Nick Quested, Sebastian Junger - Hell On Earth

Full transcript: Nick Quested, Sebastian Junger on London Real

0:04 The people in Syria are fighting because to not fight means they’ll just be killed. Why did it produce something as just grotesque and ghastly as ISIS? It’s corruption that gets reasonable good people to sign on with a radical movement that they don’t particularly like. We really wanted to do a kind of anatomy of a civil war. We tried to do everything we possibly could and followed every lead we possibly could.

0:39 Why do they keep going? Why do they get worse? If you can understand why something happens, you might be able to prevent it from happening the next time. You take men and put them in a platoon in combat, and all of a sudden you have that primordial closeness. We are at our best when we are in a small group facing an average.

1:04 As horrible as war is, it also brings out some enormously noble and admirable qualities in people. This week on the show we have Sebastian Junger, who is the Academy Award-nominated director of the documentary film Restrepo. We have Nick Quested, and they are here to talk about their brand new film called Hell on Earth. It’s about the Syrian Civil War and the rise of ISIS. This is a fascinating film, and I learned so much.

2:16 Sebastian goes deep and talks about what people do when civil war ensues and how we go towards extremists. It’s a really interesting film, and Sebastian is also a fascinating guy. He actually wrote the book The Perfect Storm and a book called Tribe, which says that humans are at our best, our most happiest when we are in small groups fighting and struggling for a common goal. It’s a really interesting theme that he talks about and has a lot of parallels to war.

2:45 I hope you enjoy this episode. I’m a huge fan of Sebastian and his work. I’m also a huge fan of being here at the London Real World Headquarters, and inside the Academy we’re cooking up all sorts of great stuff. Most importantly, our life accelerator program that’s geared to set you up for 2018. It’s 18 different high performance habits. We’re going to meditate, do gratitude, change your diet, change your movement routine, change your relationships, change your outlook on life to make 2018 awesome.

3:15 So check that out inside the Academy, and now I leave you with Sebastian Junger and Nick Queston. Hello, I’m Brian Rose. My guests today are Sebastian Junger, the Academy Award-nominated director of the documentary film Restrepo, and Nick Queston, the owner of Goldcrest Films, a prominent movie distribution, production, and finance company. Sebastian, you’re the award-winning journalist who’s covered major international stories and the best-selling author of The Perfect Storm, which was made into a movie, and your new book, Tribe.

4:39 Nick, you produced over 35 films and have won two Emmy’s and have worked closely with Sebastian on his previous documentaries. Your latest collaboration is the feature documentary Hell on Earth, The Fall of Syria and the Rise of ISIS, that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival to critical acclaim. Rioting magazine said this is a powerful and important documentary, a movie of multiple achievements, and one of them is that it lets you look right in the face of this Hydra-headed paramilitary beast, Sebastian and Nick.

5:04 Welcome to London. Thank you. How and why? And when did you decide that you were actually going to go along with it? Because I know you were writing Tribe in New York, you’ve just come off of making Restrepo and Korangoff.

5:20 Why make this movie? Other than why, you do the how. So I’d covered wars for a long time after our friend Tim Heatherington was killed in Libya in 2011. I stopped frontline reporting. But we thought that the Arab Spring really needed to be sort of treated in a documentary, particularly Syria, because it was such a grave case.

5:49 It was such a bloodbath of all the Arab Spring countries. Syria was the one that just remained stuck in this cycle of violence and produced ISIS. And so we really wanted to do a kind of anatomy of a civil war, like why do civil wars start? How do they start? Why do they keep going? Why do they get worse?

6:07 What is the logic of each side as it confronts the other sides? And in the case of Syria, why did it produce something as just grotesque and ghastly as ISIS? And there are rational, understandable reasons for all of those questions. And we wanted to put out a film that was both human and compassionate and gave this sort of big picture understanding of how this happened. Okay, now the civil war started around 2011, is that right?

6:33 Yeah, in March 2011. And when did you decide? Okay. Well, we started to really take a serious interest around the middle of 2014. And we started our research in earnest at the beginning of 2015.

6:54 We started shooting towards the end of that year and then shot for about 18 months. We knew at the very beginning when we started to plot the film that the first there would be the How the House and Kids from the Deaf in the south of Syria. How their incarceration for graffiti in school with the words, your next doctor, how this turned into this civil protest for the kids from the locals. How this protest turned into a series of mass protests that turned into a civil war which turned into a sectarian jihad.

7:35 So we knew that’s where we wanted to go. So that was the first part of the film. We started to build the section on the Islamic State which forced us to go back to the American occupation of Iraq because that’s really where it all started. Now we saw a Verizon’s in Tunisia and Egypt and Libya, but those didn’t go as far. And you make a reference in the film as it’s like a bit like a barroom brawl, that the longer it goes on, the more people get involved.

8:01 I mean, I’m simplifying it there. But what happened here that made it get so out of control? I mean, that’s a good question. In Tunisia there was a minimum, the first of the Arab Spring countries, there was a minimum of violence. And the political leader of that country stepped down and there was a transition to something a little bit more democratic, which is what the people wanted.

8:27 Egypt sort of seesawed back and forth. Libya lapsed into a civil war and Syria was sort of the worst of the bunch. My guess is that if despotic leaders like Assad think that they have a viable option, that their immediate needs and their wealth will be protected and taken care of, they might consider stepping down and going into an exile in an allied country. I’m just guessing. When you have someone like Assad who thinks, who’s back is to the wall, who thinks if I make any concessions whatsoever, those concessions will eventually devour me and my family and everything, the entire power structure.

9:09 If they’re thinking that, they will fight to the death. And so when these democratic protests, this is the population asking for very reasonable things. When those democratic protests get met with gunfire, and then there’s more protests and more gunfire and more people die, when it escalates like that because the ruler is desperate and thinks there’s no alternative but to fight, when that happens, the population will eventually arm itself to defend itself from the security forces.

