Doug Liman Blog: 28 Hours in Iraq, Baghdad Part 2

Share on Facebook posted 01-18-10 by Doug Liman

I spent 28 hours in Iraq. Every location we went to, the security team would say how many minutes we could spend at that location. They showed us the classified report from the day before of how many attacks there had been in the city. It was about 35 pages long. Little of this stuff is in the press but it really brought home how real the danger was for us.

At night we stayed in a fortified compound outside the green zone that housed some news agencies. Our movie takes place before the invasion; there was no green zone so there was no need to shoot within the green zone. We did have dinner in the green zone one night with our friends form the Embassy. The person who ran the compound explained to us what it meant to be a “high value target”, which we were. Basically, there is a price on your head. Even if people aren’t necessarily devoted to Al Qaeda, there is a market in hostages, not unlike Columbia, Mexico and other places in the world. The thing that makes it worse in Iraq is that there are multiple markets for you, as a hostage. Depending on whether a Sunni or a Shiite grabs you determines whether you could get sold up the chain to Al Qaeda and ultimately killed and video taped, or held for ransom and allowed to live. There are a number of transactions that could take place if you were taken. Because I had seen the training at a classified CIA training facility that Naomi went through in the beginning of production of Fair Game, I had not the skill set (because I didn’t really go through the training) but I had the knowledge of what I do if anything happened to me. I also spent a lot of money on security protection, which bought many armed and trained escorts for our days in Iraq. We also discovered that most foreign reporters don’t ever go out onto the streets. They don’t have the budget for a security detail like ours and spend most of their time working within a fortified compound. They only go out when absolutely necessary.

The procedure for filming was once we got to a location was that they would give us a time limit that we could spend there. Whatever we wanted to film, from the time the car stopped, we needed to get within the allotted time. The longest we got in any one spot was 20 minutes. The rationale was that the moment the car stopped and we are spotted getting out to film, someone is making a phone call and forces are being mobilized to attack us, potentially bringing a force that’s bigger than our force. We read many examples of this in the report that they gave us. There were plenty of people who had a security detail as big as ours that were being attacked, and grabbed. We had a really big force — I don’t want to say how many because I don’t want to give any tips off on how we did it because someone else is going to go to Baghdad and film — but it’s clear that we were just diamonds walking down the street, walking money in a dirt poor, war-torn country.

As much as possible I delegated the filming, trying to keep as low a profile as possible. If we were told it was a very dangerous location, sometimes I wouldn’t even get out of the car. The camera was a gigantic “look at me” and it was safer for everyone if it was held by an Iraqi crew member. That being said, once, after stopping at a location that our machine-gun-toting guards told us was one of the worst places we could go in Baghdad, we were given 5 minutes max. I made sure we were back in the car in half that time, then as we are about to peel out my producer Avram says “Wait. I left my bag inside.”

Probably the most surreal experience we had was shooting in a relatively safe place, one of the only streets that life appeared relatively normal with families and children around, and this man confronted us, wielding a gun, looking for papers. Every five minutes someone was pointing a machine gun at us. This time, after our Iraqi handler/translator smoothed things over and this man started talking to us, it turns out he’d been to America for training and asked if we’d like an ice cream. After clearing it with our security people, we went with this man for an ice cream, wearing bulletproof vests and surrounded by our machine-gun men, with families and children playing around us. The bank right next to us had been bombed the week before and was an empty, destroyed building but there we were, eating ice cream surrounded by children who were not wearing any type of protection at all.

The Iraqi people were the nicest people we encountered in our whole trip to the Middle East. They felt the most like New Yorkers of anyone we met, in the best possible way. Nowhere else did anyone stick their necks out to help us, like they did in Iraq.