“I’m Sorry, I Empathize with Lynndie England”

Let’s get right to the controversies this film has sparked.
You paid some of the subjects in the film, and people have been
complaining about that.

I suppose there are all of these reasons not to do it. A reason not
to do it, correct me if I’m wrong, is that supposedly it calls into
question the truthfulness of what somebody is telling you.

I guess there’s an idea that the subject will tell you what
they want to hear or dramatize the event more.

I am not in the habit of paying people. I have paid people in the
past. Of course, Steven Hawking was paid because we bought the rights
to his bestselling book, A Brief History of Time, and then we
had to cooperate with him to make of the movie: to be filmed in some
real sense, to be interviewed, to help write voiceover, and so on. The
movie could not have been made without him and is essentially about him
and his ideas.

Fred Leuchter, from Mr. Death: I did not pay for his
interview but at a certain point I asked Fred to act in my movie. There
are all these scenes with Fred standing out on the side of the road,
Fred in an apartment walking down a corridor, Fred in a Van de Graaff
generator at the Boston Museum of Science. I felt, if I’m asking him to
do all of this stuff, he should be paid, because I’m asking a lot of
his time.

We certainly didn’t pay Robert S. McNamara (The Fog of War)
a fee but we did pay for hotels and premiums. It was an unusual
situation. I felt that there was a very important story here, I still
think it’s a very important story and it’s clear that I would not have
been able to get the five people—the bad apples—to
participate in the movie without paying them.

Did you pay all of them, all five?

I did, in fact. I don’t want to go into all of the details but in
one instance, I actually felt that it was right to pay, even though he
hadn’t asked to be paid, because I paid the others. It seemed
inequitable. We’re talking about people who are really, really, really
poor here. People who took time off work, who weren’t even sure if by
doing this they would have a job when they came back. It’s asking them
to fly someplace, not asking them for an hour interview but for days of
their time. You could easily imagine the flip side of this: by not
paying them you’re exploiting those with no money. People are aware of
documentaries as movies in theaters. It’s not as though I’m doing this
as a print journalist and I’m on a salary.

This is not part of the argument, but you should know I make no
money from these movies. I can tell you that there is one person who is
not going to be paid from Standard Operating Procedure or
The Fog of War, and that’s me. Simply, I’m given a fixed
amount of money to make films and I can never make them for that much.
I just spend too much. I haven’t made money off of my documentary
films. I’m fortunate enough to have a career making commercials and I
make money off that. Otherwise, I would be in horrible, horrible,
shape.

There’s also a dream that people have—it’s almost like the USDA
stamp on meat—that you know it’s guaranteed to be truthful. People
imagine all kinds of guarantees that are supposed to ensure
truthfulness. There are all these arguments about vèritè being more
truthful than brand X. There are ideas that an interview is more
truthful if someone hasn’t paid for it and I actually don’t think
that’s true. Self-serving, perhaps, of me to say so. But I don’t think
it’s true, not in my experience.

Interviews are fragile kinds of things. They are people’s attempts
to reckon with the past, to reenact the past, in words. Should you put
a disclaimer at the beginning every interview that says memory is
fragile and people have a tendency to lie, to confabulate, to distort,
to deceive themselves in one way or another? To me there’s a deeper
issue. The issue is whether a person who’s making the film is invested in
pursuing the truth. There are so many ways in which any kind of
material, particularly interview material, can lie to us.

For example, God knows how many times I was criticized for my
interview with Robert S. McNamara for allowing him to tell his story,
as if my job was to constantly remind him that he is a war criminal. I
don’t agree. I think it’s all there in that interview if I’ve done my
job skillfully. You have enough information, not only to hear what the
person is saying, but to think about his truthfulness and what it means
as well.

Reenactments I’m not as concerned about, but do you want to
discuss?

Well, what do you think about them?

I think reenactments are… fine. I prefer if they’re
obviously reenactments. In this case, I think everybody know that there
were not high-quality films being shot in Abu Ghraib at the
time.

