Lone Survivor: A Conversation

what an extraordinarily emotional film that is and how hard it is to even think of doing this interview after it when all you want to do is just go into a room and think quietly about it but it is my great great honor now to introduce this extraordinary panel um ladies and gentlemen the incredibly talented director peter berg sitting at the end one of the stars the great talent taylor kitsch who played the great mike murphy well and of course the man who lived through this harrowing event who is the lone survivor himself the man that we have come here really to honor marcus latrell thank you i would also like to mention that we have in our audience a great number of navy seals marcus was actually sitting with many teammates in the audience and we also have with us admiral eric olsen who was head of special ops at the time he is with us tonight too well i have to start with marcus because our heads are so full of questions and so many questions first of all marcus i mean just the physical question first we see what you went through in this unbelievable harrowing ordeal which is just unthinkable we see you rolling down that mountain smashing into rocks we see you shut up banged it up in the most unbelievable way how did you sustain how did you go through living with that kind of pain keeping yourself together how did you even raise a gun tell us about the physical ordeal and what what injuries you did in fact suffer um well i was shot uh i had multiple frag not only from the the rpg rounds themselves but from the trees and the and the rocks which actually hurt worse than the uh the rpg blasts themselves i fractured my spine in multiple places my pelvis tore my rotator cuff out and uh my maximum facial damage was very severe didn't show it in the movie but i had actually broken my nose and i bit my tongue in half and swallowed it um i had 11 through and throughs in my quads and calves most of the skin off my back side and and most of my front side was turned into hamburger but as far as the pain tolerance and most seals have high pain thresholds anyways and the adrenaline that was flowing through me on concentrating more on what i had to deal with the task that was in front of me and concentrating on my teammates is as ultimately we got through me uh got me through the initial gun fight i was actually shot in the back the following day it didn't show that and that one hurt because my adrenaline wasn't up and i wasn't really prepared for it uh but ultimately from the time we were we check into seal training and become tadpoles and and work our way up through the community it's it's a selection process that that weeds out the the weak or the ones that can't handle it and the ones that can and the one ones that make it through it and they put us in situations uh in our training that pretty much equate to everything that had that transpired up on the mountain that day wow how long did it take you to actually recover from those wounds i i still have surgeries to this very day wow so that's unbelievable well of course the other many questions that we have and i just want to ask a couple of them because i know you're all going to want to know in the audience what happened to those communications i mean why did those communications go down like that why didn't they function that day communications are kind of just like cell phones out here driving down the road or talking to somebody and then all of a sudden the phone just goes down you don't can't explain why it just just happens the terrain that we were in believe it or not there's a lot that goes into dealing with communications from the rotation of the earth the sun the clouds and rain and ultimately the position that we were in on to where we could get the best vantage point at our for our target location and didn't allow us to have uh stable communications that's why we had to back up with the uh the satellite phone well i mean what the why did the why were the apaches not there to to cover i'm not advised you're not advised has there been an investigation after the mission as to what happened meaning i'm not going to tell you you're not going to tell me okay all right well peter the berg the intense realism of this film makes it very hard to watch at times uh what was your uh you know how how did you go about making this film and i know this was a great odyssey for you to get it done tell us a little bit about the odyssey to get it done and what you what you saw in this film that you wanted to do and how you you wrote it you directed it this has been a huge passion of yours for many years um that's i don't know where to start i was made aware of this book when i was working on another movie and i wasn't really open to reading anything or thinking about much and my partner sarah aubrey was here somewhere i was like no you actually have to sit down and read this book and i fought her and i argued and she's like you really have to read it and during my lunch break i went locked myself in my trailer and was going to read a few pages of it and tore through the book very quickly and stood in line with a bunch of other filmmakers uh to to try and talk marcus into letting letting me take a shot at it um and i got my my day in court with him and we spent some time together and uh he he told me that you know the good news was that i i had i was going to give it to me and uh the bad news was that he would kill me um and if i screwed it up and uh he wasn't kidding i don't think and uh and that's been sort of the mantra i've heard from so many of the team guys you know better get it right and somewhere out here as uh eric olson who at the time was uh running special ops in florida and i had to go see him and and kind of plead my case as to why i should be allowed to have access to the seal community which is generally not particularly receptive to outsiders we had a long conversation about it and and he agreed to let me have access