E-MAIL THE AUTHOR | ARCHIVES By Christopher Stipp

March 25, 2005

GUNNER PALACE: AN EXCLUSIVE LOOK AT ONE OF THIS YEAR’S BEST REVIEWED DOCUMENTARIES

Before we get going with the meat of today’s EXCLUSIVE interview with Michael Tucker, who, I have to state for the record, was just an amiable guy who genuinely has a passion for making movies, I have to give special shout-outs to all the people who sent in an email to win a one-sheet for the new flick, KUNG-FU HUSTLE.

Winners will be picked this weekend. There were so many good, whacked-out, totally nonsensical bon mots of all artistic varieties I have to resort to picking the winners at random and am planning posting some of the winning entries next week, aqui, in this here column.

I know it sounds Pat Sajak-ey but, really, thanks to everyone who wrote in looking for free schwag. It warms the heart to know that there are people who read this thing…or who are out for free schwag. Either way, I don’t mind buying an audience; I have low self-esteem so it’s all par for my course.

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There’s a certain level of chaos that one expects to find on a battlefield. When it was WWI, the lines clearly defined with you on one side of the field and the other, an enemy or ally. WWII saw men storming the beaches of Normandy to gain position and overthrow the visually stark Nazi regime with their Kaiser helmets and black swastikas. In Vietnam, things got stickier when you couldn’t really tell who was a Charlie and who was just an innocent man out tending to his land. In Iraq, today, soldiers mingle in the general population without any way of knowing if the person they just passed on the street is strapped with enough C-4 to take out a good sized radius or if the car that just pulled up along side of them is about to detonate.

We have troops over there losing their lives at too quick a clip to even think that this war is over. How many people here worry about someone who’s over there, knowing full well that this war isn’t finished, and that it still rages on? Nearly every troop stationed in the streets of Iraq is in danger from insurgent activity, suicide bombers are at the ready to blow themselves apart if means taking out one of our own men, and there is always the ever present reality that a firefight could erupt at any moment.

What GUNNER PALACE does, what it effectively manages to be, is a scrapbook of sorts, looking at the soldiers who are just going about doing an extraordinary job under extraordinary circumstances.

The opening sequence of the film grabs your ears with the sound of popping, like small wooden marbles ricocheting off a hardwood floor, the sound deathly soothing, and the jittery camera moves let’s us all know we’re in the middle of a war zone.

Welcome to Iraq.

Also, what’s especially stunning about the way this film is constructed is that there isn’t a discernable bias anywhere to be found. This movie is pure devotion to what it is, exactly, that we’re just not seeing back here at home. The men you see in this film appear fearless, thick fortresses of strength and seemingly impervious to the vicissitudes of what war does to the average psyche. These aren’t average men, these are soldiers. However, there are moments, real moments, when their guard comes down ever so slightly and you sense the real emotions that flow just beneath all that Kevlar. It’s enough to make your heart break but it’s not enough to turn away. The film moves at such a quick clip it’s amazing that the movie’s only 86 minutes long.

There are movies that really strike a chord somewhere with people but GUNNER PALACE is a film that plays entire melodies that are at the same time exciting, thrilling, and engrossing. You will not see a more effectively created documentary than this one this year; GUNNER PALACE is the documentary you never knew you needed to see.

I could go on but I want to jump right in with my interview with GUNNER PALACE’s director, Michael Tucker, and let him give you an idea of why this film needed to be made. His comments appear right below mine, which are denoted by bold type, and if you haven’t seen GUNNER PALACE genuinely make an effort to go see it. I can make a 100% guarantee that this movie will humanize every bloodless, soulless, sterile news report we’re all being fed by a media that doesn’t see a need in putting faces to this conflict unless you’re one of the unlucky ones who have to go home in a coffin.

So, thank you very much for making the time to talk with me today.

Yeah, we’re trying to make time for everybody. Things are going very well. There’s been a lot of interest.

How has that been, when just a few months ago this movie was just this indie film. Now all of a sudden…. Well, there’s just been so much press. An unheard of amount of press. I just saw the press book. It’s pretty shocking. I mean we’ve just shot like 9 packages for CNN and it seems like we’re on every single CNN show that exists. I’ve been on FOX four times. And I’m staying in New York for another whole week just to do all the network stuff leading up to the [anniversary of the] war.

