Pat Tillman was a safety for the Arizona Cardinals. In 2002, instead of renewing his NFL contract, he decided to enlist in the Army. As a Ranger, he served tours in Afghanistan, where he was killed in 2004. Early reports said he died taking enemy fire, but further investigation showed that it was actually a friendly fire incident. This would simply be a tragedy if the facts came out. But the military tried to spin a different story which resulted in a now exposed cover-up.
The Tillman Story is a documentary that shows what we were told about Pat Tillman, what actually happened to Pat Tillman, and why the government lied. Director Amir Bar-Lev follows Danni Tillman, Pat's mom, and Kevin Tillman, his brother who also enlisted, as they piece together the truth and bring it to light. Clarifying information contained in redacted documents, they attempt to assert that Pat was not the gung ho military icon the public was led to believe. He was actually a very private person and serving in the Army was just a choice he wanted to make.
Beyond the Tillmans, Bar-Lev speaks to others in the military who knew Tillman or were involved directly. Some suggest that the military myth was intended to bolster an image that soldiers are wise, mature warriors - instead of simply 19-year-old youths who can make mistakes. The film also addresses the Jessica Lynch story, which was similarly twisted by the military. For those that don't recall, a camera crew joined the rescue of PFC Lynch and Pentagon officials embellished the extent of her injuries to create the impression of a larger than life female war hero.
The week of the film's Los Angeles opening, Bar-Lev sat in the conference room at The Weinstein Company offices as journalists rotated in to discuss the film. Exposing the cover-up only leads to more questions. Bar-Lev, whose previous film My Kid Could Paint That chronicled a child artist, was enthusiastic to address the further developments of The Tillman Story post-film.
Fred Topel: How did you first become aware that there was more to the Tillman story?
Amir Bar-Lev: Well, I can't take too much credit for it. I can say this. I am definitely not the only person who knew there was more to the story about Pat's death. It didn't take long to realize that there was more to the story about how he lived and who he was. That's actually when we got very intrigued by the story is when we realized that the myth making about his life was comparable to the myth making about his death. So we knew there were two records to correct, so to speak. That was right from the beginning, in the spring of 2007.
FT: How did that come to your attention then, through his family?
ABL: It was his family. It was our initial conversations with his family once we finally got in touch with them. It took us a little while to get in touch with them, maybe six or seven months to get them to agree. It took about seven months to arrive at an agreement to work together. It was in the initial conversations with them that we were made to understand that they felt they had lost Pat twice: Once to death and the second time to this cartoon character that had taken his place in the public imagination.
FT: Still, you say 2007. That's three years since his death. You were watching all the coverage for four years, when did it dawn on you that something wasn't right?
ABL: It's a good question. The thing is, I was busy with my last film until Spring of 2007. We didn't decide to undertake this story until then. You're correctly pointing out that we sort of got involved at the end. What you see as basically the end of the film is really the beginning of when we got involved. I know there were others who were on top of this story before I was and a lot of those guys were fiction filmmakers. The family had a steady barrage of requests to make a fiction film. In fact, we shot a scene that didn't make it into the movie of Marie Tillman, Pat's widow, going through these spec scripts that are very comical, that landed on her desk.
FT: The scripts were still doing the propaganda version of the story?
ABL: Yes. That's why I shot it and it didn't make it into the movie.
FT: I wonder if one of those will still get made.
ABL: God, I hope not.
FT: It was encouraging to see how they could reconstruct redacted documents. Is that a process people can apply to cover-ups?
ABL: That's interesting. I don't know that it's something applicable because don't forget, Kevin Tillman was in the platoon. So Danni had two assets that most people wouldn't have. She had a son who could help her with some facts and names and contacts. Then she had Stan Goff, a retired special ops soldier who knew some of these people and could help her find ballistics experts. They engaged in, as Stan Goff describes it, this game of an elaborate crossword puzzle. Once you began to fill in some, it worked like a Rubik's Cube where you could fill in others.
FT: Even figuring out how many spaces were blocked out on each person's name sounded like some genius detective work.
ABL: Some of them had the dashes and some didn't. I'm speculating, but they probably went after the dashes first. That was another whole thing they got wrong for a while. They had a totally wrong idea because there were two soldiers I think with the same number of letters in their name.
