A War Photographer Watches Alex Garland's 'Civil War' | On the Media | WNYC Studios

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media's Midweek podcast. I'm Brook Gladstone. Alex Garland's new film, Civil War, has spent its first two weeks at the top of the box office charts. It's a horrific depiction of an America at war with itself, for reasons we never learn, where societies' norms have crumbled, and the nation is drenched in blood and anarchy.

Civil War film clip: 19 states have seceded.

Civil War film clip: The United States Army ramps up activity.

Civil War film clip: The White House issued warnings to the Western forces, as well as the Florida Alliance.

Civil War film clip: Our president assures the uprising will be dealt with swiftly.

Brooke Gladstone: We follow the path of four journalists on their circuitous and perilous route from New York to Washington, DC, to interview the shaky and shifty President of the United States. The reporters include an elderly New York Times guy portrayed by the trustee, Stephen McKinley Henderson. The novice photojournalist is played by Cailee Spaeny. Wagner Moura is the [unintelligible 00:01:03] Reuters reporter, and Kirsten Dunst is the veteran photojournalist, and the film's beating heart called Lee.

Last week, I spoke with Zack Beauchamp, who covers challenges to democracy for Vox, about how Garland's Civil War doesn't directly speak to the one that looms in the back of many American minds. Now, we turn to Lynsey Addario, an award-winning photojournalist who's covered humanitarian crises and war around the world for over two decades. She's the author of the book, It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War. I asked her what she thought of Civil War.

Lynsey Addario: I was so happy to finally see a female represented. Usually, films about war, photographers are men. It was pretty great to see women as the lead roles, and men supporting them. I think the movie was powerful and beautifully shot. There was a lot that resonated with me as true, how we approach things as war photographers, going between humor and these very serious moments using levity to try to bring us out of these very dark moments.

I think the main issue that I had was that it never answers the question of why war photographers do the work we do and why we risk our lives, because you never actually see them filing or the images appearing in public and people responding. Of course, I'm looking at it as a photographer, so it is like, "Hang on, there's a reason why I do this. It's not just for the road trip through war and because I'm an adrenaline junkie." That's always the question that I get is like, "Do you do it for the adrenaline rush?" I think that this film promotes that because you don't ever see why they're doing it. You just see this road trip beautifully shot through war.

Brooke Gladstone: Early in the film, Lee, played by Kirsten Dunst, the veteran photojournalist says, "Every time I survived a war zone and got the photo, I thought I was sending a message home, "Don't do this," but here we are. Isn't that addressing, at least, in brief why you do it?

Lynsey Addario: Yes, but it's one line.

Brooke Gladstone: True.

Lynsey Gladstone: You have to understand, I've been photographing war for 23 years, almost a dozen wars all over the world. We live in an era where journalists are being criticized. There's fake news. People are always questioning why we do the work we do, am I an adrenaline junkie, am I running away from a bad home life? I think it's brilliant that people are seeing the movie and that there is a depiction of war correspondence.

I do have an issue with the fact that it ultimately doesn't really address why. You see Lee as very solemn, clearly very jaded, but almost catatonic. The irony is, the older I get and the more I've seen, the more emotional I get, and the more invested I get. Not the more jaded. When I was younger, I was trying to figure out why I was so drawn to the work. I would run into the middle of a gun battle and I would shoot all those pictures, and I was learning from mentors.

There was a lot that resonated with me as true, but the older character, I just wanted to see a little more emotion and investment as to why. What are the stories she's trying to tell? We know she was trying to get to the president, but you don't witness a mass grave and just get back in the car and keep driving. It's like there are moments that I feel like I need a little more.

Brooke Gladstone: I am so fascinated by your observation that you've become more engaged, more emotional, more expressive as the years have gone by. As an outsider, I would think there would have to have been a numbing effect after just learning the ropes, getting battered and fired on, and seeing what you've seen over and over again. How do you not get jaded? How do you go in the other direction?

