international<\/a> sales.<\/p>\n\n\tRowley spoke with THR in Copenhagen about the global rise of mercenaries, how the spread of oligarchy and authoritarianism relates to it, and why he believes Hell\u2019s Army is a warning to us all.<\/p>\n
\n\tWhy did you decide to make a film about Wagner?<\/p>\n
\n\tI\u2019ve been tracking mercenaries since I first saw them in the field in Iraq, way back in 2004. It was their reemergence on the battlefield that signaled a terrifying potential in war. When Wagner emerged and came out of the shadows, it was clear that mercenaries had entered a completely new paradigm. Wagner put 30,000 soldiers in the field. They were larger than most of the armies in Europe. And they became the first private company to conquer a European city in 500 years. So, I knew this was a story that I had to cover. <\/p>\n
\n\tHow did you find Katya and Denis?<\/p>\n
\n\tYou can\u2019t make a film about Wagner without talking to Denis, who revealed their existence for the first time and has cultivated an unmatched network of sources on the inside of the organization. He knows it inside and out. Denis introduced me to the whole team that he works with and Katya and the Dossier Center. It\u2019s a unique combination. We have, on the one hand, Denis with his sources, and Katya, who\u2019s on the ground in the field, immersing us, taking us to the battlefield and showing us on the ground what this means. And the Dossier Center has access to this trove of internal documents. All this allowed us to be global and epic in scope, and also intimate and immersive on the front lines.<\/p>\n
\n\tHell\u2019s Army includes scenes where, as an audience, we are told that we cannot be shown certain people, or they may be recognized and face danger. How involved were the security guidelines you followed for the film?<\/p>\n
\n\tThe Dossier team has significant security protocols. They are on a list as an undesirable organization in Russia. Katya is also on a list. When she was in Syria, it was discovered that she was on a target list and that she would be arrested if she were ever found at a checkpoint. So they spend a lot of time thinking about and planning for ways to keep people safe.<\/p>\n
\n\tYou yourself accompanied her in the field. How key was your presence on the ground and what kind of security measures did that involve?<\/p>\n
\n\tAbsolutely. I had to be everywhere because I also shoot, and it\u2019s really important for me to immerse the audience in the specificity of each location. Part of that is visual and oral. Part of it is [capturing] the color of light in the morning or the sound of drones whining in the air. But more important is the feeling of the walls closing in on us in Syria, or the public mourning in the streets of Ukraine. And so I had to be there, and I had to be there to shoot all of it. <\/p>\n
\n\tEvery location is different and unique and has its own set of security requirements. But I\u2019ve been a war reporter for many years and have learned that sometimes you have to work with private security to just stay safe. But in the end, that\u2019s not what makes you safe. What makes you safe is having local people whom you trust, who you can work with. There are always risks involved with going to any conflict zone, of course, but it\u2019s important also to recognize that the risks we take are nothing in comparison with the risks that our local colleagues take in bringing us there.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/wp-content\/themes\/vip\/pmc-hollywoodreporter-2021\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tHell\u2019s Army<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Evergreen Productions<\/p>\n
\n\tWhat other elements were key to bringing this scary world of mercenaries to life?<\/p>\n
\n\tIt\u2019s just an incredible cast of characters. I was amazed by every one of them. We have an AWOL Wagner colonel who\u2019s hiding out in Turkish Cyprus, a scruffy-haired lieutenant with a mechanical hand who\u2019s running their operations in the Central African Republic, a prison recruit who\u2019d been thrown into the meat grinder in Ukraine and then ended up escaping. Mercenaries occupy this gray zone at the extremities of human morality and experience. They\u2019re always fascinating, and their stories are always revealing.<\/p>\n
\n\tHell\u2019s Army even mentions at some point that it\u2019s unclear why a person is talking to you. Do you always know people\u2019s motivation to meet and speak to you? I would expect them to not trust you.<\/p>\n
\n\tFirst of all, they\u2019re all very suspicious of us. And their motives for speaking are complex and different. In some cases, they are genuinely looking for some kind of redemption. [One of the people in Hell\u2019s Army,] Igor is weighing his options for his future. But I think that some of the people were talking to us just to see if they could figure out what we knew or what we\u2019re working on, or where we might be going. That happens too.<\/p>\n