9:36 And eventually, if that goes on long enough, you’ll get radicalization and you’ll get forms like ISIS and al-Qaeda. And you also have to put it in context that you’d seen the rhetoric from America, from George Bush. The Syrian president felt that he was next on this list, that he would be the next Mubarak or the next Ben Ali or the next Qaddafi. And you’ve got to also imagine that Assad is just the figurehead of a Baathist institution that is, even if he was to be assassinated, you have a political structure that has facilitated this kleptocracy.

10:19 And there’s so much more at stake in this region as well with Iran and Hezbollah and Russia and America. It is the center of this world because it has access to the Mediterranean, which all the countries to the east of it desire. Right, and that stakes were never that high in Libya, Tunisia. No, geopolitically or geographically, they’re just not as important. When you play this film in Tribeca and even the subtext of the film, where the fall of Syria and the rise of ISIS, do most Americans say, oh, I never thought of it that way.

10:48 They don’t see the connection. I mean, I think for a lot of Americans, they see the violence coming out of Syria, and it’s just this sort of incomprehensible blur. They don’t keep the faction – I mean, how could they? Why would they? But they don’t know what the different factions are.

11:03 It all looks like senseless violence. Why are these people fighting? Why are they killing each other? And what the hell is ISIS? Why is it – you know, I mean, so what we wanted to do, again, is to make all that understandable.

11:16 I mean, it happened for understandable reasons. And if you can understand why something happens, you might be able to prevent it from happening the next time. And that’s – you know, we don’t say that in the film, but that’s sort of implicit in what we did, I think. It’s like, okay, this is – now we have a blueprint for how these things escalate. Next time this thing starts, let’s maybe make some different decisions.

11:37 Yeah, because the black flag of ISIS is pretty clear, and that’s like a story that’s very clear to tell to Americans and Britons. It’s like, oh, these are the bad guys. We’ve got to get them. But when you start talking about Syria, even if you’re well-led, it’s hard to understand or explain it to anybody. And that in itself is a political problem. It’s an everything problem.

11:56 I mean, look, Nick Tra – I mean, I never left the United States for this film. I was working on a book. I wasn’t going to do any more war reporting. Nick went over there, did an amazing job that he should talk about how you report inside Syria when you can’t get in there safely. But I mean, there were points where Nick was trying to explain to me how it all worked, and I’d be like, Nick, it’s too much detail.

12:20 I’m not following. It’s just like – There’s never too much detail. So I’d get lost, too. Yeah, and it was complex at first, but I started to see the patterns around a minute 30 or a minute 40. So now back to the how. How do you shoot this?

12:34 Because we’re seeing ISIS literally execute people in high definition. So you probably know you can’t get into the country. Or did you think you could? How do you attack this beast? We tried to do everything we possibly could and followed every lead we possibly could.

12:50 So we had cameras with jihadist groups. We had cameras with the family. We had a back door to an Islamic State media repository. So we pursued every lead we possibly could. But in the end, I can’t go into Syria.

13:14 So in order to cover the war from that point, we met with activists and journalists and trained them in the way we like to shoot. And then we would commission them to do stories. So we spent time with the white helmets. We spent time with the Arashim. We spent time with an orphanage. We spent time at a women’s center.

13:38 We spent time with the Kurdish troops. We spent time everywhere. And what we’re really interested in is not what most people are interested in. We bring back a lot of front line footage of combat. But that’s not really what people associate with it.

14:00 It provides a frame of reference. But the way someone makes a cup of coffee and the way someone cleans their teeth, you can see the pathology of how they’re going to deal with their day. And that becomes more interesting because their psychology is reflected on their face at that point. And we’re programmed to respond to these very small messages that are conveyed through human facial expressions. And this is kind of the family that told that story of emigrating.

14:29 That’s what you mean, really, that father and the wife. I gave them a two-page document that said, turn the camera this way. Shoot your children. Ask your children how they feel. Ask them what they did today. And then you tell us what you did today and how you feel.

14:45 And they did that in an incredible and pure and candid way. I think it’s as pure to documentary as you can get because also wherever you are in that part of the world, everyone has a smartphone. And when people pull out a smartphone, the behavior of people around them doesn’t change because you see them everywhere now. People walk down the street like this. No one’s behavior changes when they pull out a phone.

15:11 Whereas you pull out a video camera, people are aware that things are being shot and people’s behavior changes. So that’s why I felt it was particularly as close to being with the families you could possibly be. Did you get all your cameras back? Was that hard to retrieve them once you put them in these groups or gave them away? Tell me who it was. Oh, God. Lots.

15:35 It’s not like they check them out. Right. What was the thing that surprised you most when you saw that footage? You’re like, wow, I never thought we would get this. Well, they filmed themselves crossing the front lines of the Free Syrian Army, the Islamic State front line, and then the Turkish border. I mean, to actually film themselves crossing the border was immensely dangerous for them.

16:00 They were hiding underneath a canvas in the back of a cattle truck. Keep in mind that had they been discovered at an ISIS checkpoint trying to escape, they could well have all been shot. So the stakes were incredibly high. And these are people with their children. Imagine, for those of you that have children, imagine being in the back of a pickup truck thinking, if I’m stopped, we’re all shot. And that’s what they went through. And they were so brave and dignified.

16:32 They, despite their fear, they documented it because they knew it was important to document this kind of thing. Because it was happening. What was happening to them was having hundreds of thousands of other innocent people. And they did it. It was extraordinary.

16:46 We always sort of look at this, that sometimes people are prepared to pick up a rifle in a civil war. And some people are prepared to pick up a camera and show people the war. So people choose to fight their war in different ways. The baker continues to bake bread. The surgeon continues to operate on people.

