“We Watched It Burn”: My Conversation with Journalist and Filmmaker Michael Ware

“Only the Dead See the End of War” is Australian journalist Michael Ware’s intensely personal war documentary chronicling the seven years he spent living in Iraq. From the time before the invasion through the height of some of the worst violence of the war, Ware lived the middle of it all, camera in hand. The film, an 80 minute cut of the over 350 hours of footage he brought home with him, has already been released to acclaim in Ware’s native Australia. The film is airing for American audiences on HBO tonight at 9 PM. I got the chance to see the film and interview Ware, who, even over a short rollercoaster of a phone call conveys brash conviction mixed with simmering frustration.

I began by asking him how he went about creating a film from the mountains of footage he brought home with him from his seven years in Iraq. “There was no one clear narrative,” he told me. “Once we started really digging into the archives that the story truly revealed itself. …the story was formed when I by accident picked up a dogeared old copy of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” That’s when the archive really started… and the narrative really started to take shape, when I reread “Heart of Darkness.” But it turns out that by complete accident, I went out and filmed “Apocalypse Now” in the midst of Iraq for real, without knowing that i was doing. And Zarqawi, the creator of the Islamic State was my Colonel Kurtz.”

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a central figure in Ware’s film, and in Ware’s mind. Zarqawi, infamous in his brutality, lead Al Qaeda in Iraq, the organization which gave rise to the Islamic State. He was known for videotaped beheadings, including American contractor Nicholas Berg, and suicide bombings. Some of these clips can be seen in “Only the Dead,” and Michael Ware was the direct recipient of some of these violent propaganda films, which foreshadow the Islamic State’s own affinity for snuff films.

This, Ware claims, is how the film began for him. After re-reading Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” the story fell into place. The journey into darkness and back is Ware’s refrain, throughout the movie and throughout our conversation. At one point, over the phone, he slips into the third person while describing the movie. “And that’s what I’m doing, I’m seeking my Kurtz. I’m Conrad, I’m Marlow…and I’m going up the Euphrates to find this guy who represents all the worst and all the darkness… Really it’s a universal film, right? Like this happens to be a film shot in a war that happens to be in Iraq, but this is ultimately a conversation about the nature of us, about the human condition. But yes, you witness the birth of the Islamic State. You follow a journalist as he stumbles through one of the greatest conflicts of modern times. You see one man’s descent into his own personal hell. But really it’s a story as old as time.”

When I spoke with him over the phone, I was especially interested to know his assessment of the rise of the Islamic State. What must it be like to watch the rise of this group after having witnessed up close Zarqawi at his most powerful and destructive?

“It was really the West, when we invaded Iraq in 2003, who unleashed the IS upon ourselves,” he told me. “No one could have seen it coming. No one could have predicted it. But that’s also what we did. What you people are now experiencing from Paris to Brussels to San Bernardino to anywhere else, [began with] the summer of 2003. We saw it. We saw the new normal…emerge.”

It’s at this point that Ware’s frustrations began to bubble up in our conversation. “There was no fucking Twitter or fucking YouTube or fucking useless Facebook. But there it was. The generational war and the generational struggle of the modern age. And we watched it burn. So to so many of us none of it comes as a surprise. It still hurts and we still wish it wasn’t so but we saw all this happening 13 years ago.

“I’ve been watching a trainwreck in slow motion for 13 years,” he continued. “It’s like being able to see something happening right before your eyes and you’re the only fool who can see it . And standing in wonderment at everyone else’s fucking surprise, you know. Those of us who were in iraq in 2003, we knew all this was coming! You feel you know the only, you know, sane person in an insane world, or the only insane people in a sane fucking world, but either way you know this reality is not new to us. It might be… startling and shocking to the rest of the world, but some of us have been living this for 13 years and it feels like you all are just catching up.”

As the person on the other end of the conversation, I slipped into the role of “you” for Ware: the person back home, the person who didn’t get it. When I asked him about the recent thirteen year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, he checked me quickly.

