The search for humanity
Jason Wood: There are similarities between Battle For Haditha and Ghosts in that they are both compelling human dramas based on real events. What drew you to the material and what do you hope your film will reveal about humanity at war?
Nick Broomfield: I think the starting point was there were no winners, only losers and victims. This isn't just the Iraq war but any war where the ability to talk and resolve things in a personable manner disappears. The language of war is precisely this, and this is a film about the language of war. This is what happens in any war; the way in which things spiral, and consequences follow and paranoia increases, and this is the kind of behaviour you have to expect. It is about that, and it is about that by going into the details of this specific occasion very thoroughly so an audience is taken through how it spirals into an out-of-control state, which then leads on to a set of worse scenarios.
JW: I know you always research thoroughly. Was the process particularly lengthy this time?
NB: We continued to research up to and including the shoot. So it was spread over about a period of nine months. There was a very intensive period when we went down to San Diego and met with three marines who had been there on the day and got a sense of who they really were. They all joined at 17, they were mainly Spanish, young kids, extremely traumatised. We spent long enough with them to get to know them beyond being shocked by the things they said. We then flew into Aman and met with survivors of the massacre. We met with insurgents who were involved with Haditha and we spent about a week with them in a hotel. We then went back to America and met with the journalists who had been involved from Time magazine and The Washington Post. After speaking with all the key players we started to get government reports and witness statements. From these detailed sources of knowledge we started to construct the stories and tried to get a sense of how we could tell the story as sympathetically as possible to represent all sides and all points of view. That was the main thing - to try to understand the event from the three different points of view in a very human and compassionate way.
JW: At one stage you intended to cast the marines who were the veterans at Haditha. How did the casting process pan out? As with Ghosts, you ended up casting people with similar backgrounds and experiences mirroring those in the film.
NB: The marines, when you first meet them, have a shocking sense of humour which is their way of coping with what they have seen and done. It is a very distressing and vulgar humour and is very off-putting. But you have to get beyond that and get to know them. It is a bit like people who work in a casualty ward - they have seen too many bodies. Their way of surviving it is by having a horrendous sense of humour and you have to get through that to find their humanity and understand them, to see where they are coming from and to find out why they are all so fucked up and on tranquilizers. They were just too damaged to make the film with. We did cast real ex-marines in the parts, though, so they could bring their experiences and sensibilities to it. I wanted to touch on their vulnerabilities and their misgivings about what they have done. I felt that this was the way an audience would identify and sympathise with them.
JW: I think the vulnerabilities are clear, especially in the performance of Eliot Ruiz. Is he someone you came across through the marines, and how did you harness his background?
NB: With Eliot, as with other non-actors, you cast them because they are who they are. You don't cast them to be characters because that's when it all falls apart. It's not like they go off and act. They go off and use their experiences of who they are directly in their parts. We used the same process with the Iraqis as well. They were Iraqi families who were all refugees from the conflict. The main family were a family of 12, several of whom had lost brothers and sisters. They had never acted before but they had the experience and the passion to be able to easily do their particular parts.
JW: One of the Iraqis, Shukrieh Hameed, saw her own son shot dead. It must have been a tense and difficult atmosphere on set because you are dealing with people who are unleashing such powerful memories. How did you help them with that?
NB: It was tense but there was also an enormous humour - the way people survive these things by being very funny. Experiencing such intense and tragic things informs people, makes them much bigger. They get an incredible perspective on life and their reactions are much more sophisticated. They have to think more about life and think more about what is important to them and it won't be what their next car is and so forth. They are kind in a way that most people are not. It makes it much more of an incredible experience and it is rather wonderful to be with these people.
JW: My familiarity with your work means that I am always looking for parallels. One of the things that strikes me is that you always choose difficult situations in which to shoot: Tattooed Tears, Soldier Girls and Ghosts being just three examples. Filming Battle For Haditha in Jordan must have presented challenges.
NB: It is a very traditional and conservative culture. We had technical problems, but it was more the adjusting to a strict Muslim culture that didn't allow for women and family members to be filmed. The people all invite you in for tea, which you have in their front rooms in a formal way. They talk with you for about an hour and then say they don't want to be in your film, in the nicest way. Then you have to go and involve all the officials and the governor and then people still say no. But they will know more about the film and they may rent you their houses, but then you still have to find people to go in the houses. It is a massive undertaking.
JW: The recreating of the military situations must have been difficult. Not just the getting permission but setting them up.
NB: That was the bit I enjoyed most. I hadn't done any action film-making before and I enjoyed working with David Harris who is the action guy. I learnt a lot from him: how people fall down when they get shot, how to set the shots up, how to keep a lot of movement in the camera, how to make things as real as possible. Just to keep that documentary feel, the feeling that you are there. Often action is shot in such a way it is very cut, and I think action is much more threatening when it isn't cut because the human eye sees it as being real, when the camera is moving around and it is not cutting to make a point. It is much more powerful when you see action shot in a very naturalistic way.
JW: Your "fiction" work is an obvious search for authenticity. How do you respond to the terms people are using to describe this form of film-making? Docu-drama and cinema vérité are both descriptions that are bandied about.
NB: When searching for terms to try and explain what we are saying I think cinema vérité is a confusing and pretentious term, I would say it is much more something like "real cinema". You are making things as real as you can. You are using real people, real locations, using real available light, using real time as much as you can - long shots with few cuts. But at the same time you are structuring it with a narrative. I think "real cinema" rather than a drama documentary or docu-drama is the correct term. It is very cinematic, very visual and dramatic; the reality of it heightens the drama. I think it is the cinema of the future. I think "real cinema" is a good term. I think cinema vérité belongs more to a documentary form and people such as Jean Rouch.
JW: I watched you go through the experience of making Ghosts. It was something you obviously very much wanted to succeed, the move into "real cinema". How much confidence did it give you to go on and make Battle for Haditha, which is on a broader scale?
NB: It gave me a lot of confidence. I found that the technique worked. Ghosts was a film all about people saying you can't do it. You can't use Chinese from the mainland, you can't use Mandarin speakers speaking Chinese, You won't get any illegal immigrants in the film, they are all frightened of you, you can't use HD, you can't make it with such a small crew. Everyone wanted to make it with a small feature film crew, rather than make a feature with a documentary size crew.
The only group who were working in the way we wanted to work were Andrew Eaton and Michael Winterbottom, so they were very helpful. What happened on Ghosts was that the people who didn't love working that way just left, which was painful. There was conflict because some people wanted to work how we were working and others didn't. By the time we got to Battle For Haditha we had a team who wanted to work this way.