17:06 Whatever it is, everyone has a different way to struggle against the regime. Both of you are known for making films that don’t judge the war or don’t judge the participants. I think you’re trying to explain the human behavior behind that. That makes you different, I think, among a lot of documentary filmmakers, which are, at the end of the day, making a judgment and trying to pass the judgment on to you a lot of times. How do you stay objective when you’re watching that footage of dead children being pulled out of the rubble and you’re seeing this over and over again?

17:39 How do you keep that? And is that something you talked about in the very beginning, saying, okay, we’re going to do this or this is the core value of a film? The problem with offering judgments in the film is that people always offer the obvious judgment. Killing children is wrong. Of course it is.

17:56 So you don’t have to state that overtly in a film. I mean, when you state that overtly, you strip your journalistic status from yourself and you become an advocate, which is fine, but you’re an advocate. If you simply show the horror, the atrocity of the killing of children, of the killing of anyone, you don’t need to diminish your point with a judgment. You just offer that and any sane, healthy, reasonable person will immediately come to the conclusion that this is intolerable.

18:26 And saying that it’s intolerable just weakens your point. And so really, in journalism, clarity, honesty, and less is more really conveys a message, most more effectively than a kind of opinion piece. I mean, our mantra could be, we don’t tell people what to think about. We don’t tell people what to think. We give people things to think about.

18:52 Is Assad a bad man and what will happen to that regime? Personally, I think Assad is the devil incarnate. But I don’t think anything will happen to this regime. I think they are, I think they are, it is the political system that is modern Syria. So even if you were to remove Assad, there is six principal families that run Syria.

19:26 And the Baathis party elected Assad a long time ago. And he’s backed by both Russia and Iran. You have friends like that, you’re not really going anywhere. And Iran now is on the verge of creating a land bridge from Tehran to the Mediterranean, which is something they’ve always wanted to be able to achieve. Qasem Soleimani is quite happy at the moment.

19:54 And you equate the governments to kind of organized crime organizations. They’re cartels. But again, if in the West you’re thinking, oh, it’s the government, it’s the president, it’s hard sometimes to equate that standard. Or even in Egypt, to understand the military has huge economic interest there, things like that. Do people get that when they watch the film?

20:13 Or do you think it’s so hard for people to make that association? I mean, you look at in Egypt that the army is more than 50% of the economy. Every bit of bottled water in Egypt is bottled by the army. It’s the largest landowner in Egypt. And it’s the same in Syria.

20:36 But it’s not just the army there, it’s the kleptocracy of the Malmouks and Malouks and Asads. If you want to get any building done, you’d have to talk to Ramy Malmouk. And then he owned the telecommunications companies. Everything went through these six families. And the same thing in Iran.

20:56 The Revolutionary Guard is a huge corporation that has a military wing. So I think it’s difficult for people to conceive that there is this convergence of commerce and militarism. One of the people we interview was an old friend of mine named Sarah Shays. And Sarah lived in Kandahar. She drove into Kandahar in Afghanistan in 2001 on a motorcycle by herself.

21:24 I mean, the Taliban was still there and rented a house and started a kind of advocacy within the civilian population. An extraordinarily brave woman. And she’s an academic, she’s studied a lot of this stuff. And what she’s realized is that if you look at all of the Arab Spring countries, if you look at all the really radical Islamic movements like the Taliban in Afghanistan, Shabaab, Somalia, ISIS, Boko Haram in Nigeria, all of them get traction with the population.

21:56 They’re extremist horrible organizations, but they get traction with the civilian population because they promise to end the corruption of the government. It’s corruption that gets reasonable good people to sign on with a radical movement that they don’t particularly like. Because they’re so desperate, they’re so crushed by the endless corruption of their own government and violence of their own government. And so it’s an important thing to remember if we talk in this country about terrorism, or in the United States about terrorism, and the threat to the West.

22:32 They’re really the root, I mean the root, a lot of this terrorism ultimately is the incredible injustice in these very, very corrupt countries. Often countries that we’re doing business with, we’re doing business with these corrupt regimes, we’re aiding and abetting them. And if we really want to protect ourselves from terrorism, one of the things we could do is actually really start at the bottom and fight corruption. And that would go a long way towards protecting us.

22:57 Speak on this kind of tribal issue and from like a humanity perspective when these radical groups come about and they kind of go back to the history, they go back to the public executions and you draw a lot of parallels to America’s history with that, Britain’s public hangings. And because that is very human phenomenon and even kind of things you talk about in your book, Tribe, is this something we naturally go back to and grasp at kind of like a clan level, a Dunbar number lower than 150? Is this something you were also trying to make a comment on in the movie?

23:30 Well, I mean, the violence perpetrated by ISIS is horrific and unforgivable and unthinkable really. And yet they’re doing it. And it’s easy to be horrified and you should be horrified by it. But in the same moment you must realize that that kind of public violence has been committed by the United States, by all the countries of Europe, by every country in the world, at some point in their history. If you publicly torture and kill one person in full view of everyone else, it means you don’t have to murder a thousand people.

24:10 Killing one person in public will cow the population so thoroughly that you actually don’t have to commit all those other murders in order to maintain control. And so governments and populations commit murder in public, horrific murder and torture precisely to strike fear into the population and control them. And so the lynchings of black men in the American South in the first part of the 20th century, those murders could have been done in private in the middle of the night, but they weren’t.

24:41 You were done in the middle of the town square. You know, I hung from a tree in the middle of the town square in front of the church by good Christians. And that was on purpose as it is with ISIS. And we just felt it was very important. I don’t know if that’s a tribal thing, but it’s very important to understand that that kind of violence has been used by all of us at one point or another.

