Battle for your pockets

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It’s the mobile phone’s turn to have a technological growth-spurt. Cameras, sat-navs, web browsers – you can even call and text your friends if you have time. But perhaps most intriguing are the developments in gaming: it’s been a while since countless millions sat huddled over Snake on their Nokia 5110s. Could this ultra-personal, omnipresent device become games developers’ Holy Grail?

“Niche?” – Scott Foe, who heads up Nokia Game Publishing’s production offices in San Francisco, is incredulous at my suggestion that the mobile games market is still small. “It is without argument now that mobile devices are personal computers – the most personal computers available, and they’re available everywhere.”

Scott’s ten-year trail though the handheld games industry has included massively multiplayer N-Gage title Pocket Kingdom: Own The World during his stint at Sega, and Nokia’s recent cross-platform hit Reset Generation. “The battle for the living room was nothing compared to the coming war for the pocket,” is his rousing cry, and such a cracking way to kick off a feature that we raided it for the title too.

So without further ado, what is it that makes that multi-talented device that we can no longer live without so unique in the gaming space? Could the presence of features like a camera, touch-screen, microphone, GPS, accelerometer (the thing that knows when you tilt your phone), web access and all your social contacts in one place make for an entirely different gaming experience, that has yet to be tapped fully?

“Great question: I don’t think anybody’s asked me that before,” muses Scott. “I think it comes down to the fact that mobile phones are more personal than any other computing device. Having location-based services and so on is nice, but that personal nature makes mobile gaming special. I for one can’t wait to see games take full advantage of that.”

From a development point of view, three undisputed heavyweights dominate the mobile games market: EA Mobile, Glu and Gameloft. In a relatively fledgling market that’s still fighting for consumer attention, this is largely down to their wealth of development and marketing resources, links to big brands and franchises, and strong relationships with distribution networks.

But bridging the gap is a challenge even for the big guns. “We have tons of games that would be bought and enjoyed by many, many more people if only they knew how to get them,” argues Chris Gibbs, who heads up EA Mobile’s European Studios. “Discovery is still the biggest problem: how you find out that you can play games on your device, how you find the games that suit you, and how you actually buy them.”

But as Scott has already emphasised, mobiles are literally everywhere: it’s like an ocean of potential consumers just out of reach. And with the mobile industry still taking vast technological leaps at the rate the Internet was a decade ago, it’s surely only a matter of time before mindsets change.

“I always have my phone, wallet and keys in my pocket,” reflects Chris White, Glu’s Head of Studios for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, echoing that pocket-patting ritual familiar to many men as they tick off their mental checklist before leaving the house. “But I don’t necessarily carry my DS everywhere I go. There’s a definite market for mobile games,” he concludes, fortunately for his platform-exclusive employers.

So what will spark the revolution that propels these portable treats into the mainstream? According to Patrick Mork, Marketing Director at Glu, the release of a specific phenomenon like the iPhone has the potential to galvanise the entire developing community.

“The iPhone has revolutionised content discovery, purchase and usage,” he argues. “By linking it to iTunes, Apple have created a platform that makes content discovery and purchase easy. They provide content directly to consumers in a way that completely bypasses mobile operators.”

“That release really shook things up,” agrees Howard Tomlinson, Director of Game Development at Astraware, a considerably smaller outfit than Glu. Based in Keele University’s Science Park, they’re perhaps best known for adapting PopCap’s classic puzzler Bejewelled to a Smartphone audience – a market-savvy move that scooped the developer a Golden Joystick Award in 2008.

“iPhone opened up access to developers and publishers who’ve struggled to reach customers directly,” Howard goes on. “I don’t see either devices or individual games making the biggest difference to the industry, but rather the improved and slicker ways for users to browse and receive the content, and to pay for it seamlessly.”

Apple’s Application Store is matched for impact only by Nokia’s new N-Gage platform, which has evolved from the much-maligned piece of taco-shaped hardware of the same name – which targeted the handheld games market, but was unceremoniously blown out of hostile waters by the Game Boy Advance, and later the PSP and DS – into an innovative handset-agnostic distribution system.

“The N-Gage platform is a good step in the right direction,” argues EA’s Chris Gibbs. “Everyone knows how to use the iPhone Store. It’s so simple: browse, click and buy. N-Gage allows you to do this across all handsets, which should prompt a significant increase in mobile gaming.”

The cautionary tale of the original N-Gage device also holds a valuable lesson. Mobile phones challenging dedicated gaming devices head-on may not be the answer – partly because of the functional limitations, but mostly because of the way people choose to play on them.