on a limited basis and over over time there's admiral tom brown here somewhere i think who was kind of running the show then he agreed to let me have more access and that began you know my journey and my passion for for marcus and his teammates um obviously uh mike murphy is is one of the great characters in the film taylor tell us about how you built the character of mike murphy did you did you immerse yourself in his family his friends how did you learn how to be mike murphy um can you hear you can hear me good all right yeah hold it um how did i obviously reading the book and i had talked a few times and then i talked to uh pete a bunch about a lot a lot of meetings with him and i i'm very i'm flattering myself but i like to think that i have some pieces of of what mike had as well and it's it's really bringing the best out of me in in those attributes that i have and really trying to bring them to the surface as well as talking to marcus a lot of the tools that we gained were in the training and working with each other and the other shields that were training us that really i think solidified a lot of the choices that i had done on my own the training in in texas where i live so um it was i guess community how long did you train with the seals to to immerse yourself in that culture um over a month and then it was a lot of talking to marcus one-on-one meetings um in a hotel room before and then pete and then you know you have your your script as well you know where you can you know create those waves marcus of course you know the whole moral pivot of this story is uh and the you know the huge turning point is a decision not to kill those uh shepherds on the mountain tell me about that real incident and do you regret not killing them no i i don't have any regrets at all with anything that i've ever done it was a situation that we got put in that we obviously we had to deal with we tried to radio back for um advice on how to deal with this particular threat the our our target that we were dealing with was very elusive had been we've been going after him for about two years before they finally slid him across our desk and soft compromises are are a part of what we do sometimes i mean working out in that area it's it's bound to happen it's their backyard and we're just kind of trying to work our way through it i mean it's literally one of the things where if you go in and you take a rock and you move it from this area to this area it's probably the rock that this guy's great great great great grandfather sat on to go to the bathroom or something and it was like hey where's my rock obviously there's some there's been somebody up here who's not supposed to be up here so in order to dig in and find positions to where we can get vantage points on what we were dealing with it was very difficult and that's what came in with the training and and how long we'd been out there we we've been doing this our team we've been together for a very very long time so we were really good at what we did the the overall decision to turn them loose was was well above our pay grade i'm speaking of rules of engagement and stuff like that and there had been situations in the past where the exact same scenario had played out with other forces some green berets and and so forth and so on and you know there's no there's no manual that they can hand us that that we wish we could look at every time something like that goes down it's and it's another thing it's on the reason that we've trained so hard and trained so long and that there's so much time and money invested into what we do is because you allow us the the opportunity to make our own decisions while we're out there i mean we it's it'd be like laying on the operating table while some guy was working on your heart and you're like hold on wait a minute let's call somebody else in here because i don't think you know what you're doing well we do know what we're doing so everything that we encountered out there and and all the situations that were right there in front of us ultimately our decision is what we had to deal with and to turn them loose good bad or indifferent the outcome obviously was was bad but we're we're prepared for that as well so peter obviously writing that scene must have been for you i'm sure you saw it as a huge turning point in the film tell me about writing that scene um how did you get to it does it matter you know that that moment it was was a it was a key moment for me and something that really caught my attention and and i think what you know personally for me and inspired me about that was kind of stepping out of my life and trying to imagine uh you know what what we ask of these guys you know they're all in their mid to late twenties um and you know i think about what i was doing in my mid to late twenties and uh it wasn't being up on top of a mountain having been discovered by some you know people who may or may not want you to die and not having any situational awareness not having communications and not having anyone but yourselves to rely on um and that that scene to me uh uh really typified what we're asking uh our soldiers to do today and and um how much temper meant they must show and restraint and the ability to see macro micro at the same time and i was just very very impressed with that and that that scene uh you know i i think has probably played out um you know certainly has been in iraq and afghanistan over and over again in stories that we will never hear about where young men are asked to make extremely uh complicated uh and morally ambiguous decisions uh and and so you know except that the audience in a way is is wanting america to do the right thing i mean in a way it it's also self-defining national sense that that you know we are supposed to do the right things and you know you know what the right thing is well the right thing you know was obviously killing innocent civilians i don't have any idea one not to be rude or