Lynsey Addario: Well, I've seen almost everything, so I can internalize, I can witness things without losing it, but at the same time, it doesn't mean I'm less emotional. It means the stakes are higher because the longer I do this job, the more sacrifices I make personally and physically. You're speaking to someone who's been kidnapped twice. I've been held up at gunpoint twice. I've been thrown out of a car on a highway in Pakistan, in numerous ambushes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Covered wars all over Africa and the Middle East. I don't do this without a toll. The more people I witness dying and the more people I witness suffering from malnutrition and being displaced from their homes, all of the things that we see every single day right now, the more heartbreaking it is to me because it continues to go on despite the risks that we all take as journalists to document these atrocities.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm interested in where you found the movie did track with your experience. Obviously, two of the main characters, one is the veteran, and one is the novice. You've been both. Did you find more that tracked in the depiction of the rookie saying that she's never been more terrified in her life and never felt more alive, the adrenaline junkie line?

Lynsey Addario: Definitely. I saw a lot of my younger self in her. I had incredible mentors when I was starting out, whether it was Ruth Fremson or Paula Bernstein, and also Elizabeth Ruben, the writer who taught me everything about covering war. I think it is still a profession where you learn on the job. You learn from people around you. It's not something you can learn in a classroom.

I was much more fearless when I was younger. I felt invincible, of course, before I experienced so many close calls. I think there were certain things I definitely identified with. With Lee, the older character, I identified with her determination to go and to understand the risks. There's an understanding that it's going to be very dangerous, but she felt like she needed to go. That's something that happens to me pretty much every assignment.

Brooke Gladstone: The bond between the four journalists sharing the car down to DC where, apparently, the standard order now is to shoot reporters on site is the emotional backbone of the film. It reminds me of how soldiers in war are often depicted. Did that feel familiar?

Lynsey Addario: Yes. War correspondents, war photographers have a bond that is unparalleled in other aspects of life because we experience such incredible highs and lows. We witness the most horrific scenes and beautiful scenes. I think we do form a bond and it is that sort of, you can die at any moment scenario. You spend extraordinary amounts of time with the people. I've covered the war in Ukraine for the last two years with Andrii Dubchak, who's a Ukrainian videographer and journalist, together 18 hours a day every day for four to six weeks. I don't spend that much time with my husband. You spend a lot of time and a lot of really boring time, driving time and then very exciting, adrenaline pump time with people.

Brooke Gladstone: Yes. As you said, you were thrown out of a car in Pakistan, ambushed by the Taliban, and detained in Darfur, kidnapped once in Iraq and in Libya too. Your career is staggering. I wonder about conflict also among comrades. You were one of four in Libya in 2011 when Muammar Gaddafi's forces kidnapped you. How does the film portray what it's like to balance, say, your risk tolerance with that of your colleagues?

Lynsey Addario: Everyone who does this work has a different risk tolerance. Not every trip is the same. Sometimes I go into Ukraine now and I feel like I'm fine to be on the front line for five straight weeks. Sometimes I go in and I have this premonition that I just don't want to do it. I don't want to be at the front line, so I do more civilian-based stories. It's very important for each one of us to listen to our instinct because so much of this work has to do with instinct and experience and also where your fear tolerance is. When you get in a car with three other people, you have to make sure that you all have roughly similar tolerances for danger and fear. For example, in Libya, it wasn't so equal and that was one of the reasons why we ended up in the situation we ended up in, because I think we all had different levels of needs journalistically and also different levels of fear. I don't think you really can make a generalization about war correspondence. We all really are very different.

My colleague, Tyler Hicks, for example, who I was kidnapped with in Libya, he likes to be at the very front line basically in a trench with the troops the whole time he's in Ukraine. That's the last thing I want to do. I'm much more interested in telling the story of how war affects civilians and particularly women and children. We all just have different perspectives, and we all contribute to the greater coverage.

Brooke Gladstone: Can you give me an example when you were talked out of something or you talked somebody else out of something? Is there a time when, because there are life and death decisions, there's disagreement that has to be hashed out in that moment?