“Mobile games are aimed at filling the ‘downtime’ in people’s lives, especially when they’re out and about,” asserts Chris, cementing an obvious difference with console games, which vie for people’s attention during their valuable leisure time, rather than while they’re otherwise at a loss for something to do with their hands. “This forces game design in a unique direction where consoles and other traditional platforms don’t usually go.”

“Great mobile games are the ones that make the most out of the limitations, not the ones that are made as compromises because there’s not enough computing power,” agrees Jef Valadares, Creative Director of EA Mobile. “But I do believe that mobile is destined to play a more relevant role in the lives of hardcore gamers, by offering ways to move their console game forward while away from their living room. The real trick will be linking the console and the mobile so they are extensions of each other.”

Howard agrees, predicting that mobiles could transcend their status as yet another self-contained platform. “You can take different-sized windows on your play experience,” he proposes. “For a football game, you could play on your console, manage your team on your PC and play fantasy league on your mobile, receiving updates as you go. All part of the same game world, but different views suited to the device you’re using at the time.”

Creative solutions are often born from tight constraints that force lateral thinking, and this is certainly true in the mobile space. “It’s a misconception that technical constraints get in the way of innovation: nine times out of ten the reverse is true,” confirms Chris Gibbs. “Handset differences have pushed developers into making the most of single button presses, display-agnostic interfaces and communication without reliance on audio.”

“High-end features like GPS, motion-sensors and cameras inspire cool game ideas that aren’t yet commercially viable, having a small user-base of suitable phones,” he goes on, but adds that “this is a rapidly moving target, and every six months using these features in gaming gets closer to reality.”

Howard at Astraware is quick to point out that if a developer feels restricted by the mobile platform, they’re probably trying to cram too much in at the expense of the user experience. “Many popular franchises have been let down by this, but then anyone buying from the title alone won’t know what to expect,” he reasons. “The challenge isn’t how much you can load in, but choosing what’s best to keep. This is a very frustrating experience for a designer coming from the console world.”

Chris White at Glu hails the ever-addictive Tetris as a triumph of gameplay over techno-wizardry – a game that rivals EA have successfully reinvigorated on mobile. “Many designers enjoy the challenge of tailoring a game to new hardware,” he asserts. “It forces developers to be imaginative to ensure the game is engaging across touch-screen, a traditional keypad, or even with an accelerometer. Some of our recent titles – like Get Cookin’ – support all three mechanisms, although not necessarily at the same time!”

As Patrick is keen to point out, this was one of the first games to take advantage of the accelerometer on Sony Ericsson’s gaming-focussed handset, the F305. Although of course where that particular brand is concerned, all speculation concerns their much-anticipated PSP phone, about which the press were excited and frustrated in equal measure in August ‘08 with reports that it would hit the market by Christmas – just not necessarily this Christmas.

Patrick returns to the case at hand: “Not only was Get Cookin’ a fun game where you learned recipes, flipped pizzas and grilled burgers, but you actually flipped your phone and moved it from side-to-side in the process,” he enthuses. “No other mobile platform has leveraged this kind of functionality so far, and with Bluetooth and GPS we’ll see other innovations very shortly.”

But besides a few notable platform-specific successes, mobile games have largely comprised reversions of existing franchises – partly owing to the fact that consumers have to-date based purchasing decisions on little more than a title. Free demo downloads are a key feature of the N-Gage platform, and one solution to coax wary users into experimenting with unknown brands.

Flying the flag for the smaller studios, Howard concedes that although the Glus and EAs of this world will likely skim off the lion’s share of a burgeoning market, things will also level out at the bottom. “Far from being locked out, smaller players find it easier to get the tools, start developing, and actually reach customers,” he insists. “Indie developers can hit all kinds of game genres, and can class a game successful at much lower revenues than would even be a footnote on a large company’s balance sheet.”

Clearly a burger-flipping, handset-twirling extravaganza and a 2D gem-swapping puzzler have little in common beyond the size of the screen, but taking the limitations into account, are there common factors that can contribute to a mobile game’s success?

“There are some common factors,” acknowledges Patrick. “The game has to be attractive, well-presented and easy to get into. Controls need to be intuitive and not overly complex. And games should be designed so they can be played in short bursts of five to ten minutes, while not being so short that the value of the purchase is questioned.”

Another major difference between mobile and any more advanced platform is the length of the development cycle. Chatting to Jef Valadares at the Golden Joystick Awards, it becomes clear that one of the most rewarding elements for him is the variety. EA Mobile’s team will work on around four titles per year, while a console team could be dedicated to one game cycle for years at a time.

