Standard Operating Procedure Q&A

The Military Hollywood Insider - Mary McIntyre Brown

The Military Hollywood Insider - Standard Operating Procedure

As a veteran living in Hollywood, when Tinseltown and the military somehow intersect, I’m always interested, so I go straight to the actors and filmmakers themselves to find out what’s going on.  This week I’ll share my conversations with Errol Morris, Morgan Spurlock, and Rade Serbedzija.  Finally, Willem Dafoe sets the record straight on playing Gen. Douglas MacArthur and gives me a cool example of where he gets his inspiration…

- Errol Morris on The Stain of Abu Ghraib
- Morgan Spurlock on Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?
- Rade Serbedzija on Prior Service
- Willem Dafoe on Independent Film Anamorph

The Stain of Abu Ghraib  

“Standard Operating Procedure,” is the already controversial new documentary from Errol Morris [“The Thin Blue Line, “Fog of War”].  Morris explores the photos of Abu Ghraib by interviewing many of the people who appear in the photos. 

This movie is not for the faint of heart as the now infamous photos are shown throughout the film as well videos and some re-enactments of what was happening in the photos.  I’ll admit I went into the viewing of this film with my own preconceptions about what had happened at Abu Ghraib and what it all meant.  I don’t think that “Standard Operating Procedure” provides any new answers, but it does shed light on what was considered to be standard procedure at Abu Ghraib and what was found to be a “criminal act.”  In the film some of those who appeared in the photos and some of the investigators speak for themselves as they discuss the circumstances at Abu Ghraib.

There is currently a controversy in the media over the film which opens May 2nd because Errol Morris recently said, when asked, that he “paid the bad apples” for their interviews in the film.  When I interviewed Morris, I didn’t ask him whether he paid anyone for their appearance in SOP.  I’ve had enough experience with documentaries that I assumed he possibly had since it’s not an uncommon practice-- after all; it’s a commercial film, not a news story.   But, once people have seen the movie, the controversy may no longer be about who got paid, it may shift back to who to blame…

MMB:  Why do you think Abu Ghraib is such a divisive topic – how can we all look at the same photos and have different opinions about them?

EM:  Well I think the photographs are unclear.  The photographs became politicized immediately, so people would argue:  left would say one thing, right would say something else.  It very, very quickly devolved into an argument about ‘rogue soldiers’ versus ‘administration policy’ without anyone ever really bothering to investigate the circumstances under which the photographs were taken.  It became political football.  And, often the argument devolves into an argument about torture -- there will be people who say, "well, torture is not admissible under any circumstances" and the other people will say "we have an implacable enemy, they would do the same to us or worse, we need to fight back, the ends justify the means" and so on -- everyone is familiar with these debates. 

I would like to remove it from that arena because I think there is no winning that argument - whether torture is admissible or it isn't or it works or it doesn't.  To me, there's something that I feel even more strongly in this story, that is, I want to know, when I look at these photographs, what I'm looking at.  I want to know -- Am I seeing the actions of a few rogue soldiers; am I seeing policy? 

I want to know, not by reading ‘blog x’ or ‘blog y’ -- I want to know by trying to re-examine those photographs, trying to place myself back in that moment where the photographs were taken; I want to hear from the people who were there, the people who took the photographs.  I want to look at the evidence once again.  I want to try to think my way through what actually happened. 

I've pointed out a couple of times my surprise that no one had really bothered to investigate the photographs per se - no one had bothered to talk to the people who had taken the photographs.  No one had bothered to figure out, really, what happened in these photographs.  Instead, people simply argued about them, each assuming that they knew what they were about.  And to me, that's the underlying problem. 

MMB:  What do you think of the impact the release of the photos had on the US and the world?
 
EM:  I think there's little doubt that the pictures are so deeply shocking because they run counter to the idea of what this country is about or what this country should be about. But, oddly enough, I think there's something much worse than the pictures actually that bothers me even more and says to me something about my country at this juncture in history -- the fact that we're willing to punish a few lowly soldiers and allow all of the higher ups to walk away scot-free.  And we've aided and abetted it -- not a pleasant thought, but we have by not looking further than the photographs.  As if the photographs were all there was to say about Abu Ghraib. 

