Fight Like Soldiers, Die Like Children recently premiered at Hot Docs 2013. It’s a fantastic film about challenging subject matter. You can check out my review of the film here. During the fest, director Patrick Reed took a few minutes out of his day to talk to me about Dallaire, child soldiers, and escaping from security detail.
FM: The film is excellent. Congratulations. This may seem like an odd comparison, but it reminded me structurally of There Will Be Blood, where at the end of the film everything suddenly all ties together. It’s courageous to take that approach, given that you’re holding back key elements to the very end of the film.
PR: Well, you can make a number of films about any subject. And I’ve shown this film, apart from big film festivals and stuff, with totally different audiences. And I remember one of the screenings I showed clips from the film once to a group of seniors. And their response to the film was very much that they loved Dallaire. Because for them it was like, “Oh God, the guy’s like 65. He’s going back in the field.” It was inspirational and aspirational for them. They loved the fact that he didn’t have all the answers. He was a flawed character. He was sorting things out. They identified with that maturity of life experience.
I’ve showed the film to high school students. We just had a big screening here and they reacted a different way. They were talking about the child soldiers and there were a whole bunch of different things they were interested in. I’ve shown the film to university level students too and it’s hard because some people – and I’ve had this problem with other films I’ve done – some people they want to walk out inspired. You know, here’s the three things you gotta do: buy the t-shirt, do this, do that, and you’re going to change the world.
Somebody came up to me at the end of one of the screenings and said, “Dallaire says that this is an issue that’s not going to be solved before I die… That is the most depressing thing!” (Laughs) I actually find it quite inspiring the fact that somebody’s still going at it. I mean, that’s life right? Like, abolishing slavery, could you imagine if at the start of that movement someone said this is going to take decades? And it’s not worth it? So there’s a complexity to the end of the film and throughout the film where the central character is being challenged. He’s not always the simple heroic character that a lot of audiences want. So I can understand that some people love that kind of complexity. I mean that’s what interests me about him and about the issue. Other people will find the film frustrating for that reason.
FM: What I liked about it was it showed Dallaire as a man where at first he felt deflated to an extent, but then you quickly discover he’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing and that the General is just waiting to rear its head.
PR: That was something that was very important for me to establish in the film. There’ve been a lot of good films about child soldiers. Some not so good. And good memoirs and not so good memoirs about the issue. I mean a lot of people approach it showing the pity and the sorrow and the humanitarian issue. And it definitely has that component to it. But one of the things that strikes me is the opening of the film with him going out on morning patrol with the UN: it was like each day we were in the field with the guy, he got younger and younger. And you could tell how much he missed being in uniform.
There’s a line where he says, “Combat is better than sex,” and you know, although he’s a moral guy, this is a military guy who’s being honest about the issue. And that’s one of the things about the issue. Like with child soldiers, if we’re just looking at it as a filmmaker or a storyteller dramatically? Yeah, it’s bad. We shouldn’t have child soldiers. But it’s looking at those issues like why does it happen? What are some of the attractive things about it?
If you’re making a film about a drug addict, I want that drug addict to tell me at one stage that, “I’m not doing heroin anymore, but there where times it was the best days of my life.” You can connect with that. It’s the same as Dallaire talking about combat.
I remember some of his staffers – because now he’s a senator – were worried about that line. But his wife saw the film and his wife is career military. She looked at that scene and she said, “That has to be in the film. That’s the most honest thing my husband has ever said.” So I think that also speaks to the humanity, even if some people may not like to hear that.
FM: What made you decide to follow this story and how long was it before you began production?
PR: I’ve been lucky enough to make a number of films in various parts of Africa. And it’s a tough sell. It’s hard to get funding for it. There’s a belief that Canadians are not interested in international stories in general, Africa in particular. So what we’ve done in the past for a number of films is you put a Canadian face to an international issue. It becomes a little more accessible for Canadians, so to speak.
