Small camera, small crew, Oscar nomination: "We were in the middle of a climb up to Restrepo with bags, with gear. Within a few hundred yards, I realized I was actually tremendously straining my right leg, and I was like, “Shit, something else is going on.” And it was a really horrible, horrible walk, to get to Restrepo. And there was shooting in the valley, and I just didn't want to slow people down. I was just thinking about the mountains and climbing, and how many other films have been made where you carry the equipment on your backs? You now have these new lightweight cameras to film with, but I'm talking about, like, you know, everything. So if you actually put together a film kit, normally, it's quite a lot: You've got a tripod, and chargers, and stuff -- but everything that we had to make the film, we had to carry on our backs.
Along with our bullet-proof vests. I mean, it was a lot of gear. I would occasionally get questions from people about our film crew. So it was what we could carry, along with the rest of the stuff we needed to carry, to just be with those soldiers.”

Filmmakers Sebastian Junger (left, author of "The Perfect Strom", "Fire", "A Death in Belmont" and the bestseller "WAR") and Tim Hetherington (recipient of four World Press Photo awards, including the World Press Photo of the Year) during the shooting of Restrepo. Hetherington: "I’ve been filming since about 2000 and what happened was I did the two things separately because, until now, there hasn’t been room for crossover. The technology in the past just wasn’t there. And now you have technology like the 5D that do crossover."¹ Junger: "We weren't always there together. But when we were there together, if there was a scene unfolding that would benefit by two cameras - I mean, sometimes I had to take notes, and Tim would shoot, or sometimes Tim had to shoot, or take stills, and I would shoot - but if there was a scene, like when they were negotiating about the cow, Tim and I would sort of whisper to each other a lot about, okay, who covers what, because we knew this was going to be a kind of interesting scene."

I’ll just come out and say this - Restrepo is one of the best films about war ever made. My statement includes fiction and non, although Restrepo’s power is inseparable from the fact that it is a documentary. Filmmakers Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington embedded themselves for a year with the Second Platoon of Battle Company of the U.S. 173rd Airborne Brigade in the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan to shoot the bulk of Restrepo and have created a non-fiction film which approximates the experience of a lengthy military deployment in the country as much as would be possible without actually going there oneself.

(The Korengal Valley, above.)(still from Restropo, directed and photographed by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington)

Junger and Hetherington deliberately keep Restrepo non-partisan, and consequently, the film contains no discussion of the political backdrops of the Afghanistan conflict. Instead, the filmmakers sought to open a window onto the lives of one group of very brave soldiers, and simply “bear witness,” a phrase that Hetherington uses in our talk to describe their objective. What makes Restrepo such an achievement is that it captures the day-to-day existence of soldiers in a manner which only fiction films about war have been able to in the past. The nearly unprecedented length of the embedment was key here, in that the filmmakers became such an accepted presence around the company, that the soldiers let all guard down, allowing for the true fly-on-the-wall feel that every good documentarian hopes for. Intimately shot, the battles are often harrowing, particularly one in which a soldier is killed, sparking the temporary mental anguish of another, all as the bullets keep flying. The daily tension of waiting for the other shoe to drop permeates the film, much as it did in Platoon, the difference here being, again, that Restrepo is real.

Junger rose to prominence as the author of The Perfect Storm, has reported extensively from war zones around the world – including Monrovia and Sierra Leone, and recently released another best-selling book, War, which also covers his time with Battle Company in Afghanistan. UK-born Hetherington is a contributing photographer for Vanity Fair, lived behind the rebel lines as a photographer while the Liberian civil war raged, and has received four World Press Photo prizes.

The film has been justifiably short-listed in the Documentary Category for the upcoming Academy Awards, and won the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.

After watching Restrepo, it is almost a surreal contrast to be sitting with Junger and Hetherington at the Avalon Hotel in Beverly Hills, sipping coffee on a sunny day, but here we are.