In 2009-2010, during the War in Afghanistan, a group of soldiers calling themselves The Kill Team murdered no fewer than three innocent Afghan civilians. The circumstances that led these young men to commit wartime atrocities were documented in Dan Krauss’ award-winning 2013 documentary, The Kill Team.
Six years later, Krauss returns to the tragic and disturbing story with a feature film dramatization of “The Maywand District Killings,” as the incident came to be known. Also titled The Kill Team, the film stars Nat Wolff and Alexander Skarsgård as two of the soldiers. The film attempts to dive into the psychology of men who choose to commit these heinous acts. Why did they succumb to madness? How does a patriot become a murderer? Both versions of The Kill Team examine these questions, but the new film does so in the context of a tightly-paced thriller with emotional drama and resonant performances from its actors.
While promoting The Kill Team, writer/director Dan Krauss sat down with Screen Rant to discuss his work on the film. He talks about his relationship with the military in the context of his movies, as well as the complications that arise when turning an objective documentary into a subjective feature. He also shares The Kill Team’s cinematic influences, which range from obvious to surprising.
The Kill Team hits theaters and VOD on October 25.
How did you get Nat involved? Was he always your first choice, or was this role being shopped around to many actors?
I feel like the criticism of the military in art has almost been off limits, especially in the last 10 or 15 years. It’s not quite the same, but we’ve got the whole Blue Lives Matter thing, and I think there’s a notion that if you hold soldiers accountable for their actions, it’s like you’re criticizing the military and you get in trouble. Working with A24 or even before then, with the documentary, was there ever any pushback, of people saying, “maybe you shouldn’t tell this story,” for any of those reasons?
It was being shopped around, but he was the first person that was attached. He was incredibly passionate and enthusiastic about the script. I remember meeting him for lunch the first time, and it was just really clear that, creatively, we were connecting, and he really wanted to play this part. And also, in meeting him, I recognized that he can pull off the very tricky feat of both believably being a grown-up, a man who can wield a weapon and be in the US military, but also someone who hasn’t completely shed his innocence and his youth, and who you believe is someone bringing a certain degree of naivete with him overseas. It’s hard to find someone who can carry both of those in equal measure, believably.
Hollywood coastal elite.
No, I think when you see the movie, you understand that we’re taking a much more nuanced and empathetic approach. We’re not judging the characters; we’re trying to get inside their heads and understand what lead them to make these choices. You know, a lot of people, I think, have seen the trailer or know the subject matter of the movie, and perhaps they’re from military communities or insert themselves and presume I’m coming at this from a political standpoint, that I’m trying to paint the military in a bad light, or soldiers in a bad light.
You’ve probably gotten this question a million times, but you did the documentary, and now this movie is very strongly based on that. Did you always have the idea that this would eventually be a feature?
Yeah, exactly. Another libtard making an “I hate Americans” movie, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. I have a huge amount of respect for soldiers. In fact, my interest in the story comes from that respect. But I also am aware of how difficult some of the choices they are forced to make can be. I’m intrigued by that. The military, to their credit, has shown a willingness to learn from episodes like this. I don’t think they’re necessarily trying to silence films like this. We were invited to show the documentary at West Point. Adam Winfield – the subject of the documentary, the inspiration for Nat’s character – and I were asked to come to West Point, show the movie, and have a discussion afterwards. I think the military wants to find ways to avoid incidents like this from happening in the future. It’s not good for their image, and it’s not good for the world, for service members to be engaged in these kinds of criminal acts. I hope that the military community will not see this as an attack, but rather as an opportunity to have an honest dialogue about how things can sometimes go wrong. In fact, in showing the documentary, I can’t count the number of times I’ve had soldiers come to me afterwards and thank me for depicting something that’s really difficult to talk about, but that many have experienced on some level. And all I hope for is that people come to the movie with an open mind and are willing to have a thoughtful dialogue about it and not dismiss it outright before actually having the experience of watching and thinking about the movie.
There’s many movies based on true events, and directors take artistic license with these events. Do you feel a greater responsibility to not do that since you did the documentary?
No, not at all. When I was making the documentary, I was only focused on the documentary. That’s all that consumed me for a number of years, and that was my only focus. It was only after making the documentary that it occurred to me that there was an opportunity to explore the story in a first person present tense way. A subjective way, rather than an objective way. When I spoke to the guys about the events in question, it was a year after those events took place. It was a retrospective account, and I thought, there was a really interesting creative opportunity to try and make a movie that forced the audience to feel what it must have been like to have been confronted with those same choices, and how terrifying, disorienting, and anger-producing that must have been, to be in that situation. That was really the impetus for the feature; to take all the emotions I could sense in the guys when I was interviewing them for the documentary, and try to bring those to life in a way that was more immediate and more immersive and more visceral.