Chris White outlines the team behind Glu’s recent title Transformers G1: Awakening. “We had a producer, who essentially project managed the game, working closely with Hasbro; a designer, responsible for creating levels, scripting and design documentation; a 2D pixel artist, responsible for in-game artwork; a 3D artist, responsible for character modelling and animation; two programmers, and a dedicated QA tester, responsible for play testing throughout the duration of the project,” he reels off.

“On average, the first version of a game will take about six months to develop, depending on its complexity,” Chris goes on. “But this doesn’t include the porting phase, where the game is converted to the hundreds of handsets available worldwide. Deploying a mobile game is a complex business, requiring knowledge of unique devices available in each territory.”

Another reason why global impact requires global investment, and Howard advocates specialisation on particular platforms for smaller-scale outfits such as Astraware. This policy is illustrated clearly by their website, tellingly split into categories by platform – iPhone, Palm OS, Blackberry – rather than by gaming genre.

“For us, team sizes depend on the size of a project, how many platforms, and whether it’s a license or an original game,” explains Howard. Astraware games take between six months and a year to develop on average, including artwork, development and in-house quality testing. “Costs of $100k are a reasonable estimate – yes, I work in dollars,” he chuckles. “For the console industry you’re looking at one to two orders of magnitude bigger.”

Clearly it’s not all about the development process however: as all the interviewees have agreed, it’s getting the games into the hands of players that’s the toughest hurdle at the moment. Buy-in from handset manufacturers and service providers can prove crucial.

Many networks are waking up to games as a potentially lucrative way to up their ‘revenue per user’ index, and Patrick highlights recent Glu-Vodafone collaborative triumph Brain Genius as an example of best practice. But Howard laments that gaming execs at carriers often come from console backgrounds: “They want the ‘bigger, brighter, shinier’ approach, whereas the average user wants games that are easier, more fun, and aren’t a complete let down.”

But if, as Glu, EA and Astraware agree, distribution is the next big hurdle to leap, perhaps carriers will necessarily be cut from the loop altogether. To conclude, as we began, with Nokia’s Scott Foe: “N-Gage aims to eliminate not only handset fragmentation, but carrier fragmentation – in short, to eliminate the incremental costs of mobile game development.”

“I hope Nokia will continue to create original content too, otherwise I’m out of a job. Have you seen Reset Generation, the highest-production-value, most critically-acclaimed mobile title ever created?” he asks, seasoning his question with Silicon Valley modesty. “When you know recipes like that, you don’t close the restaurant. You keep cooking.”

© Nick Carson 2008. First published in Issue 10 of 4Talent magazine

The American Dream

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Cult British comedy hails from a cloistered isle where subtlety, eccentricity and surrealism can thrive. US shows may surge across the Atlantic but only a select few wriggle back against the tide; established big-hitters like The Office and Little Britain that are checked in fully-formed before being re-packaged. A Brit writer pitching a fresh idea exclusive to the US market is virtually unheard of, so how did Green Wing creator Victoria Pile get on when she landed Stateside?

“It never happened,” muses Victoria with a wry smile, when asked when she realised she was funny. The four-times-Bafta-nominated creator of Green Wing and Smack the Pony started penning broadcast-worthy sketches for the Beeb while still at Uni, so surely that switch must have flicked earlier than most? “I’m constantly surprised when my work is appreciated by other people,” she continues. “That sounds fake, doesn’t it? But comedy writers need a lot of stroking, and positive feedback – me more than most.”

It doesn’t sound fake. We’re sipping water in her spacious North London front room: it’s comfortable, but clearly a well-lived-in family home where this writer can squeeze in some precious keyboard time before the kids get back. She’s rented some space above a shop to use as an office, she tells me, but the decorators are still in so it’s a working-from-home job ‘til they’re done.

“I get fearful of expectation,” Victoria’s prepared to admit. “I prefer to do a low-profile project and see if it makes a ripple than go out all-guns-blazing. I’ve always abhorred publicity: I don’t like people seeing stuff until it has to be seen.”

So it was an intriguing career curveball, following Emmy and Bafta-winning hits and mounting public anticipation, to plunge into a notoriously competitive overseas market to produce a pilot, set in a police precinct, rather than risk dropping the bat in Britain.

“America lured me, partly because I didn’t have to recreate something else immediately here: I went to avoid the second-album syndrome,” she goes on. But far from burying her head in the sand, she’d buried her head in a goldfish bowl. “Over there you’re exposed so completely; you can’t just say, ‘Let me do it, and then you can have a look.’ Every step of the way, you’re naked.”