Do you currently live in the States?

I live in Berlin. I’m leaving on the 21st and that would be about 8 weeks worth of press we did.

I’ve been reading many of the reviews and they’ve all been very glowing.

Well, there’ve been some crappy ones. But, you just have to expect that. The movie is not for everyone. Myself, I couldn’t get to sleep last night because I was waiting for Ebert.

3 ½ stars. He liked it. He was really positive. It was a glowing review.

The glowing ones are great. Most of them are B, B pluses, there are a lot of good ones and, of course, there are a few stinkers.

Well, the ones who didn’t like it, did they point out something, consistently, that they just didn’t like about it?

They don’t like the chaos.

I mean, that was very intentional and deliberate, but I wouldn’t even say that it was consciously intentional and deliberate but that was just the way it is. You know what I mean?

Absolutely.

There aren’t too many ways you can say…how many ways can you approach this? Like trying to enforce some false structure would be foolish. It’s almost like the reality bothers some people and they want you to enforce some reality upon it. Does that make sense?

Yes it does.

I mean, it is what it is. That’s the way it is and some people expect something different. And documentary is such a weird form. I don’t do things like wait for people to come out of a door. I just don’t operate that way. It’s exactly like it happens from a certain perspective. It’s like I would never ask anyone to do something again, but most documentary filmmakers do.

I’d like to ask a question. I was watching PBS’ Frontline news program a couple of weeks ago and they followed some soldiers around to see what was happening in Iraq and it blew my mind to watch these men and women doing their jobs for an hour and a half. At one point in your film you have a soldier saying, “I don’t think a lot of people in America have a good idea what’s going on out there.” Now that you’re here, watching news reports and how the news on the war is repeated, do you see some validity in that statement?

Yeah, certainly.

I think it’s great that people like Frontline are out there doing those stories but then you have to ask yourself why aren’t network news doing that?

In the 60’s it would be Dan Rather and Morley Safer recording their 90 minute thing and it would be prime time but it’s not like that anymore and so, again, people…they’re being sold the vision of this war that it’s not. People are thinking about the war in a way that’s inaccurate. They don’t understand the complexity and the horrors of it. People just don’t understand the horrors of the violence.

I only watched parts of that Frontline piece because I can only watch the downloads.

It’s so difficult to capture. And I think I saw one scene where a vehicle is hit with an IED.

Yeah, the camera starts to jiggle, there’s screaming…yelling and confusion.

And I have lots of mixed feelings about that. I mean on the one hand you want to get that shot but then if you do get that shot it means that your vehicle got hit. I mean hopefully those guys are driving uparmored now so their survivability is high but when we were out driving we were out in these highback Humvees, basically pick-up trucks with no cover, no nothing. So, when the guys would get hit…it gets pretty messy and you just don’t want it to happen.

The first time I was with them we used to roll, we kept the camera rolling all the time, just waiting for an IED to go off and after a while you’re thinking, “And what am I wishing for here?”

That’s a weird thing and I am glad that stuff is out there because no one else is doing it.

And you’re right. There isn’t anyone who is. There’s people out there reporting on things that are going on but they aren’t bringing the war home in a way that’s tangible or meaningful in a way that tells a story about what is going on over in Iraq.

However, your film is real short. Was that a conscious decision to make it this length, 86 minutes, or could you have made it longer?

I think we had to be selective because you could only show…it’s about contrast. What’s going in the day, what’s going on in the night and so much of it is similar and so the big thing was to have contrast and variety of things that are going on so you’re showing all the facets.

And I think a lot of the negative reviews…the thing for people to understand…they think I’m focusing on downtime or that’s what they see, not seeing that the whole…you’re talking about guys who are deployed for 400 or something days and most of it is pure boredom punctuated by violence and terror and fear and all these things and you somehow you have to get all of this into a form that people can understand. It’s very choppy and fragmented and chaotic and disjointed. There is no narrative arc. If there was a narrative arc the war would be over and everyone would be home but they’re not.

Did you go in there with any kind of expectations about what you find out about what these guys’ lives are like in Iraq?

I didn’t think it would be so much about the lives of these guys. I saw it at the beginning as much about what Frontline was doing but I saw there was something relatively infantile about attempting to do that considering the kind of resources we had.