anything like that but one one person's uh what they think the right idea is is completely opposite from what the other one is that's why we have to solely focus on our leadership our admirals who have been around and have been through all of this and they they make the calls and it flows all the way down to us and we follow our orders to the t i mean being in the seal teams we're outside of the box thinkers and i mean we're not idiots most seals have their degrees and a lot of them have their masters and we've been in this game for a very very long time so the thing that we ask when and not out loud and we just hope and pray that the american public has enough trust and and faith in us to do and make the right decision i've seen so many and i've heard so many monday morning quarterbacks they're just it's the funniest thing to me because uh i read stuff not not too much online but this you know you hear people like oh i killed him just did right there and there really would yeah i mean you've been there absolutely not you hadn't been there and then the other people are just like well you know you know you turned him loose and and that was the right thing to do even though everybody everybody died so how do you weigh human life it's it's a conundrum that can never be answered it's it's it's war and there is no right or wrong answer in in combat and those people who aren't out there carrying the rifle have no business dictating what and how we do it if you want if you want to know that and don't and don't get me wrong i'm not i'm not trying to preach or anything like that i'm just saying that if you want to know the details about this and you want to make those command decisions then grab a rifle and come help us otherwise wake up every morning kiss your wife or your husband and live your life and enjoy the freedoms that the american military provide for you that's why we're out there and we don't want to thank you a pat on the back or anything like that we just want you to enjoy your life and because everybody's made different i mean you got guys who are doctors and lawyers and accountants and you have the war fighters the guys who know how to fight and we're good at it and we love what we do and we know how to make those decisions so stay out of our way and we'll stay out of yours taylor did you get to know the family of mike murphy did you spend any time with them yeah i will say um i will say i i got to meet his his father dan and he was incredibly gracious and excited for me to play and obviously you're everything under the sun really before i got to meet him it was a week before we hit camera and um no it's i mean as you can you know you're you're breathing life into someone that's given his you know so when you're speaking to his family and his best friends and teammates it's it's heavy-hearted so it's it was a really really more or less for me a sigh of relief when he was just like i'm grateful you get you're doing it kick ass and um that was a really big day for me peter you had a recently had a screening for the families uh that must have been an immensely emotional day that was very emotional we had the dietzes axelsons christensens and the patents were the first group of families to see the film uh as a whole as a group and uh it was as you might imagine quite intense marcus i think one of the one of the many horrendously you know heart gripping moments in this film is when that you know you're lying on on your back there and the helicopter goes down uh can you tell me about that moment in real life yes ma'am in real life i was unaware of that i didn't know that that had happened i was it was after well towards the end of the gun fight and i had already crawled into the um into a crevice and buried myself um i just remember laying there praying there was actually a helicopter that i uh i believe was an apache that flew overhead and i i could see the pilot in the cockpit and i and the militia and everybody were walking over the top of me i mean i there was rocks falling on my head i mean i could smell them they were right over the top of me and i had this idea i couldn't key up my radio it was my battery was low and it was making this there's a low battery pain that comes out once that happens and give away my position so every i'd have to turn it off and i the thought actually crossed my mind to take a shot at the helicopter then i figured well that'd probably be a bad idea because if you turn around you know piss him off and come in here with guns blazing but all of a sudden while i was there i was praying i was like god please you know give me something because i was paralyzed from the waist down in the movie they had me walking around i didn't walk i crawled for over seven miles that first night and then um and was shot again well while i was laying there praying it started to rain and i thought and i remember going that's not really what i was asking for god because you can ask any frog man even though our job demands us to be wet and sandy and miserable we really don't like to be wet and sandy and miserable so all of a sudden all the militia left they kind of just started pushing up the back side of the mountain and i had no idea what it would have gone down and then two days later when i got rest when i the villagers brought me in there i was in this room i was they had already taken my clothes off of me they they stopped my bleeding as best they could bandaged me up started to pull that frag out and then they had left and then about an hour later the door kicked open and the taliban flooded the room and that's when they the taliban had me and that's when i found out that the hilo had been shot down and they were trying to tell me how many bodies were there in this and i didn't believe it at first i mean that's how loud it was on our side of the mountain that i couldn't hear a helicopter getting blown out of the sky and rolled down uh the hill so that's that's when i found out