The following is a transcript of an interview I conducted with David Riker, co-writer and editor of the new documentary, “Dirty Wars”. The interview can be heard in the Praxis archive, coming soon.
DR: “My name is David Riker and I worked on Dirty Wars as a writer with Jeremy Scahill and as an editor with director Rick Rowley. And I’ve known both Jeremy and Rick for a very long time, but my own background is in fiction film and in documentary. So I started out making documentaries, and I started working in fiction film after finishing film school and my interest has been to find a way to speak about real life– to speak about life as it actually is– in the dramatic language. So I very often cast non-professional actors in dramatic parts.
Dirty Wars was an interesting balance because it while it was absolutely a documentary, it closely follows Jeremy Scahill reporting as an investigative journalist, so to really tell the story the three of us were frequently looking to the tradition of fiction filmmaking as a way of structuring Jeremy’s research so that it conveys some of the tension and the drama that their work as filmmakers, that was part of their experience. Dirty Wars in some ways is a fusion of strict documentary with some of the elements of fiction filmmaking.”
TW: “Yeah, that definitely comes across. I just watched it last night, I like the way that [the technique] can inject some foreshadowing and some reflection before you understand what he’s reflecting about. It keeps it going in the same way a fiction film would. You were brought on to help write and do everything after they had already come up with much of the film, is that correct?”
DR: “Yes, they had done most of the filming and as Jeremy and Rick would tell it, they were working on a four hour version of the film and were screening it to people and generally finding the same reaction that they would eventually get from me–that, the material at the core of their investigation, that is to say filmed in Afghanistan outside of the Green Zone, in Yemen, in Somalia, was not only very powerful but also unlike anything we’d seen before, but the context and meaning of those episodes was not coming through and the effect was a bit like watching a catalog of horror. You don’t know what to make of that, and the viewer is quickly overwhelmed. And that, when Jeremy asked me to watch it, I felt, I had two main reactions. The first was that the footage was explosive and how is it possible after more than a decade of the war on terror that someone like myself, informed, had not seen, especially in not such a powerful way, the other side of the barrel of the gun. And I know, of course, that there’s a great effort to filter what we see, intentionally.
As I was watching the footage, I couldn’t help but look at Jeremy and at Rick and think about what this really meant for them to work on this project. I’ve known them a long time and I’ve felt increasingly that the work that they’ve done in the warzone… watching the footage I had this whole series of questions of how they got to this point, what led them on this journey and as they began to tell me that I felt that it was an omission that weakened their story. To not have the investigator and his own journey included somehow weakened what I was seeing. Even though Jeremy as a journalist and Rick as a war reporter have never, ever have put themselves in front of the camera or on the page. They’re always invisible; their work from a principal standpoint is to focus on the subject that they are investigating or reporting on. So the idea that in this case, Jeremy Scahill, his own journey being somehow a part of the film was essentially out of the question for Jeremy, who just felt it was wrong to put his own story in the film.
What happens is a journalist spends a decade slowly piecing together a story, but then in the article or the documentary film it’s presented in a really cogent way–after the fact. After all the investigation has been done. And it’s very hard for it not to sound didactic for it not to sound instructive like, “this is what is happening”. Whereas the journalist really doesn’t know, Jeremy didn’t know at the beginning of this work where it would lead him. He described it as pulling on a string, and suddenly it’s an elephant’s tail, and the elephant itself is completely out of view in the beginning. To me that is part of the story. And I would say it in a different way. We wanted to reject the convention of NPR, of PBS, of the BBC, where, sort of, the voice of god tells us what’s happening in the world as if it’s just available there for anyone to share and, rather say, there are things happening that you don’t know about because we are not meant to see them and to see them is a very difficult and complex job. And if we can actually in the film, allow you to go on the journey that we went on, then the meaning of what is revealed will be enhanced and the sense of engagement with the material will deepen. Does that make sense? It was this sort of conversation that eventually led us and allowed Jeremy to say ok let’s try it, what does it look like if i’m going to be in this film and you have to guarantee, assure me that it won’t come at the expense of the theatrical story.”
