Filmmaker Q&A: Garrett Scott

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LU: How did your own views about the war evolve through the experience of making the film?

GS: My stance against the war has never changed. If anything the sense of futility and waste are only magnified for me.

LU: What kind of response are you getting -- from critics? audiences? buyers/distributors? Are any of them having difficulty with it because it's not easy to peg as a pro- or anti-war film?

GS: The response from critics and audiences has been overwhelmingly fantastic. We've had great, rewarding reviews all over the country. But from the beginning distributors have been very shy to pick up the movie. There are two reasons for this: Gunner Palace, and the war as a 'played out' media subject.

Gunner Palace was completed about five months before our movie was. The events in both films are about five months apart. GP had a huge theatrical release, with lots of publicity and tanked at the box office. The conventional wisdom was that if had poisoned the market place for any other documentary about soldiers. Although the movies were very different, ours was deemed a 'non' event.

This first point was seen as a given in a media world saturated by the war. The war was seen as a depressing subject, a drag. People want to pay their ten bucks to be entertained, to escape from the real world. Everyone had already seen Iraq on TV, this conventional wisdom goes.

We were dead in the water, until a little independent distributor, Rumur releasing stepped up to the plate and put the movie in theaters.

These are polarized times, and there is obviously a lot of anger about the war in this country. The ideologically motivated, whether on the left or the right, always accuse us of making propaganda. This happens once or twice out of every one hundred viewers. It's always pretty obvious that both sides wanted us to make a different movie. The left accuses us of making an 'embedded movie (as though we ever claimed to do something else)' heroicizing the US occupation, which will always work as propaganda supporting racist military expansion and imperialism. The complaint is that we should've made a movie about the Iraqis, and that this film should be more of a 'framed' condemnation.

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