a few days later from the taliban and tell me about golub the man who who rescued you um it's just such an extraordinary twist in the whole story that in the end you were saved by an afghan and i know that you stay in touch with him now do you not he's here he's here he's here he's at the hotel right now he's a very humble man and obviously in right after the uh the sich the the op went down and i was rescued and they pulled him away from he left in the helicopter with me in real life and the rescue was at night under gunfire and when we loaded up in the hilo it's funny one of the the guys who rescue me one of the pj's he's out in the audience right now he's a a heart surgeon he uh he almost shot me in the chest because i was dressed up like an afghani and i had a rifle and gula was with me and they were having to carry me well i the only thing that saved me because i came up with the back side the wrong side of the helo and the helo actually came in to crack the rescue is is crazier than anything you just saw on that on that tv the air force came in to get me out of there it was absolutely insane well i'd come up on the wrong side of the hilo and all of a sudden there's lasers on my chest and luckily i'd i'd fall and i was a lot heavier back then tonight i fell and the guy behind me was a green beret and he had a american flag glint tape on his chest and it pinged and that's the reason he dropped his weapon and didn't shoot me and then they load gulab and i up in the hilo we banked off the mountain they took us to where they take us bro uh about a j-bed j-bed and then they pulled uh pulled him away from me which was a big deal i i he he was scared to death to be in that hilo it went from one of those things where he had been protecting me for five days and when we got into that hilo he was wrapped around my leg like a like a wet cat you know i was just kind of then when they jerked him away from me i didn't have enough strength to figure out what was going on and he pulled me back into the helo and when they shut the door i just remember them pulling him away and then we flew to another base where they offloaded me onto another transport flew me to bagram air force base and i i was in the hospital i had multiple surgeries to to put myself back together for about a year almost a year and then we i redeployed to iraq no 6907 and redeployed yes ma'am and um didn't know that it wasn't it wasn't a real popular idea in the community but luckily some of the headshed um emeralds and some of the other admirals gave me the blessing all i wanted to do was go back i mean that's what i was born to do and it's not that i i i'm messed up mentally or anything like that but they took something from me they they beat me and when you beat a seal you better kill us because if you don't when we heal up we're going to come back after you and the only place i need to go i i had to go back and i i went back into uh ramadi iraq al-anbar province and it was 607 which was pretty much the worst place on the planet and i i got my knees blown out on a raid we were doing and my my spine fractured again and it cost me my career so after i had gotten after i was discharged i remember that was the hardest thing that i had ever had to face in my entire life not budge training not all the injuries or anything like that the day they told me i couldn't be a seal and uh and i was beating my head against the wall for a few years luckily my wife found me but um i finally got in touch with gulab to get back to your question i kind of got off tangent a little bit i a lot of my buddies that were still going back over there were keeping tabs on him and i could communicate with him as much as i possibly could and our community and then the military we did as much as we possibly could for their village i mean it's in the hornet's nest so we we would build send money to build a school the taliban would would burn it down we uh we built a road into their into their village so they could have easier access into uh some of the major cities but uh overall i got gulab back over here just to visit so i could see him again he doesn't i've tried and tried i'm like hey come here i mean nobody deserves to have american citizen more than you you you fought for america and you're not even an american i mean you saved my life and uh he's he's such a proud afghani he doesn't want anything he wants to stay in afghanistan and then you know every now and again come over here and see me and it's funny the first time i picked him up he was telling the story he had been after i had left obviously the taliban and everybody over there are always trying to kill him so they had they had burned his house down they've killed multiple members of his family they blew his car up and he had been shot a few months before he came to see me and when i picked him up from the airport and we were driving down the road and we had to have it in he doesn't speak english and my posture is is very limited and he goes you know my first uh plan of when i got here is i was gonna burn your house down blow your car up and shoot you in the hip and uh story story peter um making this movie you know obviously it's it's a very tough movie did you have any uh i mean did you have a lot of problems getting it onto the screen i mean you know this morning we heard from jerry bruckheimer how difficult it was for him to get uh blackhawk down in a sense through the kind of feel-good culture of what america wants to see we're a war a war-tired country did you have it have difficulties getting the movie done um all movies are difficult uh middle eastern war films are notoriously difficult we were lucky to have such an overwhelmingly inspiring story that um was almost undeniable in in terms of its ability to inspire and touch touch one's heart that we were able to when financing was tight we were able to find uh uh independent producers there's a gentleman randall emmett here tonight who who stepped