TW: “I think it came across beautifully and i’m really glad that’s the way you chose to do it. I don’t think it’s meant to be self referential in the film but in the section where Jeremy had first uncovered some of this JSOC stuff and he’s going on the tour of cable talk news, and so much of that world is just unable to process what he’s talking about. They’re saying ‘that’s not possible because we don’t have that information’ and he’s not able to communicate yet the totality of the journey and it shows this big disconnect between storytelling and real experience on the ground and the type of digestible news bites that people have come to expect that have been manufactured.”
DR: “Yes, it’s exactly that. Those digestible bites of news no longer have any value in terms of shaping people’s understanding of the world. For example, we can see just this afternoon that the new military rulers in Egypt have attacked these two large sit ins of Morsi supporters and it sounds like hundreds have been killed if not more. Now Americans, reading this or seeing this, are so overwhelmed with stories people being killed in the Middle East, in far flung corners of the world , that it’s almost lost its meaning and it’s hard to know what to make of that. And one of the challenges in the War on Terror is to try, which is what I thought was the most valuable on the ground work that Jeremy and Rick were doing, is to try to reconstruct the narrative story behind some of these statistics, these night raids. It’s probably not possible to tell the totality of the story of this War on Terror. So many people’s lives have been destroyed and how to talk about it on the one hand becomes ideological and it turns into a very political discussion about empire and about religion , but to really begin to understand it the challenge is to actually reconstruct narrative stories. People’s stories we can understand. And the most interesting stories are those that are not what they immediately appear.
To put it differently you can bore through them and find all these layers of sediment and depth. and all of the stories, whether it’s the story of Anwar Al Awlaki, this American-born cleric who became the number one most wanted figure on the American kill list, or whether its the story of this family of Gardez in Afghanistan who are the victims of a botched incorrect night raid– where their death is first described by the American forces who killed them– as a Taliban honor killing. The stories once they’re reconstructed are extremely revealing. Individual stories about human beings whose lives are cut across the fault lines of this war on terror can start to actually give a way of understanding in a new way. But that’s storytelling, it’s not just journalism. It’s storytelling. And Dirty Wars in the end is a fusion between strict investigative journalism on one hand and traditional storytelling on the other.”
TW: “And how did you choose, because a lot of that responsibility would have been on you writing and editing, how did you choose which of these stories to focus on?”
DR: “I must give all credit to Jeremy and to Rick because both of them are, they are veterans, I know its an overused word and they’re both young men in their late 30s but they are veterans. They’ve been doing this work all their lives. Rick, I think, has been doing war reporting for 15 years. They live and breathe the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have been in the Middle East for years, Jeremy too. They’re already–as reporters and investigative journalists– they’re already filtering out an enormous amount of material before they cut their story and coverage. So a great deal of the filtering was done by them. But the challenge editorially was still enormous and the reason is that Dirty Wars as a film essentially says that the world as we know it has been profoundly altered during these 12 years of the War on Terror in ways that we scarcely understand. And it has occurred without any real public discussion about the changes taking place, so how do we tell the totality of that in a film?
Again the idea of the elephant’s tail, the investigator, in this case Jeremy, didn’t and couldn’t understand the totality at the beginning of the investigation, so we started to use the language of again, in narrative storytelling, of the detective in a crime thriller. To use a really bad description, the detective finds a body and is trying to find out who is responsible for killing the body and in the search to find clues for who killed the body he will discover that in fact it seems to have been killed by a group within the U.S. military that is almost unknown at the time. It’s very hard to get information about and that leads to a new investigation, no longer an investigation on who killed this person, but who is the killer? Now that we know formally who they are, who are they really? Where do they come from? How do they operate? And so like peeling an onion, the film is an exploration of an expanding journey by Jeremy to a larger and more prescient reality that is the kind of essence of the film. So in some sense, what stories to use and how to edit it the goal was to use slow disclosure rather than start with the hypothesis, to use slow disclosure and simply present the most essential clues as they are necessary. So it really becomes like a mystery thriller. Many critics have described it in a way like a political thriller because that is what an investigative journalist who really does their work truthfully, that’s what they’re doing. They’re discovering something that’s not widely known.”
TW: “So this type of personal, human level storytelling for these complex issues,that’s a pattern for you and you’ve done it with border violence in “The Girl” and in other work as well, how do you think, what’s the importance of that moving forward and how do you think more of that might become infused into public conversation and just American consciousness in general?”