I’ve also done the exact opposite. I’ve done a film about Africa that had no Canadians. No white characters. It was all local stories. Frankly, it didn’t get a penny of funding form Canadians and it was all funded from the US. But with this one, I’ve always been interested in child soldiers as an issue and to potentially get a film off the ground, well it’s difficult subject matter. Peter Raymont and I went around trying to get funding with no particular interest at first. Then General Dallaire wrote a book about child soldiers about a year and a half ago. So we made the same rounds. And now you’re no longer pitching a film about child soldiers, you’re pitching, “We’re gonna do another film with General Dallaire.” “Oh! That’s great!” “And it’s about child soldiers.” “Oh! OK.” (Laughs)
So you’re always looking at creative ways to finance projects. And again, you live in the real world. How do you get something funded? And it kills Dallaire that for most Canadian the face of the Rwandan genocide is a white Canadian. Close to a million people died over there, but at the same time it’s a classic case of someone using celebrity for good, as far as I’m concerned.
So in the early days TVOntario came on board. Luckily now there are theatrical documentary funds. So we got that money kind of stitched together as well. But once the filming actually started it was a relatively quick process. We filmed one month on the ground basically a year ago today. We came back and started editing the feature length by October and then premiered in Amsterdam at IDFA.
FM: What was your production team like? How many people on the ground? You and a shooter or was it a little bigger than that?
PR: Well I always like going very small. But General Dallaire, he doesn’t do small so well. (Laughs) In terms of our key team, what we usually do on all these African shoots is we travel very light. We had a sound guy and a camera guy from here. People I’ve worked with before. We usually bring a stills photographer with us. Sometimes we pick somebody up locally. And then obviously a bunch of support staff there: drivers, translators, people like that. But a core team of me, camera and sound.
This one was a bit different, because for these trips back there has to be a real reason to go. It can’t be we’re just going to make the film so… There has to be an organic reason. When Dallaire wrote the book, one of the criticisms was that he’s writing about child soldiers but he obviously hasn’t been on the ground for eight or nine years. He doesn’t have street cred like he used to. So he’s always wanted to go back anyway. And he’s got a small research NGO out of Dalhousie. And one of the people was going to go back with him. It was kind of like him doing a tour of the region. In military terms he would call it a commander’s recon of the region. So there was the crew, there was him. There was a researcher who he works with. There were a couple other hanger-ons, but a bigger entourage than usual, which is both good and bad.
You know Matthew Brubaker whose in the film? Well, we’d be back and going through DR Congo with Dallaire. And because he’s now a public figure the UN would have their guys with guns and full security everywhere we went. And it really slows you down in terms of how fast you can travel to certain places. Brubaker’s not a military guy was just like, “Let’s ditch these guys,” which is funny because that’s exactly what Dallaire used to do when he was in Rwanda during the genocide. It would drive his aides crazy. Because every time you go out as a commander you’re supposed to have your APC and all your support vehicles and high security.
When the genocide was going on, right in the middle, late at night he would just grab a pickup and go out on his own to see what’s really going on. And he would be the first person to admit that in retrospect he was probably trying to get killed.
A couple times we did get rid of the security detail, but there’s that fine line between being a cowboy and really pushing things. It was a balancing act, but it was generally a bigger group or entourage than I like to travel with. We made it work.
FM: It’s interesting because you bring up Brubaker after Dallaire says, “He won’t solve the child soldier issue in his own lifetime.” But by returning to Rwanda and DR Congo and joining up with the UN guys you can see there’s a bit of a passing of the torch going on.
PR: That was the thing that was driving Dallaire crazy. He wishes he was 25 years younger. He wishes he was those guys. That was a subtle thing and I don’t know how much it came out in the film. But it’s also a film about aging, and what you can do with the time that you have and hopefully inspiring people on the ground.