Someone like Frontline has money to throw at this and they’ve got multiple people but as one person I’ve got to decide, again, I can’t be out rolling 24 hours a day, waiting for an IED. Eventually, the numbers will catch up to you.

Did you ever shop this project around or did you go into this knowing you were going to do it by yourself?

In the beginning, I showed it to a lot people but, unfortunately, interest and word just wasn’t that high and now suddenly the interest is high which is great.

We were totally on our own. I didn’t even have a wrap until July. Telluride and Toronto took it and that’s when we were able to make some things happen really fast. It was such a painful process.

And I think some people looking at the independent film world from the outside don’t realize how lucky you have to be. Right place, right time, all completely dependent on festivals and all completely dependant on reps. There are like four reps in the whole world who can sell a documentary and you have to have one of them.

Now, I don’t have a problem giving it up for Palm. I think they’re a wonderful company who put out a lot of great films, small films, which need that certain push. How did you come upon them? Did you go to them, did they come to you?

One of my reps had a relationship with them. They are one of the first companies who saw it and showed an interest and it was almost very immediate. Right between Telluride and Toronto they made an offer and for a lot of reasons it just turned out to be the best offer and I am glad that we did it. I mean we’re already getting the DVD ready and you can see they have a lot of strengths in that area. And they’ve put so many resources into the marketing of such a small film. It’s amazing how much press this movie’s got.

Initially I loved the look of the film by just watching the trailer and I thought that this would be another good looking film that not a lot of people are going to know about or go out to see because it’s just this independent production. In the last few months it seems that GUNNER PALACE is the word on so many moguls’ tongues.

It’s been great but it’s also hard to deal with because criticism is so hard to take. Also people forget you’re dealing with a real subject matter, it’s a documentary, and that it was done totally independently.

I’m sure like Rodriquez, like in EL MARIACHI, probably could have thought of 10,000 things he would have done differently but considering he made the entire film with his own money you have to respect it.

It’s really infuriating, but funny in a way when you see a movie like BE COOL get panned, while our film is getting rave reviews by most every top critic, and you think to yourself, “Well, gee, what if I had 70 million dollars?” I mean how can you make a crappy movie with 70 million dollars when you could make 120 fantastic movies with 120 million dollars?

Do you think that’s a function of your having your own idea, your own germ, for a movie whereas someone with that 70 million already has a marketing idea in their head even before an inch of film has been shot?

It’s all based on passion. That’s why when you go to film festivals it’s still great. You see all these really passionate ideas.

I’m the least critical person on the planet earth and I can watch almost any movie and see value in it. They’re such difficult things to make. When I look at critics I’m just…there’s that bumper sticker Mean People Suck…that describes critics. It’s so easy to criticize someone else. It’s not like someone else criticizes their criticism. But I think people in general are very forgiving, and keep things in perspective, and I think that’s why 70 million dollar movies get panned. People will go, “Well how could you make a bad movie with that much money?”

At one point in watching these guys go out into the streets of Baghdad, or wherever it is they’re instructed to go, it seems that a common theme is that these guys, on a daily basis, make peace with their maker in thinking that, “Today may be my last.” Did you find that ethos was echoed in the guys you talked about and, if they did, how did they cope with that?

Yeah, the second time I went there, people were saying essentially that but in a different way.

There’s a scene where one of the batteries has just been hit, their jeep, by an IED. At one point, before, when one of the kid’s describing their armor around their vehicle and they’re laughing about it and as they laugh a couple of the soldiers fall on the ground, they’re laughing so hard they have stomach cramps. It’s that same…I think it’s their response is to laugh it off but when you got them by themselves you could see they were really terrorized by it.

How young were these guys?

I think the youngest was 18.

So what was your initial reaction to seeing these young guys, fresh out of high school, holding machine guns and doing military operations? Was it a little surreal?

Well, I enlisted in the army when I was 17 so, to me, it seemed normal. I could relate to them because I realize how stupid I was. And not so much stupid but you can’t really expect a 17 year old, no matter how much training you have, you just look back and realize how screwed up you were when you were that age. You think you have it figured out but you don’t so I always cut those guys a little bit of slack.

