_-_Niggo_-_ t1_j8s740a wrote on February 16, 2023 at 4:07 PM

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to create a dialogue, the first questions that come to my mind are how do you prepare mentally before filming in a war zone? And globally, are there a lot of misconceptions about war filming?

ECUFilmFestival OP t1_j8sizn0 wrote on February 16, 2023 at 5:24 PM

We didn't really prepare ourselves to go to these wars, reporting stuff. Mental health wasn't talked about much in those days, although more than it was even less talked about during World War Two and stuff like that, of course.

But we were young and silly and living in the Middle East, working for an amazing company called Newsforce who supplied war cameramen to television broadcasters. We were young and silly, adventurous, sometimes very brave, most times very stupid. But there was no where we wouldn't go to ply our craft - which was to film and edit news stories for some of the biggest and best news broadcasters from around the war zones in world.
It was very, very exciting and interesting. I remember I was 21 years of age in Baghdad during Gulf War one looking around going my goodness gracious me. What's a kid from way outback Australia doing here working for the BBC?
We did it for I guess excitement, adventure. Ego. But that changed for me and I kept going because I really believed that I was doing something righteous and good. Filming starving kids in Africa. Spending three years going into Bosnia. Trying hard to bring the World's attention to all this stuff that was happening that, to be honest, not many people cared about. So no real mental preparation just young and stupid and wanting to do things that nobody else could or wanted to do. I will point out though, that the bravest cameramen that I ever worked with, were two girls from CNN.

They were braver, cleverer, more intelligent than all of us and it gave me an amazing appreciation that you didn't have to be a man to be the best war cameraman. You could be a fabulously talented camera woman.

Misconceptions about war reporting? A million. But the worst one that I keep hearing to this day, is that, oh people don't shoot at you if you're The Press. That's a load of horse waddle. We were as shot at, shelled and bombed as much as any one else. Sure. We weren't ALL killed, but there were a lot that were killed. My girlfriend at the time of Somalia, an Italian reporter called Ilaria ALPI was gunned down on purpose. So the misconception that we're safe going into a war zone is just 1,000% Wrong.