FT: So that was all Danni's legwork and you captured it?
ABL: Yeah, all that was basically done by the time we got into it.
FT: This idea of expecting our young soldiers to have this wisdom, has it always been that way at war or is it a modern idea?
ABL: I absolutely think that this isn't something that began with the Bush Administration. This has to do, to my mind, with who we need our soldiers to be in order to tell ourselves a sanitized version of war. It actually benefits us more than it benefits the soldiers, that myth. The soldiers probably, I can't speak for them, but I would imagine that soldiers want us to face the reality of what war-making is because in a way it makes them more heroic. But for us, back home, it's more comfortable to have a sanitized imagination of what war-making is all about. Part of that involves turning our back to the youth of the soldiers and telling ourselves these are these reluctant men who go out far from our homes to defend our homes. Of course there is a kernel of truth to even that but I think one of the things that led to Pat's death is the inexperience and youth of these soldiers and, quite frankly, the fact that few soldiers want to get fired on and have their life in danger. But also, few soldiers want to go home and tell their grandkids in the future that they didn't see any combat, they didn't see any action. That's something we don't want to face as a culture but it's true. Soldiers at the same time don't want to have their lives in jeopardy but also want to see action. When those young men have these kind of weapons, it's right there in the documents. They say, "I wanted to stay in the firefight. I was excited."
FT: Is it better that we understand those complexities of sending people to war?
ABL: I think the truth is always favorable to a lie. I don't think this is a referendum on whether or not we should go to war. It's just if we're going to go to war, we should be honest with ourselves about what war is.
FT: Shouldn't we do that in all decisions? If we're making decisions, it should be based on what's actually at stake.
ABL: How can you make decisions based on [incorrect information]? I think this has to do with the military. It also has to do with Hollywood. It's interesting also thinking about how these soldiers are in part trained by their superiors and in part trained by movies which tell them what soldiering is about. What's really funny is those movies get their idea from the military who gets their idea from movies and it goes on and on and on, all the way back in time. There's always been war, there's always been warriors and there's been stories about warriors. The two mutually feed off each other. Since way before there was even a United States, there have been statues about great heroes and things like that. If we make our decisions plugging every action into what movie it reminds us of, which is exactly what we do most of the time, that's what this movie is about. The Jessica Lynch thing, it's really a mistake to blame it all on the government. The government fed us through the press a character from our own movies. We gobbled it up.
FT: Isn't it our responsibility to not fall for it, to not buy what they're selling?
ABL: That's right. That's something I think people can take away from this. Like they say if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If it sounds too much like a movie, you should be very, very wary.
FT: Did the story even work for the government? Did recruitment go up after they told their Pat Tillman story?
ABL: Well, that remains to be seen, doesn't it? As far as recruitment, I don't know how you would figure that out. I would venture to say it has worked so far because nobody's ever been held to account for this Hollywood myth. Same goes for Jessica Lynch. Nobody ever paid a price for that. I think the final chapter of the Tillman story has yet to be written. It will have to do with whether or not we decide to let people get away with it.
FT: Would Pat want this story told? It seemed he might have kept details to himself, the real story or the military story.
ABL: Would he want the movie made? I don't know but I do know that the family has told us that he'd love the movie. That meant a lot to us and I think it's hard to speculate about what a dead man would feel. I think it's clear that he would hate the way he's been portrayed. The film is an attempt by the family to correct the record. It just becomes speculative at a certain point, right?
FT: What has the effect of this movie been so far, from festivals to its initial limited release?
ABL: I can say we've been very gratified. I'll tell you one thing that happened on the very first day we premiered it at Sundance. Michael Moore came up to us afterwards who's a guy I admire a lot. He came up to us afterwards and said some very nice things. Then he went to the press, The LA Times, and said this is a very important movie. That was helpful to us. A few hours later, a guy came up to me and said, "I just want you to know I'm an American exceptionalist. I'm an arch conservative. I'm pro-military, I'm pro-war and I love your movie. I think it's a great American document." That was all within literally about four hours. That's when we began to feel gratified with the way it's being received.
FT: Has it brought any peace to his family, like his father who's still trying to piece together the complete story?