DR: “In terms of film, I think that there’s two things that are underway certainly in the last 10 years. On the one hand, fiction filmmaking in television and in theatrical film is desperate to burnish itself with the veneer of truthfulness. There’s a great desire in dramatic film and television to convince us what we’re seeing is real when in fact it is not. And this has its origins in stylistic convention such as the handheld camera which we now see so frequently in almost all of the film and television that is quote-unquote “real” drama and they’re trying to tell us this is not fake, this is actually fly on the wall documentary. So on the one hand, you see film and television appropriating stylistic conventions rooted in cinema verite in documentary, and on the other hand you see documentary filmmakers becoming increasingly bold and creative in the way that they are telling true stories. And there’s a convergence happening, no one’s orchestrating it and its very interesting. In my mind, my professional career has really straddled that grey area between “fiction” and “documentary” and I think that it’s in that space that the most interesting work is being done and I think it’s inevitable that it’s happening. On the one hand, you cannot simply present in a documentary, traditional way facts and hope that people will have the patience to listen to them or the capacity to really understand them. On the other hand, when you’re telling a story that is completely constructed, you have an understandable urge to make it true to life so it’s the space between documentary and fiction is merging and blending and I think that what’s most exciting in that is the possibility for audiences to be presented stories in a way that is engaging again.
I think probably the documentary newsreels during the Second World War were incredibly engaging. You’d go to see a Frank Capra film and before that you’d see a ten minute newsreel about the soldiers advancing on the Normandy coast and it was probably riveting, but today what is riveting is to be invited into a documentary that uses multiple points of view, that uses slow disclosure, that creates a mystery, that challenges us to actually wonder, “Is what i’m looking at really true or is it not quite true?”. You know, the light is refracted. And to put an end once and for all to the notion that any of this is really objective. You know that there isn’t an “objective”, because there never is. Anyone who’s in a relationship, as a parent, as a boyfriend, as a girlfriend, they know there’s not an objective reality. You can say objectively that everyone in the house is dressed in clothing, but you can’t say that the father is responsible for the mothers angst. It’s never that simple. There are multiple points of view and somehow in that collision between different subjective experiences of life, we can learn something.
We’re never going to learn the absolute truth but we can learn something. To me, that’s kind of a broad question, but as a writer and a storyteller and a filmmaker that’s really exciting to see that documentary today is confident to appropriate the tools of traditional fiction storytelling and to see that the fiction world is desperate to try and give authentic verisimilitude to what they’re doing–I’m more worried about that–I’m more worried about audiences watching “The Bourne Identity” and thinking it’s true than I am at seeing documentarians who are inventing new language and more creative storytelling.”
TW: “Yeah, that’s the challenge, to make sure people have the tools to suss out fact from fiction. But I want to respect your time. I read a quote on you from Jeremy Scahill that you’re a “true storyteller in the age of 140 character thoughts”. Do you have an “out of your normal long storytelling range” closing thought for us before we wrap up?”
DR: “My closing thoughts are that that’s a beautiful quote, and simply that we need stories and we need stories more than ever before. I think back to the period of the Great Depression in the U.S. when the WPA in an act of Congress was guaranteed a percentage, and I think it was 6%, of the Federal budget for the arts and for storytelling and that what was produced in that short period of three to four years was an extraordinary legacy culturally, socially that is still a treasure to the country. Whether that has to do with the mural projects, the oral history projects– the only and extraordinary history of American slaves was conducted by WPA researchers– or whether its the photographic legacy that we know…
Storytelling and story is really vital and after 9/11, I remember public television calling together all of its producers and saying, “We’re at a crossroads and we need story to move forward.”. Well, public television betrayed the promise because what they actually did was to fund jingoistic, patriotic productions. But their call was a true one and the truth is that the only way forward during times of crisis is to know where we come from, figure out who we are, and talk about where we want to go. And those three great questions are the storytelling questions. Story gives us the ability to step outside of the whirlwind that we live in, that we experience life in, and actually reflect for a moment about where we are in relation to our past and where we want to go. Story is an antidote to blind patriotism. It’s an antidote to ignorance. And it cannot be done in 140 characters. That’s not really a closing statement, but you can find one in there.”
Storytelling Forms in Academy Award Nominated Documentary | mediateacherdotnet
[…] of the tension and the drama that … was part of their experience.” I highly recommend this interview with David Riker from the blog Truth Scout. […]