We started working with our friend David Riker, who comes from more the fiction side of things as a film director and writer. So we had to make a decision, do we actually want to make a feature-length film or are we going to just make a five or eight part series or something? 'Somalia was scary as shit, man.' - Jeremy Scahill It was much more of a kitchen sink film about how all of these sort of operations play out and it probably would have had to be broken into episodes. And to be able to see it on a big screen, in a crowd of 250 or 200 other people and have a communal experience watching the same stories, there’s nothing else like it. Just to see the face of the people and to see the emotion, and feel the emotion when they’re telling the story, like no matter how good of a writer you are, you can’t capture that intensity in the same way that film can.Īnd at the end of the day I think it was an amazing project to work on because the visual imagery is so stunning, but also the human dimension of it, there’s no replacement for it. That’s how it felt being filmed and followed.īut in the end, when we started to edit the film and see what we had captured, then I understood why it’s so powerful. I was pretty annoyed during the course of filming this because I felt like it was sort of a weird War on Terror version of the Truman Show or something. Scahill: I prefer to be a print reporter in part for that reason, I mean, I don’t like putting a camera in people’s face, I don’t like having a camera in my face. I don’t think of myself as a filmmaker at all.īI: We're wondering what it was like to travel around so ostentatiously with a cameraman and what not - what sort of considerations did you have to take into account walking around Yemen?

we did a couple of shorter video projects together, but I’ve never made a film before, and I don’t know that I’ll ever make a film again. Scahill: Yeah, I’ve never done anything like this before, I mean, and I made.

So it started as something that was going to be primarily focused on Afghanistan, and then ended up with a much wider scope.īI: And to our knowledge this was the first time you’ve done a full-length documentary. Just try to figure out who’s being killed, where’s the intelligence coming from, who’s doing the actual killing and so as we started to investigate this series of raids and compile information about it, and then learn that the main force behind the night raid policy in Afghanistan was JSOC, then the investigation became more global. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.

Dirty wars by jeremy scahill