Dismantling the tight-knit Green Wing team in 2006 – cast and crew largely handpicked by Victoria herself – felt “like breaking up a family unit,” she admits: “A lot of the cast spent more time with us than with their own families, and that was the hard act to follow, not whether we’d do something funny again.”

Of course, ‘funny’ couldn’t be more subjective. “I struggle, because people say I have a slightly perverse view; an unusual take on things. I never understood that. I always assume I represent a large number of similarly minded people; it’s just how I see the world. You can’t choose how to approach something comedically; well I can’t, anyway,” she goes on. “Vogues change, and when I started out I was very much into the style of comedy that I’ve since developed, and other people weren’t. Now we’ve gone about-face and there’s more trend for big studio-based comedies. But I’ll always go for what I instinctively find funny.”

But protestation aside, it was for idiosyncrasy rather than conformity that Victoria’s agent and manager, who had existing positive relationships with US networks, “hoiked” her across the Atlantic. “Now, I’m not a ‘networks’ person,” she begins, settling back into her chair: “I prefer HBO and cable; they tend to be more off-centre.” It’s already clear that this will be no pleasant fiction where a saucer-eyed Brit skips through bountiful fields of cotton candy.

“I don’t want to slag America off,” she’s keen to stress. For while it’s tempting to snuggle you down with a dustbin-sized vat of popcorn and sensationalise this cautionary tale like a gravelly-voiced Hollywood trailer, the simple truth is that the studio-driven US market is an acquired taste for a British writer. Especially one whose devoted creative control at the helm of her own complex shows have attracted monikers like “visionary” and “genius” from cast-member Tamsin Grieg and fellow Green Wing writer Fay Rusling respectively.

“You have to be prepared to have a lot of top-down input,” is her delicately democratic way of putting it. The fact that American networks can pay extremely well is no secret, and Victoria draws attention to various fellow writers who have sustained a healthy trade contributing scripts to other shows. Suffice to say that getting a fresh one off the ground is somewhat different.

“There’s a certain hypocrisy in saying, ‘We want you because you do something different; we love your work; we understand your process and we want you to do it over here,’ when that’s the very thing that they cannot let happen,” she declares, frowning slightly as a shadow of that past frustration crosses her face. “They crush it, and crush it, and crush it, and crush it, and you end up with something that’s neither my choice nor their choice.”

“I was treated fantastically well, with a lot of respect, and actually given a lot of freedom according to other sources,” she reflects; perhaps proof positive that incompatible personalities and working practices were at least partly responsible. “It was a strangely enlightening experience. We did do a pilot; I’m going out there to pitch something else, and I’m trying to do co-productions at the moment. But the things you hear are absolutely jaw-dropping: until you’re immersed in it, you don’t quite believe it’s possible.”

“I spent most of the time either in hysterics with laughter, or in tears with disbelief at how they conduct themselves. Considering it’s the epicentre of the entertainment industry, I was horrified at the outmoded, archaic, creative-crushing things that went on.”

By way of example, Victoria recollects a memo that was passed her way encouraging producers to perpetuate the influx of British talent, but not to sign any deals: “It recommended reinventing the format with your homegrown crew,” she explains. “Rip the idea off, in other words. It was an article in an American publication. They’re not embarrassed about it: ‘We don’t need to buy the formats; we’ll just do it ourselves.’ It makes you slightly fearful of sending things ad-hoc as a writer. As an actor there are some brilliant people there; lovely casting directors; in fact everyone’s brilliant apart from the system.”

And what a vast system it is. The same year that she was in the midst of it all, the network commissioned eighty scripts – a quarter of which were produced as pilots. Three went to series, and all three of them were pulled. “There was not one success out of the whole season’s production,” laments Victoria. “What I didn’t realise was that there’s a rush of British actors coming out every year to do the pilot season: if you get picked up, you’re made forever.”

“I fought tooth-and-nail to get Stephen Mangan out there, but we were also forced to have two ‘named’ stars from their stable – Jason Alexander [Seinfeld], who’s fantastic but wasn’t right for the part, and Orlando Jones [one of the original cast of Mad magazine’s late-night sketch series MADtv], who again is a tremendously talented comedian, playing completely the wrong part.”

Half-an-hour in, and Victoria has already demonstrated pretty transparently how involved she expects to be when getting a comedy show off the ground, and it’s similarly clear that this approach won’t transplant well to US soil. But there isn’t a flicker of a toy-throwing tantrum in her voice: frustration, yes, but she’s not precious for the sake of it. Her talent’s rooted in a more temperate climate, where tight creative control happens to be what she’s very, very good at – and taking that away can mean letting a project sway off course.