If you're asking me, what I think?  I made this entire movie to figure out what I think.  What are these photographs showing us?  What do they have to say about my country and the policies of this current administration?  And my answer is that they have a lot to tell us.  I remain shocked -- you can look at the picture of the hooded man on the box with wires and you can say - "rogue soldiers" or "administration policy" – well, let's ask somebody.  Let's actually try to come up with some evidence of what was actually going on there, rather than just conjecturing about what a photograph represents.

MMB:  When we see the pictures of Abu Ghraib, it’s hard not to think that the soldiers in them are the ones responsible, seeing is believing, isn’t it?

EM:  When Sabrina Harman and Javal Davis walk on to that tier - Tier 1A.  Just imagine, imagine yourself being there -- they walk onto this tier and they see people stripped naked, bags on their heads, and if not bags, women's panties -- they're trussed up like some Thanksgiving turkey, ready for the oven.  They're deprived of sleep, deprived of food -- you might even go so far as to say "tortured." 

Javal and Sabrina look at this and they say, "What is going on here? It's like Bedlam!"  They didn't create it, these soldiers didn't create that -- they walked in on it.  And what are they supposed to do? 

I mean I love people sort of temporizing with these guys -- it actually does piss me off.  You have this picture of Sabrina smiling with her thumb up over the corpse -- no one says, 'Hmm, I wonder how the guy got to be a corpse?  Instead, it's 'Well, we'll blame her because she's in the picture!'  

Well, she's taking a picture to expose the US Military.  She had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder.  The people who committed the murder have never been charged or prosecuted and we, the public, don't care -- because we’re happy just looking at a photograph and being outraged by it without any desire to know further.  

MMB:  Did you try to contact any of the detainees who were in the photographs?

EM:  Yes, of course.  We tried to locate the detainees who appeared in the most famous photographs.  It’s been difficult to impossible.  We spent over a year trying to track down “Gilligan,” the hooded man on the box.  We couldn’t find him.  Not through military records.  Not through “fixers” on the ground in Iraq.  We don’t even know if he’s still alive.

MMB:  How did you connect with the American military people that you did talk to?  How did you gain their trust?

EM:  It took a very, very long time.  My first interview was with Janis Karpinski, the brigadier general who was the head of the prison system in Iraq and who was later relived of command and demoted by Bush.  My cameraman, Bob Chappell, had seen her on C-SPAN and said, “You should have a look at this.  This is really interesting.”  I watched the piece, and asked Karpinski to come to Boston for an interview.  We did an extremely long interview: seventeen hours over two days.  Her anger comes through vividly.

Listen to what else Errol Morris had to say about the 13 investigations into Abu Ghraib and his thoughts on the involvement of  Janis Karpinski:

MMB:  I was Military Intelligence when I was in the military and it was bothersome to me that all the Military Police -- and mostly you interviewed MPs as far as the military people in the film go except for the one MI Spec. -- the MPs blame everything on MI, saying it was their orders, their policy -- could you not talk to anyone in MI to get their response? 

EM:  I could have, and I certainly talked at length to Col. Jordan - Steve Jordan.  Part of it is I can't tell every story, because I'd like to continue doing this.  I needed to finish a movie and I needed to make the movie about something I could manage, something I could handle.  Making a movie about the entire Iraq war, the entire chain of command -- it wasn't what I saw myself doing.  I'm not sure you could even do something like that and make sense out of it.  But, I thought I could confine myself to the pictures and what the pictures meant.  And, Roman Krol, who is the MI guy that I talked to, was in the pictures and was imprisoned because of that fact, so he became an essential character.