25:02 And now we have Final Cut Pro and the Internet and now you see these videos and like I said, these well lit 4K executions and not to mention all the amazing propaganda that goes along with it, which just magnifies it. I mean, you look at the French Revolution, Great Flag, the guillotine and a catchy song. It’s a good recipe. What do you see when you see some of the multimedia propaganda? I mean, you’re filmmakers. When you see what they’re doing, what catches your eye?

25:30 You know, these are… you start to go, hold on a second, like you start to piece together what they actually… the little components start to break it down and go, this is a very sophisticated operation that they were running. And it was run very globally. It was not just… it’s not… it didn’t… the footage originated in the caliphate, but it was edited and disseminated elsewhere.

25:58 And also the propaganda wasn’t just militaristic and vengeful. There was a whole element of lifestyle to it that you’d come and you’d come to this jihadist utopia and you’d eat olives on the riverbank and your kids could play without the moral corruption that you see in the West. Like they sold this utopia. It was not just the come and die for Allah. Very intelligent stuff. You also assert that the violence that they saw on the ground in Iraq from the US involvement was a precursor to being maybe more likely to go ahead and commit these same acts. Is that what you were saying in the movie?

26:42 Yeah, we interviewed an Iraqi photographer, originally he was an architect, and then he started documenting destruction in Baghdad by American bombs of the city’s architecture and that turned him into a photographer. And now he’s this wonderfully articulate, amazing smart man. And we interviewed him about the origin of ISIS and he said, you know, the US forces came in and they introduced an extraordinary amount of violence into the society. Something like 100,000 Iraqi civilians were killed. They were bodies all over the place. Killed by Americans, killed by… as the society fell apart, killed by militia groups or whatever. They’re just bodies everywhere, all the time.

27:27 And it got Iraqis and even children accustomed to violence, to violent death. And he said that that prepared the ground for the incredible radical violence of ISIS. I mean it came out of a society that was already destroyed and inured accustomed to violence. What do we go from here? Well, what do I think is going to happen? I think there’s going to be… I think we were discussing this last night that it almost feels like a tide.

28:05 And the tide shifts and moves. You see the Shia militia pushing to Kirkuk now. You see looting. You see revenge killings. You see summary executions in Mosul.

28:20 You’re going to see the local population come together and arm themselves. They’re going to create a militia. They might find themselves a useful logo and a flag. They’ll use Islam to… as a rally and cry and we’re back to square one.

28:38 So different names, same human behavior. Yeah, I mean you could look at the waves of terrorist thought, whether it be the PLO in the 70s or Al Qaeda in the early 2000s and the Islamic State now. And what’s 4.0? I’m not quite sure. But the Americans are in Syria at the moment and if they don’t stay then there’s going to be chaos.

29:10 There’s already chaos, but it will be worse chaos. What’s worse chaos? Can it get worse? It was worse. It’s better than it was.

29:21 But, I mean, who knows? A friend of mine who works over there and has traveled extensively with the Peshmerga, with the Kurdish forces. He says that the Kurds have really overreached by voting for autonomy and that has triggered a pretty serious reaction by some very dangerous countries, by Turkey, by Iran, by Iraq. And that they may… the Kurds themselves may have… who have been sort of the good guys in all this, but they may have inadvertently triggered… started the process of a real regional war with all those countries involved.

30:01 Meanwhile, various militia groups that were banded together to fight ISIS along with the US inevitably are going to fight for control of the territory that was controlled by ISIS that have now been defeated. Now there’s a vacuum, they’re going to fight for control of that. And Assad is slowly taking back the country with the help of the Russians. And so, I mean, tragically for the people of Syria, this may not be the end point. Or the people of Iraq.

30:36 Speak on the refugee issue and the crisis. And is this something that’s going to manifest itself in the other 10 years in ways we can’t conceive of? My father was a refugee from two wars in Europe. His family fled the Spanish Civil War when the fascists took over and then fled Paris when the Nazis took over. Fascist both, obviously.

31:00 So I’m very sensitized to that issue. And my first wife was an immigrant to this country. I have friends from war zones who I helped get visas for, put them through school. They’re now American citizens. For me, I completely believe in and am in the product of immigration to the United States. It’s what makes the United States great. And one of the things.

31:25 And so, for me, violence will always push people out of those countries. They flee for their lives just like we would with our children if we were in danger. So the question is, what do peaceful, stable, wealthy countries owe the rest of the world? Do we owe the rest of the world to take desperate people in and take care of them to some degree? Like, is there a moral duty there or not? I don’t know the answer. Personally, I think there is. But even if you don’t make the moral case, you can make a completely pragmatic case that refugees and desperate immigrants who flood into neighboring countries that don’t have the ability to do that.

32:06 And so, the question is, how do we make the infrastructure, the economy, to take care of them, to absorb them? Those desperate populations then destabilize other countries, produce populous backlashes, then produce really intense political friction in those countries, even civil conflict. And then there’s more refugees and more chaos. And it really is in the interest of the West. It will cost less in the long run to actually proactively take care of some of these populations so that that sort of cascade of political chaos doesn’t just continue and continue.

32:43 And in the movie, you make the example of the men in France who went off on kind of a homicide rage. And then the fact that in certain countries in Europe, Muslim communities aren’t really assimilated or immigrant communities. Whereas in the US, there’s less of that. Can you just speak a little bit more on that point? Well, yeah, Mohammad Mera went on his murderous crusade in March 2011. He’s a different case though, because he went and trained in Al-Qaeda training camps in Pakistan.

33:16 And there is an issue that there are, according to the French intelligence, still dozens of trained jihadists that went to Syria who’ve returned that they can’t account for at the moment. So I think you’ve got to balance the refugee crisis with the security threat that comes from this continued lone wolf concept that has been propagated. Especially in your book, Tribe, you talk about how it seems humans are the most happy when we’re in a small plan in a struggle. And whereas when we’re back with SUVs and mobile phones in the US, we become high suicide rates, despondent, etc.

