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HBO: The telling of these stories is such daunting task for a documentary filmmaker; tell us about how you approached it.
Bill Couturié: The style was always intended to be extremely understated and simple, just the people sitting there and reading the letter. I think [Executive Producer] Sheila Nevins originally thought maybe that would be the whole movie--no cutaways, just as bare as possible. Very honest, very direct.
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"Frank Carvill, a Guardsman in the film, worked for the Port Authority in New York. He was in the World Trade Towers in 1993 when it was bombed, and he pulled people out and saved lives. He was in the World Trade Towers in 2001 when the planes hit. He pulled people out and saved lives. Then, he got sent to Iraq and he got killed. We're going to miss Frank. This was a good guy, a guy who made a difference in his community."
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Bill Couturié
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And that's largely how it wound up; it's just that when you go out and meet these parents some things become apparent. One of these was that the letters themselves were like holy objects. People put them in safes; they kept them in plastic, put them in locked cabinets. They protected them fiercely. They were literally religious objects. They're something beyond the words on the page. I mean obviously they treasure the words on the page, but the fact that the person had touched this, that it was actually in their own handwriting, the actual physical aspect that is there with the reading. It made them much more emotional when they held the actual letter.
What we're trying to do here is put a human face on the soldiers that died in Iraq and Afghanistan. You read about them in the newspapers, but it's "three soldiers died in their Humvee," that kind of thing.
Another thing that became apparent was that these people wanted to talk. They wanted to tell the stories of their husbands and wives and sons and daughters.
HBO: Were you concerned about seeming to take a political point of view?
Bill Couturié: It's impossible to tell story like this in these times without some kind of political interpretation. But when a film like this has a political approach, it enables people to shut off information they don't find appealing.
My point was not to make a movie about the political justification for the war. My point was to talk about the human cost of the war. And allow the audience-- whom I respect, and don't want to force feed information-- to make up their own minds.
I think the debate in this country about this war has been not only about the rightness and wrongness of it, but over and over again you hear 100 billion dollars, 200 billion. The money costs are talked about over and over again. But what no one wants to talk about is the human cost of the war. And it's enormous. It's 1100 families, 1100 dead GI's at this point.
And one of the points of the film, I think is not just the cost to the families, but the cost to all of us, to the communities these men and women come from. Frank Carvill, a Guardsman in the film, worked for the Port Authority in New York. He was in the World Trade Towers in 1993 when it was bombed, and he pulled people out and saved lives. He was in the World Trade Towers in 2001 when the planes hit. He pulled people out and saved lives. Then, he got sent to Iraq and he got killed by an IED [Improvised Explosive Device].
We're going to miss Frank. This was a good guy, a guy who made a difference in his community beyond being a soldier. You know a lot of these people who have gone are not professional soldiers. They have wives, most of them; they have families. They're being taken from that to go and fight the war. You can argue, if you want, that it's a terrible price, but it's the price of freedom. You can argue that it's not worth it to be fighting, and that they're not dying for the best of reasons. And that depends on your political point of view. But you walk away from this with the truth. And we must not sweep that under the rug.
HBO: Even mentioning the names or showing the caskets of soldiers killed has been interpreted as political recently.
Bill Couturié: I don't understand that. How can any party argue that young people who have given their lives for their country should be ignored? It's unconscionable, to expose people to war and to pretend that that's not happening. The fact that that has political implications is beside the point. Republicans and Democrats owe these families our condolences, our respect, and we should remember the sacrifice that they have made.
There is nothing more patriotic than giving your life for your country, for god's sake.
HBO: You are dealing with subjects that are in the worst emotional situations of their lives. How do you even begin?
Bill Couturié: Well first, it's very difficult to approach the families. In same cases, their loved one had just been killed. We didn't want to come out and invade their privacy.