My timely reminder that, for her seminal creation Green Wing, she’s credited as creator, producer, casting director, script editor, film editor and writer – albeit one of several in many cases – is met with a mixture of a smile and a wince. “I didn’t choose those titles,” she points out, “but as a description of the job description then yes, it’s accurate. You need somebody trying to achieve what they want, or don’t know they want. Quite often all I know is what I don’t want.”

It may take a couple of seconds to unpick the sentence, but makes sense. And for commissioners, collaborators and cast alike, it boils down to putting your trust implicitly in someone else’s creative vision.

“You have to have quite a loyal and tolerant group of people to contribute to something blindly,” she agrees. “But as a ‘tame’ writer you’re exempt from some of the difficult decisions that rack us all. You’re in a childlike state: write as freely as you like, and we’ll take the best bits. All the writers on Green Wing had careers in their own right, but as a unit we were like a different writer.”

Her confession that she once associated each member of the team with a body part – the kidney, the little finger and so-on – prompts the obvious question: which was she? “It depends who you ask,” she smiles darkly. “Probably the stick up the arse. Although the real answer, of course, is the c-word.” Whether this refers to gestating and giving birth to her precious creative baby, or something infinitely more self-deprecating, we both decide to leave hanging.

A likely byproduct of building a tried-and-trusted team of bodily organs is that you’ll want to work with them again, and shipping Green Wing stalwart Stephen Mangan across for the pilot season is a case in point. Mark Heap, too, had been penciled in from the outset, but was replaced at the studio’s behest by Jason Alexander. Does she often put pen to paper to shape a character with a favoured actor already in mind?

“Since Green Wing I’ve done that… three times,” she reports after a moment’s thought. “I put Steve and Mark in all of them, in my head. But Mark didn’t get the part, and Jason wanted to do slapstick, drop his trousers and show his bum. There was a line in the script where he opens a drawer and there’s a portable vagina inside, and he wanted the prop to be made. You don’t need to see it,” she emphasises, sounding slightly exasperated as the voice of understated British comedy: verbal humour that conjures vivid mental images, rather than literally and figuratively shoving a vagina in someone’s face.

Setting aside comic preferences however, Victoria is quick to praise the talents of the lead actor that was dropped into her production from above: “Jason has incredible comic planning, hilarious timing, and knows a lot of martial arts so there were some incredible visuals,” she points out. But as she’s already made clear, it was the system, not the individuals, which crushed the project.

“They cut all those bits out, including some gorgeous nonsense with putty,” she reveals, with palpable regret that said putty-play won’t be lighting up our screens anytime soon. “He could equal Mark in many ways; in terms of physicality he was great. There’s a scene where he’s almost grooming the new boy: he comes round behind him, puts his hands round his neck and gobs on his cheek. The executives cut it out; they said it was leery and unattractive.”

Another “cracking scene” where Steve attends a lesbian meeting, shot with a gay female stand-up, survived right up until the wire: “They ripped it out the night before,” reveals Victoria, as if they’d torn the still-beating heart from her already maimed project: “They were too ashamed to take it out earlier.”

It’s revealing that when asked how the show was compromised, she recalls very specific episodes; vignettes that made her chuckle, but failed to crack a smile on the execs further up the command chain. Of course, even the pioneering hour-long format of Green Wing – with its series-long plot arcs that seemed so far removed at first glance from the self-contained skits of Smack The Pony – was built around sketches, expertly woven together as part of a wider narrative. Individual episodes are the blocks that make Victoria Pile’s comedy work, and sliding them out one by one is like a high-stakes bout of Jenga.

“You can cover more material with sketches,” she affirms. “Your territory’s wider. If you’re out to make a really comedic experience, you want the freedom to go hither and thither, to cover as much material as we do in our real lives.” She landed on a police precinct as a setting for the untitled pilot we’re discussing for much the same reasons that a hospital became the setting for her last hit show: you can find all sorts of people under one roof. Green Wing was originally intended to weave the lives of car park attendants, canteen staff and everyone else alongside the medical and admin staff, but it never quite happened that way.

“This pilot followed four detectives’ lives and loves: it wasn’t really to do with policing, but there was some procedural stuff in there because that’s what they wanted,” Victoria explains. “This body within the department is there to check up on procedures, and they’re so litigious. We developed a potentially fantastic relationship between the slightly anal character trying to catch everyone out, and normal detectives with their everyday lives. But it was the lack of interest in those peripheral things that screwed it for me: I wanted to indulge in the little idiosyncrasies of the characters; they wanted the story.”