Lynsey Addario: Oh, 100%. Libya, for example, two people in the car wanted to stay and two wanted to leave. I, because I was the only woman in the car, decided to keep my mouth shut because I didn't want to be the one who was scared. My premonition was that we were staying too long and that it was too dangerous, and our driver had said, "Gaddafi's troops are in the city. There are snipers. We have to get out," and we didn't.

There was tension in the car that day and by the time we left, we drove directly into one of Gaddafi's checkpoints and our driver died and we ended up kidnapped for a week and beaten up and tied up, and threatened with execution. For me, groped every day by every Libyan soldier that came across us. There are very tense moments in cars where some people feel like it's safe enough to go forward and some people don't. That is why having a trusted team, a good fixer, or a good colleague, all of those things contribute to whether we stay alive or not.

Brooke Gladstone: If I'm correct, you've said that the morning before your kidnapping in Libya, you couldn't bring a camera to your face. You couldn't take a picture. I can't help but think of Lee quietly beginning to fall apart and taking no photos towards the end. What happened then?

Lynsey Addario: The morning of the kidnapping in Libya, I was just sure something was going to happen. I just had this feeling like we were too far forward. We knew the frontline. We knew that the town of Ajdabiya where we were working was about to fall to Gaddafi's forces. We were pushing the envelope too much. My concern was getting out of there and I was kind of paralyzed, not interested in taking photos in that moment, and just wanted to leave.

I think that Lee having to break down in the middle of that scene at the White House, it was a bit tough for me because it seemed unrealistic that someone of her caliber at that moment would fall apart because what happens in those moments is your adrenaline takes over, your experience takes over, where the PTSD and the trauma really gets you is when you get home. That's really where, for me, when I don't have a camera in my hand, I have to kind of wreck him with everything I've seen.

Brooke Gladstone: Alex Garland, the director, said that he wanted to make a film where journalists are the heroes. He thinks they are heroes, but a film industry person apparently told him, "Don't do that. Everyone hates journalists." Have you noticed a change in how journalists are treated both in the US and abroad? We covered, some years back, how the don't shoot journalists dictum. You wear a press jacket, you're considered neutral. That no longer works. How does it affect your work?

Lynsey Addario: When I first started, there was really a respect for journalists and we were untouchable in terms of we all had press on our cars. We wore flak jackets that said press. It was understood as an international rule that journalists were respected. Obviously, since I started, that has changed dramatically. Many people in the public say that we do everything as fake news. Journalists are killed with impunity routinely by governments that are never punished for killing journalists. The reason, obviously, is that they don't want the public and the greater international community to see what's happening on their watch.

It's wonderful that Alex Garland thinks of journalists as heroes, but it would be great if that respect was shared across the greater public the way it was 25 years ago. Things have really changed. I've had a lot of friends killed and killed intentionally, targeted. It continues to happen, and governments continue to get away with it. Look at Gaza. Almost a 100 journalists have been killed in Gaza. This is a crime.

Brooke Gladstone: Some with visible markings as press.

Lynsey Addario: Correct. That is intentional targeting of journalists and I think that that should be a war crime. The work of journalists and photojournalist is fundamental to understanding what's going on in the world today, and particularly, in war zones where people in positions of power cannot access. You need the work of journalists on the ground to understand the nuances of war. When you start killing journalists, it means that you're doing something you don't want the world to see.

Brooke Gladstone: You talked about the kinds of questions you get all the time. Some of them are very much related to, are you an adrenaline junkie? I've spoken to war reporters who say that they're never going back in and then they do, or that the adjustment when you come home is just so jarring. Have you had those moments because you don't sound the slightest bit jaded? You sound like you could do this forever.

Lynsey Addario: Obviously, I have PTSD and I have issues and moments where I become completely overwhelmed with emotion, and they're usually triggered by very random things. Watching the Wedding Crashers, I'll cry. There's not a textbook reason when I feel overwhelmed. When I came home from two months in the Korengal Valley living with the 173rd Airborne on the side of a mountain, and we were in countless ambushes, gun battles.