In the case of the Witmer family, the media had come out in full force. The Witmers had three girls in the military and all three were in Iraq. So they have three lovely daughters and in Iraq one of them gets killed. The press was all over that. The next morning after the family got the news, on the doorstep was a photographer. And the Witmers, they resented it. They were given no time to grieve before the guy had a microphone in their faces.
So we were very respectful before we approached them, we gave them time. I spoke with the families many times before we began shooting, and met with them and cried with them. They wanted to tell the story of their loved ones without any ulterior motive. And I promised them that I wouldn't allow anything to interfere with that, and I didn't.
That said I was surprised by the extent that they wanted to go on camera. We were prepared to stop filming any time, but it happened only a couple of times.
One of the things I learned is that some people cry, and some people don't cry. The surprising thing is the fresher the death, the less there was a tendency to cry. John Witmer talks about it in the movie, when he says they're still in shock. Of course, you cry when you first find out about it, but then often you go into this profound level of shock, and it takes months for that to wear off.
HBO: How did the tough subject matter affect the filming?
Bill Couturié: My feeling about filmmaking like this is you're asking people to bare their souls and you have to be very respectful of that. If the audience has the feeling that you are asking people to do this and you are not giving them every possible respect, they resent it.
My job is to allow the families to tell the story in a way they feel comfortable. So I'm not creating the story, I'm not manipulating the story, I'm simply allowing.
The way you do that is first create a bond with the family, a trust. You don't just go in there and set up a camera and start shooting. I would talk to them on the phone for weeks before going in. And then, without the crew, I would sit down with them for ½ hour or hour, before they read the letters. And I got them comfortable with me and me with them. And then it's important that the camera is not in their face, there's nothing intrusive.
HBO: You've mentioned recently that you wanted to avoid the "pornography" of grieving that seems to be the approach of some coverage.
Bill Couturié: I talked to the cameraman and the editor on the film--the two most creative people on a documentary shoot—and I said that if we do our job right, no one will know that we've been there
This goes against the grain for a lot of creative types, because you want they want people to notice your beautiful camera work and the way you've edited the film. But this is a film where I've literally asked everybody to defer. I want everyone to have the sense that there is no hand of the filmmaker in it.
And the same is true of course with music, because music is an import part of any film, but the music couldn't feel manipulative, like, "OK, I'm going to make you cry now." So we erred on the side of less music. There's very little music in the film. It's a very spare style of filmmaking. It conveys the dignity.
HBO: One of the things that was so compelling about the film was the "knock on the door" - something that every family had in common, and yet the stories were also different.
Bill Couturié: That's why it ended up in the movie. The stories of the knock on the door weren't originally going to be a part of the film. One of the things that's so interesting about being a documentary filmmaker is that you don't always know where the subject is going to take you.
There wasn't going to be any interview at all. It was just going to be reading the letters. But the people wanted to talk. And it turns out that all of the families wanted to talk about the knock. And it's remarkable, because the action is exactly the same in every case, and they all are briefed on what to expect: Two guys come to your door in dress uniform. One is a chaplain. They regret to inform you, and so on...
You'd think the story would be remarkably the same. But the reactions are very different. One of the soldier's wives told them she wouldn't let them in; she told them that she wouldn't tell anyone that they had come, as long as they left. In her state of denial, she thought if she didn't let them in, nothing would happen.
I didn't expect it to be in the film. But it's one of the things that all of these people have in common. The man at the door is their nightmare.
HBO: How has it affected you, spending so much time immersed in these stories?
Bill Couturié: It certainly makes you appreciate every day that you wake up breathing; I tend to do that anyhow. And I have an eight-year-old son. The idea of me getting a knock at the door is inconceivable.
One of the mothers, Lisa Johnson, and I were talking and we were crying, and she said, "Bill you should take care of yourself. You should be careful, this can be powerful stuff."
It's true, but what she didn't realize was that you even though you take it with you, you feel like you're helping people. You feel like you're doing some good. I feel like I was chosen to tell their stories and that I have a responsibility. It's an honor. It's kind of a sacred duty.
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