Something about seeing the forest for the trees, right?
That’s a great question. I think that probably is true. Because I had done the documentary, I knew that the authoritative non-fiction account of the story existed as a reference point for people to see. This was an opportunity to distill the emotions down from that documentary into a form that was… The goal was to get at a truth that was more rooted in emotion and experience than it was in minute-to-minute facts. Sometimes, the facts of a story can be wonderful accelerants and wonderful pieces of texture and detail that are just too phenomenally more interesting and more telling than anything I could have imagined or written. What I don’t want to say is “facts don’t matter,” because facts absolutely matter, but sometimes you have to be selective about the facts that matter and the facts that you have to…
Two of my favorite movies from when I was a kid were Serpico and Casualties of War. I was a weird kid. Did any of those kinds of movies, or movies like that, serve as inspiration for The Kill Team?
I guess what I’m trying to say is, there are facts that provide intrigue and detail in a way that you can’t create. And there are facts that can sometimes be an impediment to clarity in emotion. You have to be selective about which facts you incorporate into the narrative. My first responsibility, as a feature director, is the experience of watching the movie. The audience has to be entertained and engaged. I cannot insert details into the story purely for the sake of journalism. Any facts that are in the case have to further that sense of engagement and immersion. So there were some facts, of course, that were untouchable: the fact that at least three unarmed Afghan civilians were murdered by this group of soldiers, the fact that one of them tried to alert the military and was unsuccessful and then was drawn into the scheme himself. That was untouchable. And the fact that the leader of this squad was a dominant influence that may have created an environment where some of these guys made choices they wish they hadn’t. Those were the set of facts that were untouchable. But within that overall framework, there was some malleability that I think was required in order to tell a story with clarity and force. There was a bit of a sense of taking off my journalist hat and putting on my movie director hat. I didn’t want it to feel, quote-unquote “important and necessary.” I hope it does feel necessary and important, but I hope people aren’t only seeing it because it’s necessary and important. I hope they’re seeing it because it’s a deeply engaging thriller featuring two characters with fascinating worldviews going head-to-head. Part of what allowed me to do that is because I knew the documentary existed and stands on its own. Particularly because I directed both the documentary and the feature, I felt, here’s an opportunity to make a companion piece to the documentary that is rooted more in emotion than in fact. It’s more subjective than objective. That was the creative delight and the creative challenge of the feature.
Were there any other influences outside of war movies?
Serpico, for sure, was a big inspiration. I know Nat loves that movie, too. I think that’s sort of the ultimate story, one of the seminal stories of whistle blowers trying to pierce the veil of secrecy. I think you can draw a clear line between Serpico and our movie. I mean, I hope. It’s great to be mentioned in the company of Serpico. It was an influence, for sure. I also remember as a young teen, I was in high school when I saw Platoon. That was the first time I had seen a depiction of war that felt it was brutally authentic, for what I guessed war must be like. I have no experience of war firsthand, but when I saw that movie, I thought, this feels more authentic than other war movies I had ever seen. I hadn’t seen Apocalypse Now because I was young and naive, then. But that was probably the first war movie I saw that felt like it was trafficking in ideas about human morality. I was fascinated by the intersection of morality and violence in war. That, I think, did have a huge influence in my work. Casualties of War was similar, but Platoon was the first one, for me, where I was really fascinated with the psychology of warriors. I think that has carried through to The Kill Team.
Bullies.
The other thing that was a surprising influence, perhaps, was I watched a lot of mafia movies, classic mob movies. Goodfellas and the like, in the writing of the script. In some ways, the story is the making of a mafia.
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Yeah. It’s about testing loyalty. Deeks is the Don. The guys are rewarded when they prove their loyalty, and they’re punished when they don’t pass the loyalty test. And you don’t know if the guy next to you is smiling because he’s your friend or if he’s about to slit your throat. The way that mafia movies create a menacing subtext, I think was a real influence on this film. I really love the scenes in which a character is coming to you as a friend and smiling, but you can detect that sense of menace underneath, and the actors really did a beautiful job of conveying that. It’s a hard thing to pull off. They were really smart about how they approached those scenes. That’s one of the great satisfactions in a movie like this for me: how much we could leave unsaid and still create a sense of tension and dread.
The Kill Team hits theaters and VOD on October 25.
