Partners
Dennis admired the work of film editor Fiona Otway, particularly her contribution to the 2006 documentary Iraq in Fragments by filmmaker James Longley. Fragments documented civilian life in Iraq during the US occupation, anti-US insurgency and sectarian violence. Otway’s pacing, tempo, attention to visual detail, and calm approach to storytelling appealed to Dennis. In February 2010, he contacted her, sent footage and they had a series of phone conversations. The two met on February 27, 2010 in London. They went through an hour-long assembly of the footage Dennis had shot. They discussed his narrative idea. After further discussions, Otway agreed to work with Dennis.
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Fiona Otway
Otway zeroed in on the central challenge of the project: how to convey a highly subjective experience while trying to let the footage speak for itself. “We were trying to create a psychological portrait of war, and so that involved taking the audience into the main character’s head,” she says. [11] Dennis wanted to present Harris’ experience of going to war and coming home as viscerally as possible, to try to immerse the viewer in Harris’ psyche.
It was a daunting task, but Dennis had a major advantage: in telling Nathan’s story, he was also telling his own, similar, story. “My own subjective experience played a large part in how we told Nathan’s story,” he says. Dennis never asked Harris what he was feeling, and Harris saw very little of the footage. Instead, Dennis told Harris’ story through the lens of his own experience. Dennis felt this would result in a more complete, truthful and transparent story. He explains:
I wanted to try to combine these two worlds of the deserts of Afghanistan and the malls of North Carolina into one experience. Because that’s how I had experienced it. You’re dropped from one into the other, and it’s extremely disorienting. And because those experiences in Afghanistan were so traumatic, you had these very intrusive memories that can come up at any point.
In fact, both men suffered from psychological trauma, though neither had been formally diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Harris also suffered from a traumatic brain injury caused by blood loss. Dennis immediately recognized Harris psychological trauma, but it was quite a while before Dennis realized that he himself had a deep psychological injury. Dennis, who had been embedded with frontline combat troops for a total of 12 months, was going through the emotions and routines of his normal life, but inside a cocoon of numbness. He also had extreme nightmares. Eventually he recognized his own symptoms: emotional detachment, disorientation, a heightened sense of alertness, and the inability to turn that alertness off. He clarifies:
In Afghanistan, you never feel safe. There’s no front line. It’s this 360-degree battle space and at no point can you really completely let your guard down. And so that continues on when you come home. Even the faintest of sounds that resemble an AK-47 or a mortar can instantly bring you into this heightened state.
Harris struggled with the daunting task of describing what he had been through to people who hadn’t experienced it, says Dennis. Similarly, Dennis had difficulty describing his experiences, but the process of making the documentary proved helpful for him. Watching the footage brought up difficult memories, but reliving them in the safety of his home was therapeutic. It let him retrain his body so that he didn’t have to be in survival mode all the time. “Just the process of talking through all of these experiences in the most intimate detail with Fiona was, in hindsight, a very therapeutic process,” says Dennis.
[11] Author’s telephone interview with Fiona Otway on October 11, 2012. All further quotes from Otway, unless otherwise attributed, are from these interviews