Lastly, we focused on the material that the audience would need to understand the rules of the simulation - the "rules of the game." This information was largely provided - through interviews - with Col. Cameron Kramer, Chief of Plans and Operations, at the National Training Center, and Capt. Chris Mugavero, the Officer in Charge of Medina Wasl.

Finding the right balance between these three main elements required a long process of experimentation and calibration.

The decision to leave the simulation in the final act of the film and return to Fort Bliss (with Lt. Col. McLauglin and his soldiers) and San Diego (with our Iraqi role players) was not easy. Yet ultimately we felt it was important, even necessary, to see our subjects in the "real" world, to understand everything that was at stake for them, and bring their stories, in the film, to closure.

Style

The look and feel of the film was important to us. We come from a strong cinema verite tradition, but are comfortable and have worked successfully in narrative fiction and more conventional (interview-based) forms of documentary storytelling. The appeal of this film, in this place, was the opportunity to draw these styles together and create something new and different: to shoot breathless, surprising, and occasionally rough cinema verite; to cover the "on stage" moments in the simulation as, appropriately, a form of fiction; and sit down with our subjects for candid, intense interviews.

We came from different backgrounds as filmmakers but in Full Battle Rattle found the ultimate subject in which we could walk a line between the real and the imagined - a subject in which the distinction between the two is beside the point.