ABL: I'll answer that by not answering it and I'll tell you why. We as filmmakers found time and time again that we would ask people stuff, not the Tillmans but we would ask Stan Goff or other people in the film who knew the family. We'd ask them questions like that, questions about the family's thought process. Time and time again we'd here, "I don't want to speak for the family." Now I find myself on the other side of that. You know, they have such an admirable sense of their own privacy. They are so articulate about their own perspective that people who get to know them shy away from things that normally you would say about people you know. Like, "Yeah, they're happy about it." Also we don't speak for them. Nobody speaks for them. They speak for themselves quite accurately. So I don't know that they found any peace.
FT: What is the next step for us, after we see the film and learn about the story?
ABL: I can answer that by directing you. The most recent thing that's happened in this story is Stanley McChrystal. He was then kicked out but more applicably, he was confirmed to lead all soldiers in the war in Afghanistan. That's a chapter that happened after our film was completed and after the Bush administration was gone. He was confirmed by a Democratic Congress and the press and Congress gave him a pass. If you look into it, you'll find it really interesting. It's very hard to explain. The lie that Stanley McChrystal told successfully is a lie that's actually more childlike than "The dog ate my homework." It's too elaborate probably but there was a Silver Star. The Silver Star said, "[Corporal Tillman] put himself in the line of devastating enemy fire" and he "was mortally wounded," but was still calling out commands to his platoon. So somewhere where the period is between those two sentences is the whole real truth that he was killed by our own men. When Stanley McChrystal was asked about it, he said, "You know, I didn't read it carefully enough to see that you could mistakenly think that the enemy killed Pat by the Silver Star." It's such a stupid lie. It's such a childlike lie that it reflects poorly on you and me and everybody else that he got away with that. I think people, when they see the film, they're going to be outraged that those type of people are in charge of our military and they're going to ask very pertinent questions about who confirms them and how the press lets this kind of thing slide. So I hope that the film provokes a sense of outrage. I think it will in people from both sides of the political spectrum. The next steps are making sure that those people are held accountable.
FT: That's the age old question though. How can we hold them accountable?
ABL: There are real world ways and real tangible ways that people who lie at the highest level of government are held accountable. It's built into this Constitution and that can still happen.
The Tillman Story is now playing in select cities.
The Tillman Story is a documentary that shows what we were told about Pat Tillman, what actually happened to Pat Tillman, and why the government lied. Director Amir Bar-Lev follows Danni Tillman, Pat's mom, and Kevin Tillman, his brother who also enlisted, as they piece together the truth and bring it to light. Clarifying information contained in redacted documents, they attempt to assert that Pat was not the gung ho military icon the public was led to believe. He was actually a very private person and serving in the Army was just a choice he wanted to make.
Beyond the Tillmans, Bar-Lev speaks to others in the military who knew Tillman or were involved directly. Some suggest that the military myth was intended to bolster an image that soldiers are wise, mature warriors - instead of simply 19-year-old youths who can make mistakes. The film also addresses the Jessica Lynch story, which was similarly twisted by the military. For those that don't recall, a camera crew joined the rescue of PFC Lynch and Pentagon officials embellished the extent of her injuries to create the impression of a larger than life female war hero.
The week of the film's Los Angeles opening, Bar-Lev sat in the conference room at The Weinstein Company offices as journalists rotated in to discuss the film. Exposing the cover-up only leads to more questions. Bar-Lev, whose previous film My Kid Could Paint That chronicled a child artist, was enthusiastic to address the further developments of The Tillman Story post-film.
Fred Topel: How did you first become aware that there was more to the Tillman story?
Amir Bar-Lev: Well, I can't take too much credit for it. I can say this. I am definitely not the only person who knew there was more to the story about Pat's death. It didn't take long to realize that there was more to the story about how he lived and who he was. That's actually when we got very intrigued by the story is when we realized that the myth making about his life was comparable to the myth making about his death. So we knew there were two records to correct, so to speak. That was right from the beginning, in the spring of 2007.
FT: How did that come to your attention then, through his family?