You know, I think another phenomena with Abu Ghraib is that people want to find someone to blame so badly -- if not MPs, then it's MI; if it's not MI, then it's the independent contractors; if it's not them, it's the OGA -- my feeling, having talked to a fair number people now, is that it is something that cuts across institutional lines.  It's not MI-- good, MP -- bad or MP-- good, MI – bad.  It's not that.  It's that there were good people and bad people in every single branch.  Good people in MI, good people who were MPs.  What's really so sad about it is, again, that we can't really look at it -- it's never been examined.  I do know that the story still really has not been told. 

MMB:  Some of the disturbing things depicted in the pictures were considered Standard Operating Procedure at Abu Ghraib, but clearly things like stacking nude prisoners in a pyramid and the sexual humiliation were off the page, don’t you think? 

EM:  Well, of course it is, I mean, it's off the page.  What I keep asking myself is -- is humiliation and sexual humiliation part of this war?  And, was it from the get go?  I think, yes. 

I think there's something very strange about this war.  I think 'Shock and Awe' is about humiliation.  I believe the entire foreign policy of this country for years was just 'kill Saddam' -- it wasn't kill Saddam to some end -- it was just ‘Kill Saddam.’  Just go in there, show him who's boss, get him and that in itself is crazy.  It's a country of 300 million people with a policy of killing one man who really has not threatened our country -- that in itself is really, really strange. 

The whole idea of MI. and this is MI -- panties on heads, female MPs stripping male Iraquis -- okay, that's all SOP, but when does it become a criminal act?  Graner stacks them in a pyramid or Lynndie Englund points at some guy's dick -- is that so different from any of the other stuff?  That's what becomes -- you've already entered into this really grey area -- Geneva's long gone, the treatment of prisoners is up for grabs, all kinds of abuse have become Standard Operating Procedure. 

When I went to the MPAA to try to secure an 'R' rating for the movie which we were eventually given -- I didn't want to change the photographs, I thought the photographs were evidence -- they shouldn't be altered in any way.  So I talked to the head of the MPAA and I said that I thought that this was a war about humiliation and that most of these photographs were pictures of humiliation, almost as if the photographs were capturing the Zeitgeist of the entire war.  She said a funny thing -- that most horror movies since the war began are about humiliation -- "Saw", "Hostel." 

Yeah, you kill people in the end, but first you degrade them -- and that element of humiliation and degradation that has been part of the war on a global scale and part of the war on a very small individual scale is something that I find really disturbing because that does not seem to be about who we are.

MMB:  This film is very graphic.  Did you feel yourself becoming desensitized to the images?
 
EM:  I think, inevitably, yes -- I think when you work with something day in and day out you almost forget exactly what it is that you're doing.  I knew all along how dark and disturbing this story was.  Of course, you put it all together and you see it on a big screen, it becomes shocking all over again
 
MMB:  Coincidentally, your Director of Photographer is the very talented Bob Chappell, whom I met when he was shooting “60 Spins Around the Sun” – why did you choose him for this project?

EM:  He's a great, great guy and I've known him for really well over 20 years.  He disappeared for awhile -- he's like a Conrad character -- in the Far East, he was in Indonesia and Thailand and now he's back in the United States and that's great for me because we've been working together all the time now.
 
MMB: Why did you do dramatizations in the movie? 

EM:  Well, I've done it, you know, for better or for worse in almost every single movie I've ever made.  Am I surprised that now people are sort of paying attention again to them?  I mean, there was a cry when I made "The Thin Blue Line" with so called "re-enactments."  I have no problem with the reenactments and having done it, of course, I would argue that they made sense. 

But, here is the argument -- and you're telling people that photographs really don't show us the world. they de-contextualize things.  They allow us to read into them, to imagine things about them that may not be true.  Part of the idea, and I think this is the central idea of a movie -- it's still on my mind by the way -- is what if you could walk into a photograph?  I wanted to take these moments -- these very specific moments and bring them to life.  And to explore what was the inner world, the thinking around them.  And, the reenactments helped me to take an audience into that moment of photography. 

MMB:  There are still so many questions about Abu Ghraib and what happened there-- was it difficult to confine yourself to just one aspect?