“Pardon me, but I’m a grizzled old fucking veteran who says go fuck yourself, you know what I mean? Some of us have been screaming about this for years. And where the fuck were you people paying attention?”

I was in high school, I offered, in the pause that followed. Ware broke out into laughter; the bubble of tension burst.

One of the most powerful moments in “Only the Dead,” for me, was a young Iraqi boy approaching Ware’s camera and screaming into it in his grief over the death of his brother, killed that day at an American checkpoint. I asked Ware about what his experiences taught him about where radicalization can begin, and where it comes from.

“Well you know there’s radicalization and there’s also resistance,” he noted. “Don’t forget, we’re an occupying force. So it’s one thing to be a holy warrior for the Islamic State and it’s another to be someone trying to free your own country. One is circular and one is religious. And back in Iraq we saw for every one person we killed or captured, we created two or three new insurgents.”

The true problem, he says is absolutism. “I’ve found in my experiences of well over a decade at wars that one of the biggest killers is TB. And I don’t mean tuberculosis. I mean true belief. Anyone who’s an absolutist, a pure true believer, be it in a religion, be it in a form of society like democracy, people you cannot negotiate with are the most dangerous [people] on the planet.”

The film is at times grippingly violent, not so much in depictions of firefights but in showing close, almost intimate instances of war and their aftermath. The willingness to show the ravages of a suicide bombing, an execution in the street, or the slow death of a mortally wounded insurgent is one of the film’s most powerful qualities. I asked him about this, and about how he felt violence should be shown to news viewers.

“Well war’s a very violent thing. You’ve never been there so you don’t know,” he said brusquely. “And if I want to express the true nature of the experience of war, then I need to express the blood and the misery of it. …That’s a fundamental part of the human condition and to try and represent that to you in any kind of sanitized way would be a lie and deceitful. So to use imagery that was anything less would be to… you know… to perpetuate a hoax. So I make no apologies about the nature of the imagery because that’s the nature of thing that we’re talking about… But when you can smell the blood and you can smell the death and the cordites in the air, that’s the nature of the experience.”

On the subject of violence in news coverage, he framed it as a question of professionalism. “Well it’s a matter of taste and it’s a matter of accessibility. I’ve been a journalist for nineteen years. i’ve worked for all kinds of print and i’ve worked for all kinds of broadcast. And it’s a fine line that we must balance each and every day with each and every story. We want to bring the reality home to the viewers back in the west but we can’t access those people if we’re so gratuitous and so shocking that the salacious nature of the material turns them off from the truth of the message.”

This to him is an argument against citizen journalism and brings us back to what seems to be a minor beef he has with the digital age. “…That’s why we need professional journalists rather than so-called citizen journalists, because it’s our business and it’s our profession to try to constantly divine where that fine measure lies. …and just lying down with your iPhone isn’t going do that. Because even an image can lie. It turns out images do lie. Truth is the most elusive thing on the planet, I think. And it takes a lifetime of learning to try and express it.” He pauses, then adds, “Truth’s a bitch.”

Ware still hopes and plans to write a book about his time in Iraq. “At the end of the day, ink runs in my blood, and I will never rest easy until I’ve written a book,” he told me. “I set out a few years ago to begin the book and it turns out I’m not yet ready to write it.” The book, he explains, was and remains the main goal for him. “Ultimately my greatest desire is the book. That’s the one thing I wanna leave behind. I’ve got a lot yet to process and I need some time to do it before I write the book.”

He concluded our conversation by jovially thanking me “for giving a shit” about “Only the Dead,” which he says he hopes as many people see as possible. “I think that we’ve made something that helps change people’s understanding of war,” he said, in no mood to undersell his work. “It dissolves that distance between the viewer and what it feels like to be at war. In a way that no other film has done before. I honestly think that that’s what we’ve done. There’s no safety net for you the viewer when it comes to only the dead. You will feel what we felt. And I don’t think any other film… has ever done that.”

FEATURED IN IMAGE: Michael Ware (Co-Director and Subject)

Photo Credit: Franco Pagetti/VII Photo Agency/Courtesy of HBO