34:03 When you watch some of the footage and you see some of these groups and these men together in combat, does part of you think, I see inside them why they’re doing this? Because they feel alive, they feel connected. And is that a weird way to look at that documentary film? I mean, the people in Syria are fighting because to not fight means they’ll just be killed. So they’re fighting for very pragmatic reasons.

34:27 What my book describes is this sort of weird irony that we evolved as a species to live in very harsh conditions, facing grave threats in groups of 30, 40, 50 people that were very tightly affiliated with each other, very committed to one another. And that’s what we evolved for. We’re social primates. We’re monkeys, basically, right? And we are at our best when we’re in a small group facing an adversary. That’s our evolutionary past for the past half million years.

34:57 The irony of modern society is that as wealth goes up, individuality goes up. I mean, as wealth goes up in a society, the individual needs the group less in order to survive. I don’t need my neighbors to get through the day. There’s a police force to protect me. I get my food at the supermarket. I mean, you don’t need collective action, which is a great liberation from the group.

35:19 But what it does is it puts people in this sort of alienated place where they don’t have the emotional or psychological comfort of the close proximity of others that they depend on. You take men and put them in a platoon in combat, and all of a sudden you have that primordial closeness. You have it again. And young men and women respond to that closeness in very powerful ways. And then when you bring them back to the United States, they go into a kind of withdrawal from that.

35:49 So the irony, again, as wealth goes up in a society, the suicide rate goes up. It doesn’t go down. It goes up. The depression rate goes up. The PTSD rates go up. Anxiety goes up. It all goes up with wealth.

36:03 And then you have a catastrophe like 9-11 in New York, and the suicide rate goes back down. Violent crime goes back down. Pro-social behaviors come to the forefront. And it’s a survival mechanism that has served us well for hundreds of thousands of years. You described this. You showed this in the movie, you both were involved in Restrepo. Three years later, how do you view that film now? And does a film like that make it easier to make this film?

36:31 I haven’t watched it since Tim was killed in Libya in 2011. And he was my friend and brother and colleague out there. And we shot all the footage together. And then he lost his life in Libya on an assignment that I was supposed to be on with him last month. I couldn’t go. And I struggled for many years feeling quite guilty about it.

36:53 And I actually have not brought myself to watch the film again. But it was my first film. And I think what Restrepo did, and just the experience of being out there at OP Restrepo, was to understand very unequivocally that as horrible as war is, it also brings out some enormously noble and admirable qualities in people. I mean, the awful circumstances bring out the best human behaviors. And I kind of knew that, but I never quite understood it as fully as I did at Restrepo and in making the film afterwards.

37:34 And that has informed me in everything else that I’ve done. My films about war, but also just my understanding of life and what makes people feel meaningful and like they have purpose and they belong. It’s informed everything. A lot of Restrepo is in the book. Some of those ideas were born there.

37:54 Yes, absolutely. So what happens when you have no cell phone or for a prolonged period of time on top of a mountain? You actually think? Come up with ideas. Talk to me about your collaboration because you worked together for a very long time, which I think is quite rare in this industry. How have you managed to have this longevity and how do you work together?

38:15 Well, it’s varied. I functioned as a producer on the first films. I have a background as a filmmaker and Sebastian has a background as a journalist and became a filmmaker. But Sebastian’s a storyteller. And on this film, it worked very well because he was able to be super objective about the footage that I was getting from the field.

38:41 So I would spend hours and weeks and days trying to procure an interview or get a piece of footage or get passport records. We made a fake passport to Sebastian, a fake Syrian passport to show how fluid identity was in this region because we found an ISIS defector who had left the Islamic State on one identity, entered Turkey on a different identity and lived in the same country. We had a picture of him in Europe on a different identity. So we got the passport with his name and picture on it. But it didn’t really work in the film.

39:22 So we have some incredible video extras now, but it just didn’t drive the narrative forward. So it was, you know, we had creative discussions and we had a great collaborator as well, Mark Monroe, who helped us all see where the narrative force was in this film. Because we had to keep the emotionality of the film and the narrative thrust and I would digress. And it was hard to see what was important sometimes. It’s very hard to stay objective when you’re that close to the source.

40:01 Yeah, for me, I mean, it hadn’t cost me anything. I stayed in the United States. So I was looking at this footage without any personal attachment to it. And it was easier for me to see what was slowing the film down and what wasn’t and what would be needed and what wasn’t. So, you know, resulted in some pretty good arguments.

40:17 We had one discussion about the Hanano military base and then the Hanano was a very important moment in the Battle of Aleppo. And then I might got Sebastian to watch the footage and he’s like, oh, excellent. We must use this stuff. This is when they got all the arms and then he got it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Assad has been stockpiling Eastern Bloc weapons because he paid tribute to his Russian benefactors by buying weapons from them.

40:45 And now those are being used against him. Okay. The US’s role, Obama’s role for going in or not. Just thoughts on that. I don’t think it’s the going in or not on the red line. I think it’s the unilateral withdrawal from Iraq that was the mistake. Okay. That was the time to stop the that’s where the Islamic State was born. Okay.

41:06 That was the place to stop it. No one could have seen it snowball like. Yeah. I mean, keep in mind that Obama inherited two wars that the American public was completely sick of. He tried to intervene in Libya, which I think was the right thing to do, but the outcome wasn’t that great.

41:22 So I think he can be forgiven for not wading into a fourth Middle Eastern conflict with troops and airplanes and helicopters and everything else. The outcome is the same. Yeah. Yeah. But the I mean, to be fair to him as well, the withdrawal from Iraq. That was the time to stop the war.

41:42 The withdrawal from Iraq. That was started by George Bush. I mean, the negotiations for the withdrawal. The Iraqi government as a sovereign country demanded a withdrawal. We Bush tried to negotiate a an arrangement where American troops would be protected from prosecution for crimes and the Iraqi government would not give that to him.