EM:  I am going to write more stuff -- I'm going to write my essays if I ever have the time to do it.  I wanted to make a movie about the photographs and the people who took the photographs and the kind of bizarre misdirection created by the photographs -- I wanted to make that movie. 

There are lots of other movies to make.  There are lots of other stories to tell.  There's a story that involves the higher ups. 

Not every thing that happened at Abu Ghraib was directed from the Pentagon or from the White House.  Rumsfeld never told Chuck Graner, I believe, to stack prisoners in a pyramid -- I don't think that happened.  But, all of the policies -- the policies of sexual humiliation and abuse -- all of that stuff doesn't come from a few rogue soldiers.  We know all too well that it comes from higher up and was orchestrated from higher up. 

I think there's so much anger and so much frustration about the war -- they want some kind of superhero to come out of the wings and nail Rumsfeld to the wall and if I haven't done it, they're just pissed of like,  "that's the job, guy -- like why are you fucking around with a bunch of pictures?" -- because I actually am fascinated by those pictures and by photography. 

MMB:  Do you think it’s good that we should know more about Abu Ghraib?

EM:  If you ask me, do I think the wide dissemination of knowledge is a good thing -- I think it is inherently good thing.  I'm a populist, actually, I think by inclination.  And, I think it's -- I'd often say when I was making this movie, “I don't know whether Americans care about torture” -- I care about it.  But, one thing that I think America still stands for is the idea of a level playing field for the little guy -- that there is--not absolute equality-- but something that pays lip service to equality.  And here is a story where the little guys took the fall and the big guys just ran for cover and we all bought into it in a certain way.

MMB:  Is this movie anti-military?

EM:  Most certainly it is not anti-military.  I think that this military has been terribly served by this war and by the policies of this administration.  I think it may go further back.  I think part of it, certainly, is that I see a war – everything that I know about Abu Ghraib which is that area of the war that I have investigated and that I have studied -- you're talking about an under-trained, under-equipped, under-staffed Army sent to do a job that would require many, many fold the number of people that were sent – more experienced with better training and better equipment. 

It's funny, you listen to people say "Well, we were following the Geneva Conventions blah, blah, blah" -- Well, the choice of this location is a complete violation of Geneva.  You're talking about a place that was mortared daily -- this is the middle of the Sunni Triangle, this is the middle of the war!  You don't put prisoners in a free fire zone.  You don't put them in the middle of combat.  You put them behind the lines.  It's almost as if a script was written -- and I don't think it was done intentionally, I think it was done because people weren't thinking, because of an absence of thought, because of an absence of planning, because of self-deception, because of wishful thinking -- 'we can fight this war and we can do it without really that many people, without training -- we'll just show them who's boss and that will be it.  And yes, I rebel at the idea that Lyndie Englund is going to take the stain of the Iraq war for America and for this administration.  Are they lily-white - no; are they scapegoats - yes. 

And is this film anti –military?  No.  This country needs a strong military and it needs an effectively and properly managed military.

Morgan Spurlock Fires up the Camel and Goes On The Hunt for Osama Bin Laden

To me, it sounded like the most extreme excuse in the world, but in his new documentary, “Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden,” Morgan Spurlock [“Supersize Me”, “30 Days”] finds out that his wife is pregnant and decides that it’s a good time to go globe-trotting in search of Osama bin Laden so the world will be a better place for his baby to be born into.

Actually, talking to Morgan I found out that the film was already in the works when his wife got pregnant, so he wasn’t just avoiding those Lamaze classes, after all.

The film follows Spurlock as he travels to places such as Egypt, native land of many founders of Al-Qaeda; Saudi Arabia, where Osama grew up; and Israel/Palestine, nucleus of the conflict that has fueled worldwide Arab resentment for decades.  Other stops include Morocco, where suicide bombings demonstrate bin Laden’s nasty legacy, and Afghanistan where Spurlock was embedded with the US Army.

