By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Talking to Sebastian Junger about Restrepo
OnePiece: Sebastian Junger on RESTREPO from Ray Pride on Vimeo.
Along with Junger’s comments on the indiscretion of General McChrystal’s staff “talking shit about the boss,” the forthcoming co-director of Restrepo talks about the war in Afghanistan’s origins as a reaction to 9/11 and tries to remember how many war zones he’s reported from.
“The movie’s interesting, it’s kind of a hybrid,” Junger says. “It has the dramatic structure of a Hollywood war movie, I mean, it’s not didactic, it’s not informative, it’s not ‘about’ Afghanistan. It’s an experience, the way dramatic features are an experience. You enter that world for ninety minutes, and then you leave that world. But it’s about a topic of national concern, so I think it has the best of both, in terms of commercial potential, it has this theatrical drama but it’s real. I think it has a very good chance of people going to see it, I don’t want to use the word ‘entertainment,’ but as an emotional experience rather than a learning experience.”
Why feet on the ground instead of having “experts” talk on-camera? “The fact is, there’s an enormous amount of journalistic material that covers those important issues, the context. Do people really want to see another movie that tells them what they already believe about the war? If we had done that, I think all these people that are criticizing us for doing it, wouldn’t have gone to see that movie.”
“I didn’t have a tape recorder out there. I had a notebook,” Junger says of working toward both a film and a book while on the battlefield. “I used the notebook during scenes that would have not been good to film. Conversations in the dark. Things like that. Then there are other scenes that are perfect to film and you never write them down in a notebook. No one takes notes during a firefight. It’s ludicrous. I tried to divide those tasks up according to the kind of scene it was and then I referred to the video continually while writing my book (“War”) and in making the movie, I referred to my notes, just in terms of narrative and context and storyline. They complemented each other really well.”
“The plot, the, quote, ‘plot,’ was nonexistent. They were marking time in a very dangerous place. They weren’t moving forward to take Baghdad, they weren’t storming the beaches at Normandy. They were in a static position, pretty much doing the same thing over and over again. In terms of plot, that wasn’t really where the center of gravity of the film was. It was really more the emotional development, the emotional experience of these soldiers.”