Also, they are not reenactments, per se. They are pieces, details,
illustrations. I should use the word “illustration,” but perversely I
claim they are reenactments even though it creates an incredible amount
of trouble for myself. I’ll hear a line in an interview and I’ll want
to illustrate it. It’s as simple as that. I’ll want to call the
audience’s attention to it—whether it’s falling skulls in The
Fog of War or a flying milkshake in The Thin Blue Line or
the cup reassembling itself in Brief History of Time. I could
go on and on and on and on; all of my films have had them. What puzzles
me is that people seem outraged by them in this film. I think people
are so angry about this war and in such a state of denial at the same
time. The idea that these people are not monsters and that photographs
can be misinterpreted bothers people.

I try to separate all my ingredients out. I described it as baking a
cake on one occasion. You have these interviews shot with a high-end
Sony digital camera, with the same backdrop used for everybody, lit
differently, but the same backdrop. The photographs all have white
borders. They shouldn’t, it’s anachronistic, but it’s my way of saying,
these are the pictures and these are the borders of the pictures taken
at Abu Ghraib in the fall of 2003. That’s that. The letters are
Sabrina’s letters; we scanned them. Sometimes I think I should have
shown the entire letter so you see it as a letter. And you have
Sabrina’s voice reading her own letters. So the photographs and the
letters are from 2003, the evidence from Abu Ghraib itself. The
reenactments—the illustrations—which are shot in Scope,
often with the Phantom V9 at a thousand frames a second (that’s 40
times slower than sound speed) are these dreams, these nightmares that
take you into the photographs and into the memories of people talking
about the photographs. They take you into Diaz’s memory of al-Jamadi’s
blood falling on his uniform or the purloined key used to open the door
to the 1B shower room or Sabrina’s illicit taking of the picture. The
thing she was charged with, by the way—she was charged with
taking the bandage off of al-Jamadi’s eye. Why was the bandage on
al-Jamadi’s eye? It was placed there to cover up the horrible injuries
that had been done to him in his interrogation. So you see that detail
of taking off the bandage, the zipper, the body bag, all these things
she “should not have done.” But what was Sabrina’s act of civil
disobedience? Taking the photographs. We would not have known of a
murder if not for her and yet, everyone got confused and thought she
was the culprit. She is not the culprit. There’s a CIA guy who has
never been charged. There are the brass of the prison, whether it’s
Colonel Pappas or Lieutenant Colonel Phillabaum or Captain
Brinson—all these people involved in the cover-up—and it’s
Sabrina who spends the year in prison. It’s a really sick story. It’s a
really sick, fucked-up story. What else can I say? And no one knows
about it.

They do now.

Well they’re going to know about it because I’m publishing this
whole essay on Sabrina’s smile. It goes up in the Times this week.

You get straight at trying to go into the personalities or
these so-called bad apples right away. In introducing letters, one of
the first things you find out is that Sabrina is in this long-term
lesbian relationship.

Still is. I talked to her just a couple of days ago.

It’s surprising because she’s been interviewed
before.

I think there’s a big difference between my interviews, paid or
unpaid. I am not simply interested in sound bites, I’m interested in
hearing a story and I will sit and work with them and listen for as
long as it takes. Janis Karpinksi was 17 hours. I brought Sabrina and
Megan back twice; they always came together, they’re close friends.
None of these people have really been heard from before.

When Lynndie came to the studio, we had no idea what to expect. I
don’t want to go on and on about it because it’s a private matter, but
I don’t think any of us really have an understanding of how poor some
of these people are, and what it meant for her to be incarcerated, to
lose her son, to have her mother who has next to no income take care of
Carter, what it means to have the weight of the Iraq war dumped on your
shoulders, to become the villain of this war. I’m sorry, I empathize
with Lynndie England. I think there’s been a series of terrible
miscarriages of justice. Even if I don’t believe that these guys are
really white or stain-free or morally uncompromised in any way, I
believe that it is obscene to send them to prison and to let the real
creators of American’s foreign policy walk around delighted with
themselves, pinning medals on each other’s chests. It makes me
sick.