You could call it a war movie with real bullets.
“The September Tapes” was shot in Afghanistan two summers ago and just has to be the riskiest production in the history of movies. It is being shown this week in New York, Los Angeles and eight other cities, with Chicago and additional venues to be announced shortly.
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“We basically didn’t get any support from the U.S. military, so there was no financing,” said director Christian Johnston. “We emptied our own bank accounts to get it started.”
The production company amounted to five guys with two cameras. Dropping into Kabul more or less unannounced, they spent two weeks roaming the dangerous streets of the Afghan capital, then moved out into the desert and mountain country to the east.
This facilitated the story line, which is about a documentary filmmaker’s quixotic quest to locate Osama bin Laden by working through the Afghan bounty hunters and warlords trying to capture the terrorist leader. The U.S. government has put a price of more than $25 million on bin Laden’s head.
`Blair Witch’ inspiration
“I had wanted to make a hybrid movie [mixing fact and fiction], after `The Blair Witch Project’ in 1998,” Johnston said.
“I was curious about Afghanistan and wanted to check it out. After 9/11 — and a few months went by and we hadn’t gotten bin Laden — we decided on a story involving bounty hunters.”
Unlike the makers of “Blair Witch,” a thriller that actually was shot in a small Maryland state park surrounded by suburban housing developments, Johnston & Co. wanted to go after the real deal by shooting their movie in Afghanistan.
“Francis Ford Coppola originally wanted to shoot `Apocalypse Now’ in Vietnam,” Johnston said. “It would have been a very different movie if he had.”
The principal character in “The September Tapes” is more loony than heroic. The story line is a little hokey. As with “Blair Witch,” the acting is kind of amateurish.
But much of it is some of the scariest war movie footage I’ve ever seen.
The real star of the film is Afghanistan: the chaos, the killing, the ubiquitous danger. One gains a very real sense of what we’re up against in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere that no slick Hollywood production could provide.
“I arrived in Afghanistan one week prior to the rest of the crew to coordinate the preproduction on location,” said Wali Razaqi, an Afghan-American with relatives in Kabul who served as actor, producer and translator for the project. “The day before the team was due to arrive in Kabul, Vice President Haji Qadir was gunned down a few hundred yards from where I was standing. It was terrifying.”
An assassination scene occurs early on in the film. Though that was scripted, the team’s overall approach was to keep their cameras running while they flung themselves all over Afghanistan.
In one intensely creepy sequence, they went to the Kabul hideout of an Afghan gun dealer to see whether they could buy a weapon. The place was crammed full of guns, ammunition and the dealer’s highly excited associates.
“We were petrified,” Johnston said. “Not only had Razaqi angered the arms dealers by attempting to end the deal early, but we had now broken the curfew law.”
A close call
They managed to extricate themselves from the hideout and talk their way through a police roadblock. On another occasion, to get footage of a police chase, they deliberately evaded police, prompting a pursuit. Stopped, they found themselves attacked by locals who thought they were real criminals.
The Afghan police and Northern Alliance fighters they worked with always carried weapons. When the crew asked these people to unload their guns before shooting a scene, they got an angry, threatening response.
“Never ask an Afghan to empty his weapon!” they were told.
Except for some Delta Force special operations soldiers, they encountered few Americans — and no American journalists.
“The Al Qaeda were offering $100,000 reward for a live American and $50,000 for a dead one,” Johnston said.
Two French journalists who were fellow residents at Kabul’s Mustafa Hotel were killed by land mines at the Kabul airport at the same time “The September Tapes” crew was shooting there.
The crew joined up with bounty hunters and learned their tactics, which involved drugging Taliban with morphine and getting them to talk about their associates.
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Moving into the hills, they encountered gunfights. Johnston recalled running through a ravine while bullets flew overhead.
One night scene out in this wild country featured a blazing firefight, with Northern Alliance members providing the pyrotechnics.
“The bright flashes in the foreground are Northern Alliance,” Johnston said. “The smaller ones off in the distance are Al Qaeda.”
Harsh reality
That the reality of this small movie transcends verisimilitude is attested to by the fact that the Pentagon requested that several faces be technically blurred beyond recognition. Johnston said they complied with this request because the individuals were involved in ongoing investigations.
Careful to make copies, they also submitted their footage to the Pentagon for review, Johnston said. Eight hours of it never came back.
“Don’t look for a red carpet Hollywood premiere in Kabul. None of the filmmakers has been back to Afghanistan.