We went on a week-long mission where we jumped out of Black Hawks in the middle of the night in Taliban territory and were ambushed and three soldiers were shot. When I came home from that trip, I was flying home from Afghanistan, from Kabul to India where I was living at the time. I was removed from the exit row because I was a woman and I wouldn't have the strength to open the exit door. You can imagine, after jumping out of Black Hawks, walking 24 hours a day with all my gear on my back. I was told I was a woman, so I couldn't sit in an exit row.

For me, I had a very hard time reentering after that trip because I had been through so much along with, obviously, the troops I was with, and the Afghans we were covering. I just kept breaking down, and it took a good few months for me to collect myself. Even now when I come home and when I witness the family being killed in front of me in the mortar strike in Ukraine in March of 2022, and I and my colleague, Andrii, almost died.

I think I just have the tools to process this better. I think I talk about things very openly. My husband is a journalist, so we talk about things all the time. It's hard for me to explain. Everyone asks me how am I even normal. A lot of it has to do with my foundation. I have an incredible family that provided me with a lot of stability and love and security. I think I have the tools to get through really tough situations, but I don't really know the answer to that.

Brooke Gladstone: At one point when young Jessie agonizes over whether she could have intervened to avoid a murder, Lee says, "We don't ask. We record, so other people ask. You want to be a journalist? That's the job." You've said that, anyone who does this job, who takes it on, has to continually remind themselves why they do it. Why do you do this?

Lynsey Addario: I do it to affect policy, to inform the public, to change preconceptions or misconceptions about what's happening, to document human rights abuses, war crimes, as a historical record of what has happened. Those are the reasons why I am willing to risk my life so that those things don't continue to happen. That's the reason why any war correspondent does this, is to stop injustices, make sure that people are aware of what's happening, to be aware of the fruits of American foreign policy, and in the case of the movie Civil War, to be a reminder of where we're heading as a very polarized country.

Brooke Gladstone: I know why I'm a journalist. I don't sacrifice anything to do it. It's entirely satisfying and not at all dangerous. I had one moment with bullets when I was in Russia during the insurrection of the Russian Parliament. It was very brief and none of it was aimed at me. We don't have anything like the same experience. I know why it's important to be a journalist. I just don't know how a person can do this over and over again and believe that they can have an impact. That's very dark. I'm sorry.

Lynsey Addario: That's okay. That's obviously a question I have to ask myself all the time. It's not only about me, it's also about my family and my loved ones. I think that that's something also, of course, the movie couldn't get into, but the impact on our loved ones is also extraordinary. That's a lot to ask. As selfless as it is of a profession, it's also very selfish because we take a toll on our loved ones. I believe in this work. I believe in journalism. I believe, especially if you are a government or a leader and you are committing war crimes, they need to be recorded and you need to be taken to task. That will happen with the work of journalists.

Brooke Gladstone: You do believe it can make a difference?

Lynsey Addario: Well, what's the alternative? You can use drones, AI. There is nothing like human contact. For me, so much of the work I'm doing on the frontline is engaging with people, empathizing with them, listening to what they think and feel and recording that, and trying to capture the mood with my camera. That's not something that a drone or a robot can do. It's all about relationships. It cannot be substituted.

Civil War depicted very well the combat of the frontline. What it didn't depict as well are the relationships. Basically, you saw soldiers and you saw journalists, but it's missing regular people, how they're affected by the conflict, except for that town where they've decided to sit out the Civil War. A huge component of why I do this work and why I risk my life are the civilians. That is something that has to be documented and has to be told.

Brooke Gladstone: Lynsey, thank you so much.

Lynsey Addario: You're welcome. Thank you for having me.

Brooke Gladstone: Veteran photojournalist, Lynsey Addario, is the author of the book, It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War. Thanks for listening to the midweek podcast. Join us for [unintelligible 00:22:50] which posts on Friday where we discuss what's the matter with NPR.

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