It’s definitely a difficult place to be. I mean I’m 38 years old and I’m pretty emotionally mixed up about it all, so they definitely are.

So how do you feel now that you’re out, having spent a little time away from Iraq, and finishing up the movie?

Oh, there’s a curiosity to go back and I’m going to in a couple of months. A lot of it is to just stay current and that Frontline piece was shot, when, November?

Yeah it was.

It’s a very different time now just to see how things have changed. It’s the same kind of violence, but, now, it’s intensified. I was just looking at the causality statistics the other day and it’s just IED after IED after IED. And it’s just mind-boggling what the kind of operations the insurgents are doing on a daily basis.

It just seems to be intensifying but, again, there’s the American media, and I don’t want to say I don’t trust the media, but when I turn on CNN and see what’s happening in Iraq, and I’m thinking of just last week when a major bomb went off a lot of people died, and there’s just this single picture of a crater and that’s it. And this is what it is but it doesn’t really capture, it doesn’t really doesn’t inform the kind of chaos, the kind of…

I think the kind of thing that bugs me, and what our focus was in GUNNER, is a bunch of things happened before that and after that car bombing.

There’s a whole sick, almost pornographic desire, where people want to see the body parts. That’s like this weird, ghoulish kind of thing but they’re not…and something the news never shows you is how these soldiers or citizens react to what’s going on around them. They never really get in close enough. They don’t make an emotional connection. And for me it was really important, and it’s different than what Frontline does in trying to capture the essence of what a place is, the greatest test is when the soldiers watch this film and they pick up the subtleties of what’s going on and understand why something was put into the film and why it’s there.

They understand it.

It’s speaks to their language and maybe it’s coded but I think that it’s important to capture that because there are so few that do. It’s got a lot of humor but it’s definitely a kind of gallows humor that many civilians don’t understand or will laugh at but we screen it for a military audience they laugh all the time and I think that’s critical. Not just for a documentary but it’s that you’ve captured this sense of place, this texture and in 10 years it’ll still be there. It’s valuable that you show everything.

I am reminded of the fascination or repulsion, whatever you want to call it, ghoulish interest in the beheadings when they started in April of last year. It was almost a weekly thing, these videos were surfacing on the Internet of civilians, contractors, getting beheaded. For me I was just drawn to them in an unnatural way to see what happened to these men. In the media, though, it just seems like a footnote. It feels like they’re giving short shrift to what’s really going on, the kind of danger, and what kind of dangerous place it is over there.

Right. It’s definitely pornographic.

I’ve only watched one and can’t do it again. It stays with you.

It’s like, “Okay…that’s enough.”

Do you stay in touch with the guys from the film?

Yeah, I stay in touch with a lot of them. I’ve seen a lot of them and one of the guys who was a captain down there, and who has gotten out of the army, was with me doing Q and A’s. And they’re really happy with it and you’ll watch it, and you’ll think what you’ll think, but for them there’s so many things that are important to them that people see as far as what their experience really was.

Do you think, yourself, were more empathic by the end of shooting than you were, perhaps, more sympathetic at the beginning? On the same token, do you think that unless you’re holding a weapon in the middle of a street, taking combat fire, that you can’t really know what these guys are going through or feeling?

That’s an interesting question. There’s things in the film that may not make sense to certain people.

There’s an interesting question about the film at a screening we had in Tampa, and it comes up all the time, people don’t understand the violence. You hear it all the time and you hear things exploding but you never see it. You don’t see any wounded and that’s what people want to see, what they expect to see. And while I was with this unit in the two months I was with them no one in the 2/3 was wounded, there were two people in the national guard unit who were wounded, and no one was killed actually when I was with them.

In between my two trips three of them were killed. So, it’s a little bit like, it’s hard for people, and it’s hard to explain this, people project their expectation on what this violence is, but when soldiers watch this they completely understand what’s going on. It makes them very nervous and agitated. They’re reading the situation. They’re driving down the street and they feel…it brings them back. They go into a house and they’re kind of reading the room when they go in. It’s the first time they’ve seen something like that and they don’t know how to decode it yet.

I was just going to say, what’s it like to have these guys coming home? I’ve seen them in the movie going door-to-door, looking for insurgents, and I wonder how many of these guys come home and how hard it might be to turn it off, as it were.