From the off there was a lot of “slipping and sliding” and top-down adjustments, which as Victoria readily admits, was “exactly what I do, but done by someone else.” With very different sensibilities pulling in opposite directions, the chances of the comedy kernel surviving intact were slim to minimal. Pressing on, her team wrote two new blind scripts that impressed another network, and they commissioned a fresh hour-long script. Then the writers strike happened, and it all ground to a halt once more.

“Ultimately, in America all your experiences often come down to one person, and everyone’s curtailing to them,” she explains. “Over here, you cast someone and say to the broadcaster, ‘I’ve found some great talent, here’s the tape, have a look.’ Over there, you have to make a deal for two series before you can pass them. You need at least two other options, then you go to the studio – not the network – and they all perform in front of 40-odd people on stage, up against each other like gladiators. It’s The X-Factor, basically. Then if the studio executive agrees with you, you go forward to the network and do it all again.”

An observation that’s hardly worth making to a British audience – that a talented small-screen comic actor won’t necessarily take well to a live stage – is the final, forceful reminder that things are untouchably different over there. Victoria shrugs. “I’ve learnt a lot, and have less belief that they want what works here,” she concludes philosophically. “If I make a decision to do something that works there, that’s another matter.

© Nick Carson 2008. First published in Issue 10 of 4Talent magazine

Real Cinema

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“It’s a filmmaker’s responsibility to put together something as accurate as possible,” is the Broomfield manifesto. Following 2006’s acclaimed Ghosts, he’s taken his experiments with ‘real cinema’ to a new level with Battle for Haditha – digging as deeply into the principles of filmmaking as he does the universal issues surrounding this symbolic episode.

“It’s great fun to play around with style,” Broomfield tells me, citing Day for Night – François Truffaut’s much-lauded film about making a film – as a creative influence. Certainly since the journalistic frustrations of 1988’s aptly-titled Driving Me Crazy, he’s carved a name for himself as a figurehead for what pigeonhole enthusiasts call les nouvelles egotistes: a growing breed of doc-makers who are themselves central to the action, together with the likes of Louis Theroux, Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock.

Given their deviation from this trademark approach, it’s all-too-tempting to pin up his two most recent films as the start of a new chapter in his work. Both are dramatic interpretations of controversial situations, with no bobbing boom or frantic chase in sight; unlike much of his personality-driven back-catalogue to-date, both stories pivot largely on a specific series of events and the complex repercussions for the many characters involved.

But like his intriguing Anglo-American drawl, or one of his elusive heckled interviewees of past films, Broomfield’s not that easy to box in: for him, both style and substance should remain organic. “I think about one project at a time; I never seem to have a problem finding my next film,” he insists. “I’m not one of these people with a list.”

The latest episode to pique his inquisitive instinct was the death of 24 Iraqi civilians in the small town of Haditha on 19 November 2005, in the aftermath of a blast from an improvised explosive device (IED) that killed a young marine riding in convoy. Whilst initial reports from the US military claimed that the deaths were a direct result of the blast and a subsequent gunfight with hostile insurgents, Iraqi witnesses told a very different story – five unarmed men in a taxi shot dead as they approached the scene, and 19 more killed in three nearby houses in an act of violent retribution over the following hours.

It was an amateur video clearly showing the bodies of women and children shot in their homes, passed to an Iraqi human-rights organisation and then to Time magazine, that laced the affair with doubt. It identified flaws in the marines’ statement, prompting a formal inquiry – although the initial conclusion was that it was collateral damage, things soon spiraled into a full criminal investigation, with several marines on trial for unpremeditated murder. For Broomfield, this was motivation enough to cement the blood-soaked incident as an example.

“I’ve researched lots of subjects that I haven’t followed through,” he admits. “When you’ve got to be with them for a year, a year-and-a-half, you might as well do something that is complicated enough, or has enough mystery to keep you going. I don’t like going into films knowing what the outcome will be: often it’s the discovery that’s exciting; changing your mind; meeting people with sides that you’d never imagined before. That’s what makes it worthwhile and fun.”

It’s a compelling approach: filmmaker both directing the action and being swept up in it. “It’s all to do with storytelling. Any way you can tell the story better so it’s more real, more entertaining, more contemporary, is great to play around with,” is Broomfield’s take. In the case of Battle for Haditha, this involved building a framework from what few indisputable facts were available – and letting the cast improvise the rest.

