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08/02/2007Film Festival Q&A... with John Laurence
John Laurence, director of "I Am An American Soldier," talks on his cell phone prior to the start of the Traverse City Film Festival opening ceremonies Tuesday. TRAVERSE CITY — John Laurence first began reporting on wars in 1965 when CBS hired him to be their foreign correspondent in Vietnam. Over the next six years, he spent three tours in the country dodging bullets, seeing colleagues and soldiers die around him and reporting back to the United States on exactly what was happening in a country that many people had never heard of. But despite returning home with posttraumatic stress disorder, Laurence decided to return to the battle field, which he did on numerous occassions over the next 30 years. And on the first day of the War in Iraq, in 2003, Laurence arrived in Kuwait City to tell yet another story. He left after several months but returned in September 2005 with a camera crew in tow, and embedded himself with the 187th Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division. His new documentary, "I Am an American Soldier: One Year in Iraq with the 101st Airborne,” follows the soldiers of Charlie Troop, with whom he lived with for 14 months. R-E: You and your crew funded the film with your own money. What was so compelling about the story that you were willing to do that? Laurence: The knowledge that no one else was getting this kind of access. When you get that kind of access you have to move immediately, so there was no time to write funding proposals to the institutions that make money available to documentary filmmakers. R-E: What kind of effect does that have on you in being right in the middle of the conflict? Laurence: It has a lot of effect. That's such a big question, I'll try to break it down, deconstruct it. There are psychological effects. There are physical effects. The physical effects are that it wears you out being in war zones, really wears you down. You can try to stay fit, but it has an immensely powerful effect on your physical well-being. It's very tiring to have to be that alert whenever you are in a war zone. The psychological aspects of being in wars, for me at least, makes me a much more sensitive person to the suffering of others, because once you've seen someone living there or terribly hurt and in pain and suffering, it triggers something in your own humanity that you wouldn't normally be conscious of...It's a different reality all together, and it speaks of murder and death, injury, and pain and suffering of every kind, and that stays with you long after you've left the war zone. R-E: How do you walk the line between getting close enough to the soldiers so that they'll trust you, while still maintaining the distance that you need to be able to present a balanced view of what's going on? Laurence: One, you're recording everything and you're doing interviews and you don't pull your punches in the interviews, you ask all the questions including the really tough ones and ones that reveal to the soldiers what you're doing ... The second part is ... always making it clear that you're outside the military system. R-E: Before you went in to Iraq, did you have an opinion about the war? Laurence: I personally thought it was a good idea to get rid of Saddam Hussein. I didn't believe the crap, and it was crap, it really was bad information, about weapons of mass destruction. R-E: Have your opinions about the war and the troops being there changed since you've gone over there? Laurence: They've more or less changed in parallel with the American public's attitude. We're not going to win this war. I believe that now. R-E: What do you hope people take away from the film? Laurence: A better understanding, a more complete awareness, insight, and appreciation of what American soldiers are doing, are experiencing, are suffering in this war. R-E: Do you think you will ever go back and do another war story? Laurence: Not in a war zone. I'm done. That's it. It's my last, best effort to tell people what the war is. It's important to know this, for me to know this. Every generation has to learn about war all over again, about how horrific it is, how expensive it is in every way, to the public, to the military, to the civilian populations of other countries. Every American generation has to learn it again. It can't be taught. And so these people who got us into this war have learned.
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