\n\tAlso, people want to talk. Everyone wants to talk. And I approach everyone with genuine curiosity. I really want to know how he ended up being who he is in this complex, gray world they operate in. And people sort of sense that. I\u2019m not setting them up for gotcha questions and going to piece together something to misrepresent them. I want them to articulate as clearly as possible who they are and how they became who they are, and how they understand their role in the world. People feel that, and they open up when you approach them like that.<\/p>\n
\n\tHell\u2019s Army mentions that the global rise of mercenaries is continuing. Can you talk about this trend a bit and what drives it?<\/p>\n
\n\tYeah, Wagner\u2019s leader was killed, but the army metastasized. So in some countries, it remains unchanged. In Mali and in the Central African Republic, Wagner is still Wagner. In many other places, the fighters have moved into other mercenary formations. Some even defected and joined Western-backed mercenary companies that are also operating in Africa and in Europe. <\/p>\n
\n\tEven their brand is being used to recruit people into Russia\u2019s hybrid war. The Associated Press has identified something like 125 acts in Europe perpetrated by Russia as part of a hybrid war campaign. That\u2019s attempted assassinations, kidnappings and sabotage. So they\u2019re very much still a live part of all this.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tRichard Rowley, courtesy of Jeff Vespa<\/p>\n
\n\tGlobally, the mercenaries are on the rise everywhere. The United Arab Emirates has a mercenary force that has been operating in Yemen, and they used it in Libya. Mercenaries hired out of Florida assassinated the president of Haiti. This is a terrifying new paradigm that we\u2019re moving into. Democracies don\u2019t need mercenary armies. Mercenary armies are what states turn to when they\u2019ve been taken over by oligarchs and authoritarians who are running the state for their private ambitions and their private gain.<\/p>\n
\n\tCan you expand on that a bit?<\/p>\n
\n\tHell\u2019s Army is a warning. In the United States, we\u2019re well on the road to an authoritarian future where our culture and politics are ruled by oligarchs or significantly influenced by oligarchs. And these are the horrors that lie at the end of that road when war is turned into a project for personal gain and personal ambition. It turns soldiers into murderers, and it debases us as a nation. So that is the dark future that\u2019s ahead of us. I hope that Hell\u2019s Army is a warning to us all to choose a different path, while we still can.<\/p>\n
\n\tIt\u2019s about democracy. In a democratic system, you don\u2019t have mercenaries, because one of the core functions of the state and of government is to have a monopoly on violence and to control the army so that wars are only fought when they serve some collective moral purpose. So that\u2019s what\u2019s at stake now. We\u2019re witnessing the collapse of the liberal order that we\u2019ve lived in since the post-war period. It\u2019s almost gone, and it is something that we have to fight for. Because it\u2019s so brazen and so out there in the open. People don\u2019t even make an effort to conceal what\u2019s happening at this point.<\/p>\n
\n\tWas there any particularly crazy moment on your journey to making Hell\u2019s Army?<\/p>\n
\n\tThe craziest moment in the course of making this film was the moment when Wagner went public. For years, Katya and Denis had been struggling to unmask and expose Wagner. And then just where they felt they\u2019ve exposed them, Wagner\u2019s out in the press. Ukraine is invaded, and Wagner goes public, and this villain who they\u2019ve been trying to reveal, steps out and is on the evening news talking to the New York Times. That brought everything we had done up to that point into question. What is the purpose and the value of all the risks that you\u2019ve taken? Colleagues have died exposing these crimes, and these crimes have now become a celebrated part of this brand. And the brand is brutality, the brand is war crimes. The answer that Katya and Denis came to was that they had to go even deeper to reveal the entire system and what makes this kind of violence not only possible, but maybe even inevitable.<\/p>\n
\n\tDo you have any new projects in the works? If so, what can you share about it?<\/p>\n
\n\tI have a new project in the same sort of universe as Hell\u2019s Army. I\u2019ve been making films about war in one way or another for 30 years, because it feels to me that wars reveal us at our extremities. The symptoms of our darkest cultural sicknesses become visible. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than a decade ago, the Wagner Group began its rise as the world\u2019s most feared mercenary army…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":346340,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[157327,146,85,399,46,397],"class_list":["post-346339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-cphdox","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-international","tag-israel","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=346339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346339\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/346340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=346339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=346339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=346339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}