42:09 Would not give it to Obama. And so there was no way to operate in that country without legal protection. And so Obama wisely decided to withdraw. He’s been sort of berated for that. But actually it was set in motion by his predecessor. Everyone seems to have forgotten that.

42:26 And to have violated the wishes of the sovereign country would actually really be an act of occupation that we would have paid dearly for. So, you know, we were checkmate when we entered Baghdad in 03. I mean, basically the original sin, in my opinion, in the opinion of a lot of people is a completely unnecessary invasion of Iraq in 2003. Still paying the price for that. Well, and then with disenfranchising of the assumed population by the back of buying it, I think that really is the withdrawal from the terrorist right.

42:59 What’s been the reception to the film? What surprised you the most that people told you about her coming back? Well, you know, I got a lot of I mean, you know, we had this dilemma. Like if you take one story and really go deep, it’s a very human way to tell a story. You get to know the characters, this one place, this one story. But you don’t get context. If you try to explain the context, the big picture, that’s great.

43:35 But it’s a bit of a history lesson and you lose the human part. Trying to strike a balance of those two, we wanted to do both. And trying to strike a balance was incredibly hard. It was a very complicated film. And the most gratifying responses I got were from people saying, you know, for the first time I understood the conflict and what happened.

43:55 And I was really drawn in to the sort of human, the human story in your film. And that to me, the week sort of pulled off that balance to me is like, wow, we got really, we got really lucky. And we did really good work. Like it was really that to me was like, so the ultimate proof that we’ve done something good. Yeah, I understand what was going on for the first time. I just got the Syria into Iraq and then taking the resources back into Syria. I never saw that before.

44:21 And then just to see people, I mean, they’re just like all of us. They just want their family to be safe. And then to see the night and day from Turkey to Syria, you know, a playground versus, you know, terrorized in a home. It’s just very real with that real footage as well. Again, even with a journalist in the room or a cameraman in the room, it would have altered that, right? So you’re getting something very pure.

44:44 And then don’t adjust. Oh, really? In Turkey either? Yeah, that’s spread spreading. Really? Is it hard there?

44:54 Yeah, there’s a rug cracked down on the press by Turkey. But no, certainly in Syria where those guys started, like, you know, it was inconceivable that someone would go there. What’s next for you two? What are the stories that need more looking into? We’re working on a multi-part series that uses the same techniques that we used here of taking a big picture subject and humanizing it through the experience of the people who are within that crisis.

45:23 And will it continue to be war documentaries or not necessarily? Or is that something you understand well and know how to tell that well? It doesn’t necessarily need to be about war, but what we’d like to do, as we said, is to find humanity in the darkest places. So we may go to some of the more interesting parts of the world and show how people live through these interesting times for them. You lost him a few years ago and you both made a film about it.

46:00 Was that a way to process that? And what was it like making that film and did it come to terms with that? For me, the emotional processing of his death just happened privately and naturally. And if anything was the opposite, like if you’re working in the field or in an edit room, you actually have to sort of put your emotions on hold a little bit and perform. And use your sort of like critical faculties to perform very complicated calculations about structure and plot and narrative and all that stuff.

46:36 And actually, you don’t process personal emotions while you’re doing that. So making the film was not a sort of therapeutic way of moving through my reaction to his death. It was a way, you know, if you go into combat with someone, you owe them something, right? You owe them, you have a duty to protect them, to help them. And that duty doesn’t end with their death. That duty extends beyond their death.

47:09 And all I could do for my friend Tim after he died was to try to honor his work and preserve his legacy. And I did that for him as best as I could, as I would have pulled him out of gunfire in different circumstances. Both are a kind of duty to your friend. The emotional healing happened in a different way. I mean, I think it postpones the grief. I think that you approach this subject of your friend professionally.

47:39 And it’s almost like he’s in the room with you and his spirit’s there because you’re listening to new clips of him that you didn’t have not seen and his voice is there. And for me, the most poignant moment was when I saw the film and I knew that was basically the edit of the film. So you knew that process was over and you had to move on. That was the closure. Can you just speak on journalism as being a journalist in the field? Because there was a point, I believe, where you were with Tim at Restrepo where one of the soldiers passed a gun to you and offered to give you a gun.

48:17 He said, here for protection. I think you two said, no, if I do that, I can no longer be an objective journalist. But you’re so close with them and it’s a dangerous spot. Can you explain that decision, that mentality of why you said no and how you view journalism in that? Well, there’s a sort of bright line in journalism that you don’t affect the story you’re covering.

48:43 I mean, you don’t become a part of the mechanism that you’re writing about. And so as soon as you’re carrying a gun with soldiers, you’re a combatant. And you can’t write objectively. You could write subjectively about the combatants and you’re one of them. Plenty of writers did that during the Spanish Civil War. They carried a rifle. They wrote wonderful books about it later.

49:08 George Orwell, etc. I mean, that amazing work. But that’s subjective. And if you want to be objective, which is the highest calling of journalism, it doesn’t mean you don’t have feelings. It doesn’t mean you don’t have opinions. But you can’t carry a gun.

49:24 And with those guys, we were, we had incredible, basically Tim and I had the ultimate security detail around us. It was like airborne infantry, heavily armed airborne infantry. What are we going to do with a couple of guns, right? Except accidentally shoot someone in the back. You miss those things?

49:48 Oh, enormously. I miss them and I’m glad I’m not doing it anymore. Because it’s so dangerous. Well, both. I mean, if you’re risking your life, what you’re kind of saying is that what I’m doing is the most important thing to me.

50:09 And I have a, you know, I’m married. I have a lot of people I love. I have a little eight month old daughter, like, to go overseas and risk my life would mean that what I’m doing is more important than all those people. That’s just not how I feel about myself. So you’re done with that?

