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Reader SurveyFade To Black
Jan 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Darroch Greer
Charles Ferguson is the director of the Oscar-nominated No End in Sight — the trenchant, definitive documentary on the run up to the war in Iraq and the mishandling of its aftermath by the Bush Administration. Among the myriad films on the war in Iraq, you can cut to the chase with this one: It offers an insider's view of how the decision-making was handled in the upper echelon of the government.
A political scientist, software developer, and author, Ferguson had never directed a film before he embraced this enormous task. “Ten years before,” Ferguson says, “when I had started a software company, I learned what I regard as the secret of how to do something reasonably competently if you've never done it before, and it's actually very simple. If you hire very good people, and you listen to them, your employees will teach you your job.”
One of the people Ferguson hired was Alex Gibney, who received an Oscar nomination this year for Best Documentary Feature for his film Taxi to the Dark Side. Having admired Gibney's films Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Lightning in a Bottle, Ferguson talked Gibney into being his consultant. “He agreed to essentially hold my hand and look over my shoulder, and he was extremely helpful,” Ferguson says.
DP Antonio Rossi filmed the U.S. interviews with Sony CineAlta cameras and an additional Sony HVR-Z1U as a secondary camera. A couple of interviews were filmed with a Panasonic Varicam. In Iraq, they used the then-new Panasonic AG-HVX200 P2, which Ferguson says shoots astonishingly good images for $5,000, and although the workflow was difficult, he was very pleased with the camera.
This was the early stages of the HVX, and the P2 cards were small and had to be swapped out every 8 minutes. With a small number of the cards, Ferguson's team found archiving to the P2 Store and then to hard disks difficult in Iraq.
Shooting in Iraq was problematic from a security standpoint as well, but Ferguson was prepared. “I had a personal security detail of eight very heavily armed men with automatic weapons and body armor. They were amazing. We had three armored cars. They would stop the cars, get out of the cars. One driver would remain in each car. When we found somebody who was willing to be interviewed on the street, they would surround us — literally — with their bodies and keep watch while we conducted the interview,” he says. “We were allowed to stay in any one place only a maximum of 15 or 20 minutes. We could never go back to the same place twice.”
In the grippingng footage they shot in Iraq is a sermon given by Muqtada al-Sadr, one of the most influential figures in Iraq, which they shot covertly with a small camcorder.
After completing more than 250 hours of interviews, Ferguson wrote several documents to structure the film. At the same time, editors Chad Beck and Cindy Lee laid out the footage, using Avid systems, into a 5 1/2-hour assembly. From there, they continually refined the film into the 102 minutes that tells as succinct a story on foreign policy run amok as one is likely to find anywhere.
Ferguson says he probably could have saved a third of his $2-million budget if he hadn't made first-timer mistakes. “I would have done more non-filmed interviews to figure out who it was really critical to interview and what questions it was really critical to film. That would have cut down our cost significantly — perhaps by 40 to 50 percent.” Also, a post house botched his online, which had to be completely redone.
“I found the process of making this film one of the most rewarding and amazing experiences of my life,” he says. “Also, paradoxically, given the grimness of the subject, a very enjoyable and rich experience. As to how effective film is, I think that at the moment something on the order of a million people have seen the film. I hope that by the time it is televised and perhaps placed on the Internet later this year, I hope that that number will rise to 5 or 10 million. If so, I will count that as some kind of success.”
