Act now. Become an unsubscriberWaiting for the Guards - the Director's story
Directors, Marc Hawker and Ishbel Whitaker describe the making of the film - Waiting for the guards
We were asked by Amnesty to make a series of films on so-called “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques”. Waiting For The Guards is the first one, it's about the use of Stress Positions by the CIA when they interrogate prisoners. A Stress Position is when the prisoner is made to stay in a position that becomes excruciatingly painful over a long period of time. It is an aggressive softening up technique. The prisoner is either chained into the position or told if he moves out of the position he’ll face far worse treatment.
We took a radical approach, and Amnesty had the courage to back us. We didn’t want to reconstruct Stress Positions, to use actors and fake it. Instead we wanted to find someone who would agree to be put in a Stress Position for real. To experience the pain for real. Our feeling was that if we were to fake it, or do something more abstract, it would not communicate the real horror and de-humanisation that these techniques involve. We wanted to show the truth. Our media space is full of images of super-violence and we wanted this film to stand out and have its own dignity and clarity. Above all we wanted the film to be emotional.
We then thought about the interrogators. We needed some kind of narrative structure to counterbalance the images of the prisoner in pain. Our thoughts were about how torture de-humanises everyone, including the interrogator. The part of the interrogator was played by Richard Loudon, an actor and member of Sheffield’s seminal Forced Entertainment. Stress Positions is all about time duration. It's not short, sharp, shock. So we imagined the interrogator in our film just simply waiting, getting bored… and talking to his daughter on his mobile phone (a simple, ordinary daily life type thing). We found this juxtaposition probably more authentic and chilling than if we had cast the interrogator as some kind of psychotic.
We had to find a performer who would accept the part of the prisoner. When we met and spoke with Jiva, it was brilliant. He is a performance artist who understood what our methodology was.
We started filming in a damp, cold basement of a disused office building. Because Jiva would be in pain and there was danger to his health, we had a paramedic with us. We also agreed a special word that Jiva would shout in case the pain got too much. The word was “green”.
Filming Jiva was difficult and took place over 8 hours. We had to direct him to stay in painful positions when his body was fighting to stop, demanding him to experience pain. This was not easy for us. It's not a normal thing to ask someone else to do. You feel dirty doing it. Every time it all got too much for Jiva and he shouted “green” we rushed over to comfort him and make sure he was OK. We had a strict regime that when it got too much for him we would stop filming, and he would walk around the space exercising his muscles.
It was important for us to film this “beautifully”. We paid a lot of attention to this. We didn’t want to film it like a horror film or a docu-drama. No exaggerated camera shaking.
What surprised us was that the actual filming was almost like a religious ritual. All of us, the film crew, everyone felt humbled by Jiva. The sounds of him whimpering, his heavy breathing, his shaking body had a profound effect on us all. It was almost as if he was a sacrificial lamb on our behalf.
When the filming was over, we packed up. Everyone was on a high and we headed for the pub and got extremely drunk. We knew we had filmed something special.
See the Prisoner's story
See Amnesty's story
See the Executive Producer's story