50:25 I’m totally done with that. But you’re going to do that. We’ll get close to it. I don’t, the level of filmmaking that Restrepo entailed is not something that I would take lightly, but I’m not a frontline journalist. I don’t necessarily know you need to go all the way to the front line to tell the stories that we’re needing to tell.

50:48 Advice to upcoming documentary filmmakers? What do you tell them? Get out now. Get out now. Because it’s the dying industry or what?

50:58 Well, I think it’s actually the most vibrant part of the industry. I think the big feature films is actually dying because there’s no invention for the big studio to keep regurginating the same ideas and the same plots. I think documentaries actually really is pure cinema that, you know, you’re it’s something that you can go out and do yourself. Like Tim Sebastian went out and shot Restrepo. They came to me to help finish the film.

51:22 It’s it’s the it really is a very pure form of cinema. And it’s if you’re looking at cinema as being an artistic form, then you’re talking about how to provoke an emotional reaction. And you can do that in documentary if you maintain your ethical integrity. If you do tell the truth, then you you don’t fabricate your footage. I think you undermine yourself enormously when you start to do recreations and pass them off as as reality. And once you do that, you’ve lost your audience.

51:58 OK, so that’s something to avoid upcoming. OK. And ultimately, this has to be a good business and you had a thousand hours of footage. You had a team going through it. So you have to think about, OK, how can this be viable? Because most documentary films aren’t economically viable. So you have to be creative. I know you work with Nat Geo and things like that.

52:16 Is that where you kind of come in to think about how can we make this doable? Well, normally that would be how I come in, except for the tables were turned and he had to cut me off. I kept on shooting. I was I was I was obsessed of getting every interview and every player. And I collected. I was like it was like I was I had a sticker book and I was putting the stickers in and I’ve got I’ve got this FSA commander and this FSA commander and this general and this politician and the leader of the occupation and the prime minister.

52:46 And I got the president. You know, there’s like five presidents that we interviewed that didn’t make it to the film. You lost yourself in this film. I had to cut him off at one point. I was like a drunk in a bar. But you’ve been there as well in other films where you’re inside of it. Yeah, I mean, I never I don’t quite have the obsessive qualities that he does. So no, he really needed some psychological help. Will there be a director’s cut three and a half hour?

53:10 There is. I’m still shooting. It’s not over. I haven’t seen a fat lady singing. So there won’t be a part two or who knows? No, I mean, there’s some additional footage we have online. And yeah, I mean, you go to the Facebook page, which is hell on earth on Facebook or Instagram, which is hell on earth. The movie, there’s all sorts of stuff that you can pick up. There’s a white helmet story we have.

53:40 The passport story we have the continuing stories of the family. They were arrested by the Coast Guard. They were detained in a in a gym for 10 days that with three other 3000 other Syrians on the day of the treaty agreement between the EU and Turkey. And what other films are there? We have a film about the Alquids Hospital in Aleppo that was bombed by the Russians four times. We have film about an orphanage that looks after the orphans in Aleppo. Like there’s lots of interesting stuff that you can see.

54:27 Just to finish on this proxy war idea. I mean, this is an ultimate proxy war. Other noted ones were say Vietnam. For people that don’t understand that concept and the fact that there’s all these huge countries kind of involved in this place and how by definition it can almost get out of control and maybe uncontrolled by those proxy people. What can you say to kind of explain that to people? And how can we avoid that? Or is that impossible?

54:52 I mean, there’s a lot of powerful countries that have an interest. They’re involved in civil war and have an interest in it. Russia, Iran, some of the Sunni Arab states, the United States, Iraq. I mean, so one of the reasons for intervening, even at some cost intervening early in the civil wars, is that it stops it at the local level and keeps it from growing into something where you have major international interests involved. And once you get to that level, it’s very hard to sort of pull people out of the bar fight.

55:29 So eventually civil war is just sort of run out of energy. But it can take a while. I mean, the Afghan civil war is basically still going on. And it started with the Russian invasion in 1980. I mean, a couple of generations. I have to think eventually it’ll stop and likewise with Syria, but we may still be going at the end of our lives, I’ll put it that way.

55:59 I mean, the war in Afghanistan led to destabilization of the Soviet Union. Right. Because they lost so much there, right? It was one of the factors that pulled it down. And America’s interest there in the future, will there be more happening? Or I mean, Trump did some things and then there hasn’t been much talked about when it comes to Syria.

56:21 I don’t think, I’m not sure we have like huge economic interest. They might disagree. I don’t know. But we certainly have an interest in containing terrorism. And terrorism is a very real threat.

56:33 And to the extent that broken societies, rogue states, rogue nations are a sort of incubator of terrorism. Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan. To the extent that that’s true, Syria could join the ranks of terrorism incubators and could be really dangerous. So I think our more primary interest right now is to make sure that does not happen. I mean, Syria already incubated the Bataclan terrorists.

57:08 Yeah, that’s right. What about a documentary about North Korea? Is that something you thought about? North Korea you can’t go to. I don’t know if you want to do that twice.

57:20 I mean, you can go to North Korea and you can take a sort of North Korean safari and you can go skiing and you can take a basketball team there and play the locals. But to get some real perspicacity about the situation there would be difficult. And Hezbollah or Iran, I feel like no one has ever really explained that phenomenon recently. Hezbollah has evolved in the last 20 years to be from a terrorist organization into basically one of the most powerful non-state militias in the region.

58:07 And as a political force in itself now. We had some discussions with the office of Hassan Nasrallah. I think Hezbollah is fascinating. I’m not sure quite how to tell the tale of Hezbollah, but that’s potentially interesting. And also the Qasim Soleimani and the Revolutionary Guards is another fascinating of Iran.