ABL: It was his family. It was our initial conversations with his family once we finally got in touch with them. It took us a little while to get in touch with them, maybe six or seven months to get them to agree. It took about seven months to arrive at an agreement to work together. It was in the initial conversations with them that we were made to understand that they felt they had lost Pat twice: Once to death and the second time to this cartoon character that had taken his place in the public imagination.
FT: Still, you say 2007. That's three years since his death. You were watching all the coverage for four years, when did it dawn on you that something wasn't right?
ABL: It's a good question. The thing is, I was busy with my last film until Spring of 2007. We didn't decide to undertake this story until then. You're correctly pointing out that we sort of got involved at the end. What you see as basically the end of the film is really the beginning of when we got involved. I know there were others who were on top of this story before I was and a lot of those guys were fiction filmmakers. The family had a steady barrage of requests to make a fiction film. In fact, we shot a scene that didn't make it into the movie of Marie Tillman, Pat's widow, going through these spec scripts that are very comical, that landed on her desk.
FT: The scripts were still doing the propaganda version of the story?
ABL: Yes. That's why I shot it and it didn't make it into the movie.
FT: I wonder if one of those will still get made.
ABL: God, I hope not.
FT: It was encouraging to see how they could reconstruct redacted documents. Is that a process people can apply to cover-ups?
ABL: That's interesting. I don't know that it's something applicable because don't forget, Kevin Tillman was in the platoon. So Danni had two assets that most people wouldn't have. She had a son who could help her with some facts and names and contacts. Then she had Stan Goff, a retired special ops soldier who knew some of these people and could help her find ballistics experts. They engaged in, as Stan Goff describes it, this game of an elaborate crossword puzzle. Once you began to fill in some, it worked like a Rubik's Cube where you could fill in others.
FT: Even figuring out how many spaces were blocked out on each person's name sounded like some genius detective work.
ABL: Some of them had the dashes and some didn't. I'm speculating, but they probably went after the dashes first. That was another whole thing they got wrong for a while. They had a totally wrong idea because there were two soldiers I think with the same number of letters in their name.
FT: So that was all Danni's legwork and you captured it?
ABL: Yeah, all that was basically done by the time we got into it.
FT: This idea of expecting our young soldiers to have this wisdom, has it always been that way at war or is it a modern idea?
ABL: I absolutely think that this isn't something that began with the Bush Administration. This has to do, to my mind, with who we need our soldiers to be in order to tell ourselves a sanitized version of war. It actually benefits us more than it benefits the soldiers, that myth. The soldiers probably, I can't speak for them, but I would imagine that soldiers want us to face the reality of what war-making is because in a way it makes them more heroic. But for us, back home, it's more comfortable to have a sanitized imagination of what war-making is all about. Part of that involves turning our back to the youth of the soldiers and telling ourselves these are these reluctant men who go out far from our homes to defend our homes. Of course there is a kernel of truth to even that but I think one of the things that led to Pat's death is the inexperience and youth of these soldiers and, quite frankly, the fact that few soldiers want to get fired on and have their life in danger. But also, few soldiers want to go home and tell their grandkids in the future that they didn't see any combat, they didn't see any action. That's something we don't want to face as a culture but it's true. Soldiers at the same time don't want to have their lives in jeopardy but also want to see action. When those young men have these kind of weapons, it's right there in the documents. They say, "I wanted to stay in the firefight. I was excited."
FT: Is it better that we understand those complexities of sending people to war?
ABL: I think the truth is always favorable to a lie. I don't think this is a referendum on whether or not we should go to war. It's just if we're going to go to war, we should be honest with ourselves about what war is.
FT: Shouldn't we do that in all decisions? If we're making decisions, it should be based on what's actually at stake.
ABL: How can you make decisions based on [incorrect information]? I think this has to do with the military. It also has to do with Hollywood. It's interesting also thinking about how these soldiers are in part trained by their superiors and in part trained by movies which tell them what soldiering is about. What's really funny is those movies get their idea from the military who gets their idea from movies and it goes on and on and on, all the way back in time. There's always been war, there's always been warriors and there's been stories about warriors. The two mutually feed off each other. Since way before there was even a United States, there have been statues about great heroes and things like that. If we make our decisions plugging every action into what movie it reminds us of, which is exactly what we do most of the time, that's what this movie is about. The Jessica Lynch thing, it's really a mistake to blame it all on the government. The government fed us through the press a character from our own movies. We gobbled it up.