As with Ghosts – for which the painstaking research process including hiring Chinese students to pose as illegal immigrant workers, and posing as an Afrikaner worker himself to film the results with a hidden camera in his glasses – finding the right cast to carry the film was crucial. Not necessarily just for their acting skills, but for their genuine deep-rooted emotions, experiences and insider-knowledge that could steer both the general atmosphere and finer details more accurately than any stubborn director with a top-down vision.

Understandably, it feels like a documentary-maker’s approach to drama: letting the action unfold as naturalistically as possible. At first he considered going the full distance: tracking down the marines who had lived and breathed the sweat, smoke and blood of Haditha, and asking them to re-enact the events of 19th November 2005. But in the flesh, as he told The Times, they were “fucked up, much too jittery. Some couldn’t keep still when we were talking to them.”

One of the most shocking elements during this initial research period was the marines’ “distressing and vulgar” sense of humour; arguably a coping mechanism to detach them from the shocking things they’d seen and done, but something Broomfield had to fight through, alongside the jitters and the tranquilliser damage, to understand what they were really about.

Unable to work with those directly connected with Haditha – and with the trial just getting under way – the production favoured a more conventional call-out to casting agents with military connections, tapping into servicemen who had recently returned from active duty to keep that emotional resonance without jeopardising the whole project.

The highlight of their nine-month casting call was unearthing 22-year-old ex-marine and aspiring actor Elliot Ruiz, who at 17 had been the youngest solider deployed to Iraq, and had already had his personal story dramatised in a Pulitzer-nominated play. Corporal Ramirez wasn’t any easy first lead role for Ruiz: dredging up all manner of demons, it was a turbulent process that came to a head in an on-screen breakdown with an uncomfortable dose of realism. Iraqi civilians, many of whom had lost loved ones in the conflict, were also persuaded to lend their stories to the film as part of the predominantly amateur cast.

Despite responding to one symbolic episode, this fresh ammunition for the anti-war canon has an intentionally timeless quality. “Things like Haditha happen in any conflict, any war, anywhere,” reasons Broomfield. “The stuff that we filmed after the IED goes off is all based on reports: that’s all accurate, what happened in those houses. But I don’t want this to be seen as a forensic film. Haditha is a symbolic crime, but not such a rarity that it deserves to be looked at in isolation.”

While it may seem that the collective lens of the world’s media has been on Iraq since those first volleys were fired, it’s the other side’s perspective that has been conspicuously absent thus far: and this is the edge Haditha brings to the public debate.

“It’s a film about the language of war, and the common humanity that people share,” he declares. “In any conflict there are different points of view; it’s rarely good and evil. But most journalists have been stuck in the Green Zone throughout, and genuine Iraqi viewpoints are few and far between.”

Accordingly, the research also included flying to Aman to meet civilian survivors of the massacre – “who were there on the day, and knew the people who were killed” – plus spending a week with insurgents who had been directly involved with Haditha, and quizzing the journalist from Time magazine who first broke the story into public consciousness. The next step was securing government reports and witness statements to build as accurate a picture as possible, from multiple sides.

Iraqi witnesses and insiders in the marines told the same story: that the killings were indiscriminate as a knee-jerk reaction to their colleague’s death. Most shocking of all were the protocols he found through conversations with marines: “Their standard operating procedure rules are so fucking hardcore. If a house is described as ‘hostile’, then you just kill everyone in the house. It doesn’t matter if it contains two-year-olds or the elderly.”

But while he admits starting the project with some bias against the marines, meeting them in the flesh and realising that these were poverty-stricken kids with little or no education, thousands of miles from home in a conflict they didn’t understand, muddied the waters somewhat: “The deeper I dug into the whole story, the harder I realised it was to take a side. It was hard to condemn them out of hand as cold-blooded killers. I hope people will feel that judgment should be passed on the war itself, the architects of the war, and the future of the war. These are just poor bastards who got caught up in it.”

“Everyone has some kind of blinkered view, and it’s interesting that in some of the cinema discussions after the film, the two main camps realised just how blinkered they are. That’s what happens in war – but most traditional war films tend to be black and white, good and bad.”

Broomfield’s already made it clear that beyond the factual framework, the cast should make the piece their own, so I ask how he sees his own role in the production – particularly in still relatively unfamiliar dramatic territory.

“I enable people to deliver their performances in as relaxed a way as possible, and as real a way as possible,” he responds, after a short pause and a contemplative hmm. “It’s creating an environment that people can work in that makes them feel alright to be themselves, particularly if you’re working with non-actors. They shouldn’t be embarrassed: you want them for who they are.”