58:35 And that combined with the Shia militia from the south of Iraq, the Khasti Shabi, that presents a pretty fearsome trifecta of militias. That’s an interesting story. Do you ever worry about your safety? I don’t want to be. I’m not doing that anymore. I sometimes worry about him.

58:59 But also you two are very public figures in movies that upset a lot of people. Oh, in that sense. Will you upset some people?

59:11 I thought that was just me at home. We only are publicists.

59:17 Do you get hate mail and hate from lots of people? Do you get trolled on Facebook by what looks to me like obviously propagandists for the counter cause. But we’re not here to advocate a position. We’re just here to show what we found. So I just sort of ignore them and say, well, you’re not there. You don’t know. I saw that. I believe it to be true.

59:41 Yeah, I don’t particularly see a threat to my physical safety in my work. I think you need to. I mean, in terms of like the jihadist world, I think you actually really have to insult the Prophet Muhammad. I mean, you really have to commit something that would merit a fatwa and then you’re in. But making a political film about the why, I don’t think they care.

1:00:05 Okay. You wanted to add something? No, I didn’t want to add anything. I don’t want to add anything. Okay, fair enough.

1:00:13 Gentlemen, I always ask everyone that comes here just a couple questions at the end. I’ll start with you, Sebastian. If you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old you, give that young man a little bit of advice. What would you tell him to do? Well, where was he, by the way?

1:00:27 I’d tell him to not be so shy with girls, that they want you to talk to them. Just walk right on up there and say hi. And I would say, leave Boston. It’s not a very interesting city. Don’t spend your 20s there. Go out into the world more quickly than I did.

1:00:43 Okay. You got into a war much later, 10 years ago? Yeah, it was my early 30s. Okay, all right. What about you?

1:00:51 I went to NYU and I promoted nightclubs with my roommates at the time who were big DJ’s, Stretch Armstrong and Velveeta. So I was having a good time. I went on to direct a lot of music videos. But I should have talked to more girls. I should have taken his advice.

1:01:12 On that same note, best filmmaking advice either one of you has ever received or music video making advice. I’ll start with you. Filmmaking advice, make films. Don’t talk about making films. Go and make them. Go out, get your camera, find a subject that intrigues you and start making a film.

1:01:29 And everyone talks about making films. Film students are like, well, how did you start? I was like, start by making a film. Otherwise, you’re just, you know, you’re a critic. Be a filmmaker.

1:01:40 I think the most powerful films are journalism, journalistic films that portray the world in a very deliberately clear, honest, powerful way. But do not express an overt opinion. I think when you express an overt opinion in your journalistic work, you’re actually undermining the force of that opinion. You’re doing yourself a disservice. Okay. Last question. What keeps you both awake at night? What’s the one thing that kind of bothers you or that you’re worried about with this world?

1:02:11 I mean, I’m not going to sound very original here, but I feel like we’re entering a kind of post enlightenment period when, where facts and data actually don’t really mean very much anymore. And everything’s relative. And that’s an extremely dangerous thing to do. We would never fly airplanes or consult with doctors when we’re sick who were not basically able to do that. They’re not making their decisions on data and on reason and on logic.

1:02:46 Bring the leeches. That’s right. And yet we run our countries that way and they will destroy us. I mean, bullets will not take down the United States, but words will and we’re on our way. Is this a Trump phenomenon or this is just before that?

1:02:59 No. It started, it started when it was pointed out to the Bush administration that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And the response, I think from Rumsfeld, was that journalists are stuck in a reality-based world. But there was another world, a political world where everything was malleable. It started then, the reality-based world as a disparaging remark about journalists, like they’re stuck in reality. It started then. And Trump capitalized on it.

1:03:36 And then it moved on to the outrageous spectacle of Sarah Palin. And that we didn’t in Sarah Palin see Trump coming is to our shame, really. We should have seen it. What about you? I look, I mean, I think that Sebastian sums up the term end of the age of enlightenment. And I look at the various, you know, there was Pax Greco, Pax Romanus, Pax Botanicus, and we were in the middle of, or maybe towards the end of Pax Americanus. So that, I think it’s, you know, every empire has an end and potentially we’re at the end of this empire.

1:04:18 Gentlemen, thank you so much for the time. The film is Hell on Earth. How can people find it at this point in watching? In the UK, they can watch it on National Geographic Channel at 9pm on November the 5th. It’s on iTunes. It’s on Google Play. It’s on, I think it’s on YouTube.

1:04:39 Got up there somehow. No, you can buy it for $2.99. But I think it’s probably up there too. Okay, fantastic. And they can see all the additional content on our Facebook page.

1:04:49 Okay. And no other film planned yet. You’ll keep us posted. No other books planned yet. Not yet.

1:04:55 Okay. Well, on London Real, we say it’s about the journey. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed the film for the first time. I feel like I understand what’s happening in Syria. And I like to think myself fairly intelligent and politically astute. And I still didn’t know that.

1:05:07 I couldn’t explain it to my 10 year old. So now I feel like maybe I can a little bit better. And so, yeah, thank you for explaining that and taking all the time. I know what it’s like to make a documentary film and how it can drive you insane. And so, you know, thank you for making that and I appreciate the time.

1:05:22 Thank you so much. Okay, thanks so much.

1:06:15 It’s Chris Eubank, Junior. How do you explain his prowess in the ring? Junior has that obsession, that genius, that magic. Genius is obsession, but it’s in one area. You studied the sweet science for so much of your life. How do you walk away from it? Do you miss it?

1:06:41 You can’t walk away from it. I am it. And even when I dance, really unboxing, the credit belongs to the man who’s actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood. The one who strives valiantly. What was the worst day of your life and how has it shaped you as a human being?

1:07:05 When I fought Nigel Ben, I stood like this. It was to mask this. The risk must be taken. That’s why you are London realist. That’s why we’re here.

1:07:25 We’re tired of sitting still, watching it happen, happening for others. Let’s do it.