A Second Shot at the War in Iraq

"The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair," is a story of unlikely friendships, writer-director Michael Tucker says. Or: a story about the human cost of war; or even a story of hope. How it got made, though, is a story of chance encounters.

Tucker, who with his wife, the East German-born Petra Epperlein, also made the 2005 documentary "Gunner Palace," describes the chain of events that led him to Yunis Khatayer Abbas, the focus of "The Prisoner," an Iraqi journalist who was arrested by American troops and sent to Abu Ghraib. He spent eight months there before being released with just these words from the Army: "We're sorry." (See review on Page 35.)

Tucker first went to Iraq after the fall of Baghdad in 2003 to film a group of young American soldiers, the 2/3 Field Artillery Unit, bunking in one of Saddam's old palaces and navigating the dangers and uncertainties of their mission in Iraq. One night, Tucker joined the troops as they raided a house in Baghdad where, they had been told, four brothers were plotting the assassination of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, due to visit Baghdad in the coming weeks.

One of the men arrested kept claiming to be a journalist, speaking into the camera in English. Tucker filmed the man and his brothers being led away in handcuffs, and that footage made the final cut of "Gunner Palace." Tucker wondered afterward what happened to the man.

"Someone saw the movie in release and said, 'I know that guy,' " Tucker explains. That someone, American journalist David Enders, worked with Abbas when the Iraqi was a freelance reporter, fixer and cameraman for British TV. Enders helped Tucker find Abbas, who by then had been released from prison, and arrange an interview.

In summer 2005, Tucker and Abbas met in the Green Zone. Tucker was struck by his everyman appearance: "Yunis has the persona of a high school teacher -- he's got his short-sleeved shirts, he's got his pens in his pockets and he's just really human."

But that mild manner hid Abbas's painful memories: In 1998, a critical poem landed him in jail, where for three months he was tortured by Uday Hussein's police. The parallels between his treatment by Iraqi and American guards were not lost on Tucker and Epperlein, whose comic-book-style illustrations punctuate the film. "We would see Uday Hussein as this buffoonish, comic-book-type villain, and later when [Abbas] was telling stories of his detention by the Americans, similar types of themes would come through," Tucker says. Abbas recalls a female interrogator who spit on him, as well as the crowded, filthy and inhumane conditions at the jail, which the filmmakers corroborated with official Army reports.

There was a twist, though, to Abbas's story: "One of the biggest surprises is, here's this guy who went through detention, both under Saddam and then by the Americans, and he's stopping and saying, 'But there were good soldiers also.' " Abbas befriended several soldiers who went to Abu Ghraib in February 2004, replacing units involved in the abuse scandal that broke two months later.

While Tucker searched for these "good soldiers," at least one of them, Army Spec. Benjamin Thompson, had been searching for Abbas. On the Internet, Thompson found a review of "The Prisoner" before its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. Tucker says Thompson "contacted us, saying, 'I was Yunis's guard; I was friends with Yunis and his brothers, and they were very dear to me.' . . . We invited him up to Toronto, and he spoke publicly about their experiences there."

After the festival, Tucker interviewed Thompson at his home in Columbus, Ohio. Tucker and Epperlein struggled with how to add Thompson's comments to the film. "We decided that we didn't want to be too sentimental about it," he says. He wanted to keep the film's focus on Abbas and, by extension, on Iraqi civilians affected by the war. "Every time there's a raid on a house, every time you see a woman and a child on the streets of Baghdad, every time there's a bombing, there's a story behind that. There are 27 million people [in Iraq], and they're suffering. I think that's almost been lost in the debate. This is four years into a war, and it's really about them, and not so much about us anymore."

After all, the filmmakers had already made a film about Americans in Iraq. Since that time, Tucker says, "The war has changed. 'Gunner' was released two years ago, and it's really about the first year of the war."

But it almost didn't get made: "When we went in, everyone was like, 'It's over. . . .' We met other filmmakers who'd had similar experiences -- they couldn't get financing because everyone said, 'Well, for all we know the war's going to be over in a matter of months. . . .' You couldn't predict that it would just go on and on and on."