How did you decide on this topic?
I had become interested in war photography...and one of the things that
fascinated me was how photographs can be misinterpreted. I thought, ''Why
not talk to the people who took the Abu Ghraib photographs? No one else
really has.''
Of those you interviewed here, who surprised you the most?
Lynndie [England], because she had been described as completely
inarticulate, couldn't even talk, might have been brain-damaged. She is
articulate. She is endlessly interesting.
Did you have a mission in making this film?
I have this old-fashioned American belief that it's wrong to punish the
little guys and let the big guys go off scot-free. This is not to say
that the [soldiers] are blameless, but I have a need to turn them back
into people, [not] monsters. This is not a film that lectures. It's an
attempt to take you into a strange world and an opportunity to think
about it. If I've done my job, I've captured the nightmare and I've
captured the complexity of that nightmare.