Of course, dramatic interpretation or not, Battle for Haditha has a grounding in fact – and was released while the trial was still in progress – so surely directorial control was crucial in places? “When dealing with specific milestones in the report, details from a legal document, we had to control people pretty tightly,” he confirms. “They couldn’t say whatever they wanted in those situations.”

“We worked from a pretty rigid structure of the story, but I was often steered by what they had to contribute: ‘We wouldn’t do it this way; we’d do it this way.’ I let them use their own language, being mindful that I didn’t want them acting being a marine: I wanted them being themselves. In a sense, they’re the experts – you don’t need one of those experts standing by.”

Given their deeply personal roots in the conflict, and intimate connections with its victims, surely the cast had their own agendas, even if the director endeavoured to avoid one of his own? “The film is all about agendas,” is the simple answer. “The marines, the insurgents, the people who get caught between those two forces, all have their own rationale for what they do. It’s about presenting those three agendas as accurately as possible, to an audience who probably has their own preconceptions.”

“Showing the film around, an Iraqi audience is very pro insurgents – would they even have taken money to do what they did? They see them as patriots. An American audience is always much more defensive about the marines.”

Three strands of narrative bind the film together, representing these three viewpoints: the pair of newly-recruited insurgents paid to plant the IED, the marines who seek revenge for its fatal detonation, and the civilians who are cut down indiscriminately as a result – several of whom see the bomb being planted in their quiet neighbourhood and choose to keep quiet.

While the brutality of the wider insurgency comes across, the two that plant the bomb are nervous and inexperienced, acting clumsily in the name of patriotism – but tellingly manage to flee the scene unharmed as gunfire erupts. The marines are brutal, dehumanised and reduced to killing machines by fear and rage, but ultimately emerge as pawns in a game much larger than themselves, endorsed by orders from above and crippled by remorse.

Iraqi civilian life is sketched out in various short episodes – a party to celebrate a circumcision, a boy playing with a goat, a family going to market – but this third group is finally crushed from both sides, with nowhere to turn. Crucially for Broomfield, all involved re-creating elements of their own lives, not acting several stages removed from it.

Some 15 years before Ghosts, his first venture into directing drama – 1989’s glossy Hollywood fare Diamond Skulls – he found overwhelming as a process, and readily admits to being embarrassed by the end result. Does mindless escapism and detachment from reality just not appeal?

“All forms of storytelling are interesting; I just happen to have grown up in a tradition of documentaries,” he reflects. “But I don’t like celebrity and all that goes with it: I enjoy getting to know normal people and their lives. For me, it’s about combining that with telling a structured story in an accessible way.”

Unlike that self-confessed blip on Broomfield’s CV, both Ghosts and Battle for Haditha shun the studio lights and contrived repetition of Hollywood to reveal something deeper about those involved.

“These are not pseudo actors; they’re real people who are being themselves,” he asserts. “That means you have to shoot in a different way; in real environments. You can’t shoot them on a set ’cause then they have to act, and they have no training in acting; they don’t know that the fuck they’re doing.”

Based in Jordan – Iraq was clearly too dangerous – the cast and crew lived as a community. “I had to create a barracks for the marines to live in, and the Iraqis were living in houses. If you’re shooting reverse angles, lighting the bejesus out of something and having hundreds of people standing around the set, you’ve got to have actors. It’s very, very difficult.”

By way of example, the bathroom in which Ruiz breaks down – purging himself of all those years of pent up anguish – doesn’t open up into a world of runners, tracks and dollies. It’s the actual bathroom used by the cast and crew. Maintaining the ‘real cinema’ approach are very long cuts. For the heart-rending mourning scene, the camera rolled for 40 minutes straight – no-one was going to ask the genuinely distressed women to go one more time for luck.

“I think the greatest thing that film has is the ability to describe real time,” argues Broomfield. “I don’t like lots of cuts: it’s really interesting to see a conversation, for example, or how long it takes for an argument to develop, rather than just cutting to an argument. We’re used to seeing things in real time, and cinema has the exciting ability to do that.”

“I grew up with anthropological, observational films, where the most interesting thing was seeing a long conversation between two guys in some weird language with subtitles. You get a sense of their rhythm, how they do things, what their humour’s like – no other art-form can do that.”

For Haditha he picked up countless tricks from special effects supervisor David Harris, including how to set up action shots to keep a lot of movement in the camera. “Certain things, particularly action, are also much more involving in real time than if you cut to the effect all the time,” he concludes. “It’s much more threatening if the human eye sees it as being real.”

© Nick Carson 2008. First published in Issue 9 of 4Talent magazine