There was a weird kind of father-son thing between the guys on the ground and Dallaire because they respected him for what he did, but there’re moments in the film where you get this sense that these UN guys are far more attuned. I mean, they live it. They’re on the ground in the same way that he was during the genocide. I’m sure there were guys 20 years older than him who were coming in and telling him, “If you just do this, this, and this the problem’s going to solved.” And the people on the ground are like, “Yeah, OK…” But they respected each other. That’s another thing. I think that at their core they were like, “This guy’s done a lot, and he’s still doing a lot.”
FM: Let’s get into the story of the child soldier animation segments. That was unexpected, but such an integral part of the film. Where did the idea for that come from?
PR: It was largely a decision that happened later on in the edit suite. I wasn’t really thinking of doing these animated sequences in the film. But we came back, and one practical thing was that Dallaire had written this book. And in the book he’s got these fictional sequences that he’s written where he’s kind of imagining what it’s like to be a child soldier and a peacekeeper and this interaction between the two of them towards the end. It’s one thing just to say a guy’s writing a book, but I also wanted to get some elements of the text of the book into the film. So that’s just kind of the practical decision.
The other issue is you expect to go on the ground and see these child soldiers all over the place. And they’re not. Most of their commanders, they know the law. And they’re very good at hiding them. You can only have so many characters in the film.
We did a lot of stuff with the various child soldiers, a bit of which is in the film. And even though everybody’s got a unique story there’s a depressing similarity to those stories. So it was also a way of getting those beats of what typically happens on a practical and psychological level to someone who gets picked up and then trained. Again, it was a composite of things.
In the practical sense, it was getting into the notion of what’s your character’s motivation? And I think that reading his book that’s the first thing that struck me. Without giving too much away, I wanted to know why is this guy writing a hybrid book where there’re fictional elements? Is there something else going on there? So it was also just a way to set up that part of the story.
FM: So the idea of getting into his motivation, is that something that shaped your approach to filming the doc?
PR: Well there are other motivations that we explore in the film and they’re intriguing as well. I think he feels guilty about the fact that he’s a career military guy, and he knows what military training is like. He knows that some of the psychology that’s used to break down these kids and to demand compliance is the same military training that you get in the west. It’s like anything. Regardless of what you believe about religion it can be a force for good or evil. Depending on your perspective, it’s not innately bad or good. Same goes with military training.
He even talks about being a cadet and being trained and getting excited about it. And that’s part of the appeal. A lot of child soldiers are 14 or 15-year-old kids without anything else to do. They get a gun so they have power and use that power, often for bad things. But it gives them stature and it’s exciting for them. That was the other thing. The thing that really pisses Dallaire off. When he was talking to that one militia commander; you can have all the international laws about not having child soldiers, but for some of these guys who are local, being shamed by the international court gives you a lot of stature. You’re the badass.
But when you have a commander like Dallaire talking to another militia commander and saying, “Well you’re not a real man because you use boys to fight for you. You’re not a soldier. You’re not a general. You’re not a commander like me.” That’s a real kind of macho approach. And with those guys in that world, in the military world, in that part of Africa, you can’t say anything worse to somebody. They can laugh and say, “Oh, yeah, whatever. We’re using kids. We’re not using kids. It’s culturally specific. You guys have your own way of looking at the world. Don’t tell us how to live. There are no universal human rights.”
What’s universal in a macho and military world is somebody saying you’re not a man because you use kids. As far as I’m concerned that was the one time the other guy shut up. He was like, “I don’t have a good answer for that one.”
FM: The film is opening in theatres very soon.
PR: It’s opening in Toronto in a couple weeks, May 17 at the Bloor. And then limited theatrical across the country. A few more fests and then it’s on to the next film.
FM: Good luck with the theatrical run! Thanks for taking the time to talk about the film.
PR: Thank you, anytime!
Fight Like Soldiers, Die Like Children opens May 17 at the Bloor Cinema in Toronto and in theatres across Canada. Check here for show times.
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