up and kind of partnered with ron meyer and his crew and ron being an ex-marine was was very inclined to lend a universal support but but you know it's it's risky to go into this terrain as a from a business perspective so it took a it took a bit of a village to to pull it off but um the power of marcus's story um uh the power of gulab and and that that that unique relationship between an american and an afghan and i think the spirit of all the men who lost their lives just kept winning and was undeniable i i was certainly not going to be dissuaded and you know fortunately we're able to put it pull it together but it you know it wasn't it wasn't as easy as like you know batman we didn't have batman we have marcus yeah he definitely had marcus taylor just you know obviously this is a movie about the bond between these men did you did you have to did you and the other actors you know playing these incredible comrades in arms i mean did you did you work on that on bonding uh it really wasn't a lot of work we got we still get along and we're very close and ben mark and uh emil um we're still very tight and it was just i mean this is something that's just bigger than all of us so um just first day on when did you shoot it where was it shawn uh santa fe mountains of santa fe and then in albuquerque and um we got there quite early and trained together ate together woke up together it was uh and we loved it i mean we were very spoiled to be a part of it but what we came out with was you know incredible friendships for life i could probably answer that question better i you know when we got a hold of them um what the seals came out there and uh well we're thinking hey you know how hollywood actors yay but um yeah we don't support that we got we got on set and we met him a month a month before shooting and hammered him i mean as soon as they got jocked up with all their gear and everything like that from sun up to sundown we were we were hammering them and we didn't cut them any slack i mean they were bleeding every day and you could actually watch i mean that's how friendship true friendship and true teamwork is is forged through um pain and blood and sweat and tears and and they did that and they not one time did they complain about it i mean they realized while they were out there and who and who they were representing and it was it was really something to watch them come together as a as a team and and through even through the movie it never stopped i mean and every day sun up some down we were always together with them and they were together and like he said they're still friends today i mean if if it came down to it the training that we gave gave these guys i mean i could throw taylor a rifle right now and he could very much handle himself one last question to you marcus obviously you'll see you've just sat through this movie now tonight and you've lived again you know it's obviously a there are changes of course as you said from the reality to what actually happened but still you've lived through this intensity again tonight what does it make you feel looking at the movie tonight as a as you when you're thinking about that experience and seeing it on the screen i just think that uh pete and taylor and mill and mark and and ben and the cat the rest of the cast and the crew they did an absolutely outstanding job of taking what happened on the mountain that day and and putting it into a film i mean even writing the book i couldn't put every detail that ever happened on the mountain that day down on paper because i just simply can't remember it i but to really answer your question is i live what through that every day in my head from the time i i lay down in bed through the night up in the morning there's not a moment that goes by that i don't think about it and one of my curses is the fact that every time you hear about operation red wing or lone survivor or anything like that my name is synonymous with that that event and anytime anybody ever walks up to me all they ever want to do is talk about it whatever wants to talk to me about football or hunting or or anything like that they just want to talk to me about the worst week of my life and so it's it's always with me and that's the reason i i stick the friends that i've had since i was 10 years old and some of the guys i mean taylor and i are really close now pete and i've been real close with him for for many years now because they understand it and they they've actually been through it with me now but to see it on screen it's just one of those things when i i i was like hey you missed something yeah it may look like it was miserable on that tv right there but i can tell you it was twice as bad in real life i don't know so i just wish that um i always wish that some of my teammates would have would have made it out as well to get their their side of the stories and to make this thing to to really open it up and and find out just everything that happened because my like i said it's coming for me and i don't remember everything i couldn't possibly put put it all down all right well listen we have been so incredibly honoured to have you with us tonight this is a great movie i want to really congratulate peter berg for this amazing creative feat and of course taylor for his magnificent portrayal of mike murphy and to hear we we've all got so much more we want to talk to marcus latrell about i'd like just to say as well how much we want to honor his his dead colleague his dead teammates who you know we're all thinking about when those pictures come up at the end it is the most moving moment in the in the movie actually so thank you so much all of you for being here thank you all for being here too thank you thank you everybody in the audience you

Channel: The Hero Summit

Views: 1,769,554

Rating: 4.8768411 out of 5

Keywords: Hero Summit 2013

Id: B5m9CMT_1bU

Length: 34min 13sec (2053 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 13 2013