Hear what Morgan had to be say about being with the military in Afghanistan:

Hear Morgan Spurlock on meeting folks during Ramadan in Morocco:

 

Prior Service

Rade Serbedzija may not be the first name to spring from your lips if you were asked to name a famous actor.  But, you would recognize the Serbian actor from the 8 episodes of “24” in which he appeared playing Dmitri Gredenko.  He is now starring in “Fugitive Pieces,” a poetic film set against the backdrop of the aftermath of World War II about a man searching for love while confronting the dark realities of his war-ravaged childhood during which his parents were killed and a stranger’s act of kindness saved him from a similar fate.  While talking with Rade, who plays Athos the man who rescues the boy, I thought he had a surprising take on war.

But, first, curiosity got the best of me and I asked Rade what it was like to work with Kiefer Sutherland:

“He’s very nice.  He’s a very nice actor, very nice person, interesting person, and bad chess player.  Even on set, he has this actor’s chair, but it’s connected with a little table.  And on this table is a fixed chess board.  And on the chair was his name, ‘Kiefer Sutherland.’  And I said, “My god, he must be some big chess player.”  And I was there watching him.  When we were shooting, he was playing with this guy, who is the makeup person.  And he was beating him, but he played awfully bad.  Then, he asked me would I join him?  Would I play?  I said, “I can.”  Then I gave ‘mate’ in seven moves.  He couldn’t believe.  Next one, it was in 11.  Next one was in 12, but it was so easy.  Then he said, ‘Oh, you bloody Eastern European guys.’”

Here’s Rade’s take on the subject of war:

“I remember I said once -- I was a very stupid and arrogant actor at that time -- I said, ‘My god.  I miss war [LAUGHS].’  And one journalist said, “You are a stupid bastard.”  But he didn’t get what I wanted to tell him.  I said I missed war to be better actor, [LAUGHS] to get real experience.  Because I said, “All my generation, we are instant actors.”  When we are playing, let’s say, war situation, heroes, you’re acting something, what you're watching on TV or film, but you’re having this experience, because if you are honest in acting, you must show everything.  And, with war, it’s the same thing.  And unfortunately, this stupid actor - I mean me - got war experience in my country.  Now I know how right I was.  I became a better actor.  It’s nonsense, but it’s true.  I know I recognize death.  Beside me, I saw death.  They twice tried to kill me for real.  I couldn’t believe that it will ever happen in my life.  And then I found how death and all these dangers are so cruelly simple.  That’s something that helped me a lot as an actor.”

Willem Dafoe  [“Platoon”, “Born on the Fourth of July”], is now starring in an independent film called “Anamorph”  in which he plays a haunted police detective who uses his knowledge of painting to track a serial killer – so I asked him where he looks for inspiration to do his job:

“One of my favorite things to do is to go to galleries. Sometimes my favorite work is when I see a simple thought and a simple execution.  Years ago there was a group show at PS One in New York and there was-- in the middle of the room. there was a white rectangular column and as you walked in you saw there was something on top.  And, as you got closer, you saw they were cockroaches, but there was nothing keeping them from climbing down the side. Then, when you look closer, you saw the cockroaches had little white bunny ears and little white bunny tails put on them -- now that was a beautiful image.   Plus, it kept the cockroaches from being able to negotiate that turn, so they stayed on the top for display and couldn't go anywhere -- this inspired me because I saw an idea there and I saw it's beautiful execution -- it makes me consider things I don't consider.” 

Dafoe has played soldiers in the past, so I found it interesting when I read that he would be playing General Douglas MacArthur in a film called “Beast of Bataan.”  I asked about it and Willem said:

“What are we going to do about these rumors? -- I know nothing about this -- except, at one point they were making this movie, and it's an interesting movie, and there was talk about me playing a role in it, but it wasn't MacArthur.  And then somebody gets the story wrong -- they put it on the internet and you can't get it out.”

Find more Military Hollywood Insider articles by Mary McIntyre Brown at Military.com.

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Copyright 2009 by Mary McIntyre Brown