These guys are used to driving down the road with one hand on the steering wheel with the other hand, on their weapon, pointed out the window. The left hand is on the steering wheel then they’re holding their M-4 braced, arms crossed, holding it out the window. Just driving with them you see how nervous they are. It’s definitely hard to adjust.

Did it affect you?

Yeah, I mean, enough that it bothers me. I think that the disturbing thing is that you don’t go back to normal. You hear an explosion and you immediately think that something’s going to happen and that’s a really weird mental state to be in.

It’s like when people in New York walk down the street and hear an airplane above their head, it might make some of them nervous. To have a traumatic experience like that.

Is domestic life quaint and domicile now? Is violence, like the kind you saw, desensitizing?

It’s very desensitizing. You can’t be scared all the time and those solders aren’t. They just cowboy up and do it. In many ways people become complacent because you just can’t be living on the edge all the time.

Did you shoot this movie with your wife?

We normally shoot everything together but this time it was just me. She functioned during post.

Did she see things that maybe you didn’t, that maybe you were too close to see?

She saw things that were, like, odd that I didn’t see or necessarily think should have been put in there and, again, it’s something totally, entirely different Frontline would have done because I see this as a scrapbook of all these shots and a lot of people see it as a total chaos but it’s a controlled kind of chaos. I can’t look at a subject like this and see it as a kind of story arc-y. I mean reality doesn’t work that way.

I watched something last night on HBO, spread over 18 months, and they tried to create this artificial arc, it’s so imposed, they’re trying to put structure on something that’s so unstructured.

I think of reality TV. They want to have a good guy, a bad guy…

Yeah, when we first talked to commissioning editors they’d be like, “This guy died. How come you don’t have more interviews with him?” Well, how do you know that he was going to die? How can anyone know? It’s either take it or leave it. It is what it is. It’s reality.

Some people don’t get it and that’s just their problem. Again, you can’t…it’s the whole idea that the way documentary is shot is so weird anyway. It’s so fake and it’s got nothing to do with what really happened.

I was watching something on HBO on some junkies and it was bizarre, they were waiting on the other side of doors, waiting for these junkies to walk through. But you see it all the time. “Hey, could you do that again?”

My wife was on some reality show on TLC and she said at one point during production she had said something really off-the-cuff and the producer had said, “hold on. I want you to say that again the exact same way.” How is that reality? Is it just something that happens and then they’re there to enhance it? Does this just get to the point where people now see this as “reality” and that’s what they expect out of their reality programming?

I think that what they expect from their reality is blocked down to 14 cameras and different positions. It’s Tony Scott. It’s just not like that.

So, are you happy with the way things turned out?

Oh yeah. I just see it in a way that now it’s like, “I’d do that different, I would do that different…” It’s part of the learning process. Again, you could do so many different things differently and I respect anyone who goes out there and makes an independent film because you’re either doing so with your own money, your own vision, your own belief, your own faith, and you’re trying to make the right decisions and making do with what you have. Suddenly, in a case like this, that something can be monetized it’s only later that the money comes. It’s really easy to make a movie when you have 40 million dollars and you can pick, you literally go to your play list on your iPod and pick all the music you want, that’s pretty easy to cut to.

It’s a dream situation. “I want this, this, and this…” It’s so different from having to make do with what you have and there’s a lot of comprise that comes with that.

When you watch RESERVOIR DOGS it’s so brilliant because it was done with so little. Because of the limits that was placed on it. You’ve got to come up with a better solution. That creativity comes through but then you look at the other end of the spectrum, at the George Lucas’ of the world, like too much money, and you end up making crap.

Is this format, the documentary, is this they way you’d like to do all your films from here on out? Is the next film you plan to do along the lines of competitive crocheting, something relatively tame?

I’m gonna go back to Iraq. I have this other film about an armored car salesman in Baghdad that I never finished.

Along those lines, are the soldiers over there getting the kind of armor that they need ever since that big hubbub months ago when a guy said they were looking for armor in scrap heaps to put on their vehicles?

They probably have what they need at this point. It’s hard to say.

Well, I want to thank you for time and I hope the film continues to do well. I really appreciate you taking a moment to answer questions about the film.

Thank you.

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