming them when the lines were overrun, that I didn’t want to put any of them at risk that’s why I walked out on that leg, that broken leg. That’s when they kind of realised that we were going to do everything they did. For me that was the real…you know the events of that operation just in the film were pretty traumatic to watch, but to be in it was a pretty traumatic time. After that we had a different relationship.
The cameras stay only with the men, there’s no respite, no cutaway to family, no talking heads…
Well we wanted to take you on a 90 minute deployment – we wanted to bring you in the valley. And anything that would break the illusion of the valley was not in the film. So we didn’t go into their families because then you the viewer realise hold on, I’m being told a slightly different kind of story, I’m no longer with them in the valley. So we didn’t talk to Generals, we didn’t talk to politicians – we didn’t give you any big picture. The idea was you just feel like you’re with them and so we didn’t want you know Morgan Freeman narrating the story of the Korengal Valley.
That’s why we used their own voices. We did the interviews in Italy where they’re based…
There is an incredible poignancy in them speaking about those experiences just a few months later…
Well we did that…first of all we’d shot about 160 hours in Afghanistan and then we tried to tie it together so we didn’t initially do the interviews in Italy as a narration. We thought that’s how you stay in the reality of the valley – to have them talk about their experiences. What happened is we turned up in Italy three months after they had come home and you know we weren’t the company shrink, we weren’t military authority figures, we weren’t their family we were… We were friends, we were people who had been through these experiences with them and could pinpoint certain experiences…
And had borne witness…
They opened up to us in a way that was kind of remarkable and those interviews are some of the strongest material in the film.
Absolutely, at points in the film you get really caught up in the action, it’s only when you come back to the stillness of afterwards that those things really hit home.
Yeah right, absolutely.
In closing we wanted to ask about the effect filming has had on you since? Obviously your work has taken you behind many battle lines but, as concerns your experiences on Restrepo, how have things been since within your career and more personally…
Oh making the film has been an incredible experience, has been a great privilege. It’s great because the film has also been part of the conversation in America and that’s an amazing thing. It’s gratifying to the soldiers to see their experience in it – that it’s honest and true to their experiences. The film…it’s now three years since we started filming, they’re big projects, they’re very draining to do – you’re constantly on this subject. But it’s good – I mean I can’t complain – at the same time, it’s good that it’s being talked about, it’s better than it not being out there, it not being in theatres, it’s a great thing.
I mean the film has been draining emotionally obviously as you’d expect an experience like that does drain you. And then to come home and to have to navigate all the film business and to have to fund it ourselves – when I was in the States I was broke basically – I put all my savings, I put everything into it. It’s great at a time when some people suggested that it had no commercial possibilities that it has had success commercially. Not that I’m interested, not that it’s about, or will make a lot of money – I’d make more money if I was a fashion photographer! But it means that you’ve had a lot of people seeing it and responding to it and that’s been great.
Well let’s hope it has the success here that it saw in America…
Yeah it will be interesting to see how it plays out here.
We wish you the best of luck with the Friday opening. We enjoyed the film very much.
Thanks. Thank you.
Restrepo opens in the UK on Friday 8th October