FT: Isn't it our responsibility to not fall for it, to not buy what they're selling?
ABL: That's right. That's something I think people can take away from this. Like they say if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If it sounds too much like a movie, you should be very, very wary.
FT: Did the story even work for the government? Did recruitment go up after they told their Pat Tillman story?
ABL: Well, that remains to be seen, doesn't it? As far as recruitment, I don't know how you would figure that out. I would venture to say it has worked so far because nobody's ever been held to account for this Hollywood myth. Same goes for Jessica Lynch. Nobody ever paid a price for that. I think the final chapter of the Tillman story has yet to be written. It will have to do with whether or not we decide to let people get away with it.
FT: Would Pat want this story told? It seemed he might have kept details to himself, the real story or the military story.
ABL: Would he want the movie made? I don't know but I do know that the family has told us that he'd love the movie. That meant a lot to us and I think it's hard to speculate about what a dead man would feel. I think it's clear that he would hate the way he's been portrayed. The film is an attempt by the family to correct the record. It just becomes speculative at a certain point, right?
FT: What has the effect of this movie been so far, from festivals to its initial limited release?
ABL: I can say we've been very gratified. I'll tell you one thing that happened on the very first day we premiered it at Sundance. Michael Moore came up to us afterwards who's a guy I admire a lot. He came up to us afterwards and said some very nice things. Then he went to the press, The LA Times, and said this is a very important movie. That was helpful to us. A few hours later, a guy came up to me and said, "I just want you to know I'm an American exceptionalist. I'm an arch conservative. I'm pro-military, I'm pro-war and I love your movie. I think it's a great American document." That was all within literally about four hours. That's when we began to feel gratified with the way it's being received.
FT: Has it brought any peace to his family, like his father who's still trying to piece together the complete story?
ABL: I'll answer that by not answering it and I'll tell you why. We as filmmakers found time and time again that we would ask people stuff, not the Tillmans but we would ask Stan Goff or other people in the film who knew the family. We'd ask them questions like that, questions about the family's thought process. Time and time again we'd here, "I don't want to speak for the family." Now I find myself on the other side of that. You know, they have such an admirable sense of their own privacy. They are so articulate about their own perspective that people who get to know them shy away from things that normally you would say about people you know. Like, "Yeah, they're happy about it." Also we don't speak for them. Nobody speaks for them. They speak for themselves quite accurately. So I don't know that they found any peace.
FT: What is the next step for us, after we see the film and learn about the story?
ABL: I can answer that by directing you. The most recent thing that's happened in this story is Stanley McChrystal. He was then kicked out but more applicably, he was confirmed to lead all soldiers in the war in Afghanistan. That's a chapter that happened after our film was completed and after the Bush administration was gone. He was confirmed by a Democratic Congress and the press and Congress gave him a pass. If you look into it, you'll find it really interesting. It's very hard to explain. The lie that Stanley McChrystal told successfully is a lie that's actually more childlike than "The dog ate my homework." It's too elaborate probably but there was a Silver Star. The Silver Star said, "[Corporal Tillman] put himself in the line of devastating enemy fire" and he "was mortally wounded," but was still calling out commands to his platoon. So somewhere where the period is between those two sentences is the whole real truth that he was killed by our own men. When Stanley McChrystal was asked about it, he said, "You know, I didn't read it carefully enough to see that you could mistakenly think that the enemy killed Pat by the Silver Star." It's such a stupid lie. It's such a childlike lie that it reflects poorly on you and me and everybody else that he got away with that. I think people, when they see the film, they're going to be outraged that those type of people are in charge of our military and they're going to ask very pertinent questions about who confirms them and how the press lets this kind of thing slide. So I hope that the film provokes a sense of outrage. I think it will in people from both sides of the political spectrum. The next steps are making sure that those people are held accountable.
FT: That's the age old question though. How can we hold them accountable?
ABL: There are real world ways and real tangible ways that people who lie at the highest level of government are held accountable. It's built into this Constitution and that can still happen.
The Tillman Story is now playing in select cities.