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HBO: How did you come to make the film?
James Longley: In 2002 I had just come back from making a
film in the Gaza Strip, and somebody asked
me at the premiere screening of that film what
I was going to do next. And it was already
obvious to me the direction the Bush
administration was moving at that time that I
decided the place I needed to be was Iraq
because Iraq was about to be invaded by the
US and I wanted to be able to record that, and
be a witness to whatever took place.
I went to Iraq a couple times in 2002 before
the war, and was unsuccessful in obtaining
the kind of permissions that would allow me
to do the kind of film I wanted to make, which
would just be about ordinary people.
HBO: What was it like to cross the border after the
2003 invasion?
James Longley: Well, it was actually more difficult to leave
Jordan than it was to enter Iraq at that time.
On the Iraqi side the government had already
fallen so the Iraqi border was no longer really
a border in the way that it had been. During
Saddam's regime they would search
everything you had and ask you all kinds of
questions and it'd be a whole long process of
filling out forms. Whereas after the war, there
was just a US soldier, like some eighteen year
old kid with an M-16 rifle sitting in the shade
waving people through with his little finger;
there really wasn't any kind of passport
control or anything. They weren't set up to do
it. These things require a bureaucracy and
there wasn't one.
HBO: How did you gain the level of access and
intimacy you had with your subjects?
James Longley: The most important thing is the element of
having enough time to spend with the people
you're filming, and knowing from the
beginning that you're going to spend a lot of
time with them, and that you don't have to
rush to get your material. You can relax, sit
back, and have lunch with people, have tea
with them, get to know them at a very
leisurely pace and explain to them what you're
doing and clear up any questions and
concerns that they might have with your
project as you go along.
And not only give yourself enough time to do
the groundwork with the people that you're
filming, but also to get to know all of the
people around those people. So for example
in the shop in Baghdad where I filmed the
eleven year old Muhammad and his boss, I
knew not only them, but a lot of other people
in their community. And they feel comfortable
then.
And when you're filming a person over a year
and a half or two years, it gives you enough
time to really become invisible, so to speak,
because it's not possible for people to
concentrate on the fact that you're filming
them twenty-four/seven. And once you give
them enough time and enough space to get
used to your camera, then you can start
getting that kind of material where the camera
is six inches away from the kid's face and he's
not paying any attention to you. And he's not
pretending not to pay attention, he's really not
paying attention.
HBO: At one point, it seemed like you were right in
the middle of the action with bullets firing and
people dropping around you. Can you talk a
little bit about what that was like?
James Longley: At the time that I filmed that scene, I had
already been filming for six months, and so
everybody who was on that raid knew who I
was, and knew that I was making a film and
while I had never filmed anything like that
with them before, they knew that the
authority figures had signed off on it, so they
weren't going to stand in my way. And having
that kind of familiarity just meant that not
only could I show up at the office and ask
permission to go on that excursion with them
and they would say yes, but also that nothing
was going to happen to me from their side
during the raid unless they accidentally shot
me or something.
So from my point of view as a filmmaker it
actually wasn't as dangerous to do as it
appears. Now it was dangerous and there
were a lot of things that could have happened.
It could have gone sour. These things are
unpredictable, and you don't know what's
going to happen when a group of masked men
storms a market and starts firing their guns
in the air and kidnapping people.
Because there had been cases in the past
when firefights have broken out and people
get killed. And if you wind up in the middle of
that kind of situation then things can go badly
for you. I was very lucky that nothing like
that happened.
I think in general, in Iraq, I was luckier than I
wanted to be. And no matter what I did or
where I went, the bomb always went off
somewhere else. I mean it just always did. I
would go down to Najaf in the summer of
2003 to film the Sadr movement, and they
would bomb the United Nations compound in
Baghdad, and then I'd drive back to Baghdad
and there would be a large multi-vehicle car
bomb assassination in Najaf where I'd just
been the day before. And on and on like that.
I was able to walk between the rain drops but
I don't want to imagine for a second that it
was because of some kind of special skill. I
think it was just blind luck.
HBO: Did you have a form you were looking for from
the outset for the film, or did the movie
emerge from the material you captured?
James Longley: More the latter. My own feeling was that the
situation could go one of two ways. Because
after the war, there was a power vacuum, and
there was anarchy on a certain level which is
very unstable. I felt it would either degenerate
into a kind of civil war, anti-occupation
insurgency-type situation, or it would come
under the control of some new power that
would probably be authoritarian.
I didn't believe for a moment that some kind
of blossoming democracy was going to take
root in Iraq that was just going to be this
bastion of liberal secularism because it was
unlikely in the wake of a dictatorship that
that was going to happen. I figured I had a
kind of window where I could maneuver before
things got either too dangerous to work in, or
became too authoritarian as they had been
under Saddam so that I no longer had the
ability to move around and film as I wanted,
and to have people speak openly to me.
I was trying to do as much as possible.
Unfortunately I'm just one guy and I was
operating on a very small budget. And it was
very difficult to find someone who would
commit to supporting a project in that kind of
unstable space of not knowing exactly what
was going to happen. So as always I think
with these things, I just wound up doing it on
my own. I mean that's what you have to do in
the end if you think you have a good idea and
it's tricky to find sponsorship for it. So I
thought maybe I'd make a series, but it
wound up being a feature.
HBO: What did you discover during that time that
you didn't realize before you started shooting?
James Longley: We, as Americans, do tend to be kind of
clueless about the complexity of other
countries. And it's really easy to jump into a
country like Iraq and think that you know
something about it, and try to kind of push
things in the direction you think they ought to
go. And that's what the United States did
when it went in.
And unfortunately I think the concept that the
United States had in Iraq was a simplistic
one: that there are the Kurds and they have
their interests, and the Shiites and they have
their interests, and the Sunni, and so on. And
we have to cater to and organize Iraq
politically around these different interests,
and actually going in there this kind of very
rudimentary understanding of Iraq only
exacerbated those divisions. It didn't help
unify the country at all.
And in my film, I do show different
perspectives in the country but they're limited
to really the individuals or groups that I'm
filming. Iraq is an extremely diverse country--
geographically, culturally, in every possible
way, there's a lot going on there. And to try to
encapsulate it into one film is really
impossible. All I can do as a director is to give
people a taste of what's going on in this period
from different perspectives, in different places.
I'm not trying to make an all-inclusive,
definitive film, although it may be a more
definitive film than anything else that got
made during that period just because I took
the time to be in different places and do these
detailed stories. It's only fragments of the
country; it's little pieces. I want people to see
the small pieces of a much broader puzzle.
And I think one of the things that I would like
audiences to come away with when they
watch the film is really how complicated Iraq
is and how much humility you have to have in
the face of that history and complexity if you
want ever to be able to have some kind of
positive impact. In terms of the United States'
foreign policy, we simply can't afford to go into
places and think that we know everything and
think that we understand how it works. I
think to a large extent, we did go into Iraq
with that kind of hubris and we've paid the
price for it and so have the Iraqis.
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