Back to selection
“I Can’t Run a Control Experiment with No Cameras”: Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber on War Game
War Game On January 6th, 2023 in Washington, DC, the advocacy group Vet Voice stage an elaborate mass role-playing scenario inspired by the attempted insurrection in the Capitol two years before. The loser of a presidential election declares the result illegitimate and encourages the public to rise up, and an extremist militia group with sleepers inside the National Guard does just that. Within the simulation, one side roleplayed the incumbent presidential administration (with former Montana governor Steve Bullock portraying the president), while the other was the terrorist “Red Cell” attempting to stop Congress from certifying the election results. If the Red Cell succeeded in preventing the certification, that team would win the simulation. The goal of the game was to test how much stress democratic norms and processes could withstand.
Filmmakers Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber captured the entire six-hour exercise in their new documentary War Game. Not only that, but their production ensured the simulation would have an extra amount of verisimilitude by building several sets for it to be staged in, including a facsimile of the presidential situation room and a television news desk. The crew had only one chance to film the elaborate game. Moss and Gerber spoke with Filmmaker over a video call to discuss the myriad logistical challenges involved, as well as how they created an immersive space for the actors.
Filmmaker: How did you learn about Vet Voice’s exercise and get access to it?
Moss: I read an op-ed by three retired generals in The Washington Post where they called out the threat that the next insurrection could involve active-duty members of the military. I learned through some colleagues that Vet Voice had taken up the challenge to test the idea; they weren’t waiting for somebody to do it. They said, “We’ll recruit from people we know in our community”—retired generals, people who served in elected office like Governor [Steve] Bullock and others. It’s not a group I knew, and frankly, I was a little skeptical. Tony and I went to DC when they were designing the scenario. I remember seeing a former director of the CIA in the room and thinking, “OK, this is legit.” Alex Vindman was there, as were the generals who wrote the Washington Post op-ed. I think that it was clear that they were working through their own trauma from January 6th, 2021, and trying to do something forward-looking, a stress test of our democracy.
We approached them and had a conversation about their willingness to invite cameras into the room. I think they recognized the value in not keeping this a secret, that it would strengthen the credibility of the exercise if it wasn’t subject to “deep state” skepticism. We negotiated the ground rules that were important for us, which were absolute editorial freedom and integrity. It was a great collaboration.
Filmmaker: You connected with these people in September 2022, then the exercise took place in early January 2023. How did you logistically figure this out in that short timeframe?
Gerber: We were limited somewhat by technology. Principal photography was one day, and we actually shot on January 6th, which was quite poignant for a lot of the roleplayers, in a hotel in DC that housed many of the insurrectionists in 2021. There were ghosts in the halls, you could say. There were no limitations on access, and we ramped up pretty quickly.
Moss: It was an extremely stressful period. We were negotiating our access, conceptualizing the film, building the team, figuring out the logistics and raising money, which was really difficult. It’s a challenging environment for docs, particularly for political work, because we’ve watched the bottom fall out of the marketplace. Streamers are very cautious. But I thought this was an extraordinary opportunity, this combination of improvisational theater, documentary and dystopian science fiction. Tony and I looked at [film director] Peter Watkins and Ivo van Hove’s theater [work] as references, but the thing itself felt unknown, and that was exciting. It was a tremendous leap of faith and we had very little time, but sometimes it helps to have a ticking clock. The players had six hours, we had about 12 weeks and I loved it.
I think of filmmaking as a kind of levitation act; you need partners who share your miraculous beliefs. Tony and I previously lived in the Army’s Iraq War training simulation town when making Full Battle Rattle, so I knew I had somebody who would jump with me, and he has great relationships in the New York theater world. We brought brilliant production designers and, I think, the best documentary camera operators in the world into this room and said, “We don’t know what’s going to happen, but shoot the hell out of it.”
Filmmaker: Did the short notice mean you weren’t able to do anything you hoped you could?
Gerber: Initially we thought we’d track down all the roleplayers and meet them before they entered this game space, but that proved to be logistically impossible. We met most of these folks on the day they arrived in that hotel. We got very lucky with the casting, given that we had no control over it. The question for us was whether these folks would really buy in. Are they going to break character? Is it going to be silly, or is it going to be like watching paint dry? And it was none of that. Watching from the control booth, it was extraordinary. There was some question about whether we even had a film here, and we knew we had only a day to get it.
Filmmaker: What led you to this space, this hotel where a lot of insurrectionists had also happened to stay in? You mentioned some of your artistic influences. How did you express them in the design of the set, and how did that play out with the technical requirements at hand?
Gerber: We had no control over the casting or what was going to happen, but we wanted to make it beautiful and dramatic, so the lighting and mise-en-scène were critical. We looked a lot of different places, empty offices and such. This hotel in the convention district of downtown DC gave us everything we needed, and the company stayed there as well. Since many of the insurrectionists stayed there on January 6th, there was this weird synchronistic bonus, this idea that we’d exorcise these demons through this performance.
This hotel ballroom we settled on had many advantages. We built this set that had a kind of grandeur to it. The most distinctive feature was this array of fluorescent tubes on the ceiling that was inspired by Dr. Strangelove. It was a bit like walking into a cathedral. Would this intimidate the players or raise the stakes for them? I think it was the latter, because they brought it.
Coming out of experimental theater, I knew that the way you carve up a performance space has a lot to do with how people behave, where they go, who they talk to. We talked a lot about where people would congregate. How do we keep this active, so it’s not just folks sitting at their laptops? We knew that we needed the different factions to be in proximity, on the same wi-fi network, but to in all other ways be separate. There were certain physical constraints in the scenario. The set had to have a practical, functional component. The president had to be able to communicate with the control room, for instance.
We brought in portraits of past presidents and other figures, adding a sense of history to the setting, using it to advance the themes. You have Ben Franklin on the wall watching, George Washington looking on in the Red Cell. [Production designer] Brett Banakis proved to be a phenomenal partner.
Filmmaker: There were six directors of photography on this film. How did you strategize where to put them, and how did you manage them during the shoot?
Moss: We had four DPs in the situation room, two on gimbals and two on movable tripods with longer lenses: Wolfgang Held, Keri Oberly, Thorsten Thielow and Daniel Carter. Brett Wiley was in the control room, and Tim Grucza was with the Red Cell. These are all people I’ve worked with before and have a great deal of trust in.
We’d communicate with them as we would if we were on location; I would tap, or whisper, or discuss coverage or movement with them. But here—and this is often the case for me—we were really relying on them as artists and sensitive, brilliant storytellers in their own right. They had to look at what was happening in a room of 30 people in which there are six different conversations, not all of which can be heard clearly. We wanted to be prepared to follow people out of the theatrical space into the backstage area. We weren’t seeking to hide that this was a constructed scenario. It was something Tony and I had worked through with Full Battle Rattle. There were no rigid boundaries about what was acceptable to incorporate, so we included things like hair and makeup and the gamemasters. When you’re essentially filming a play, it’s challenging to ask the audience to invest in and identify with these characters if you periodically pull the curtain back.
Gerber: Because there’s one play space and upwards of 30, 40 characters, there’s a risk that everyone’s going to pan to the president when he starts to talk. We don’t need four shots of the president. In some sense, it was like directing live television. The cameras had to be called, they were all on comms. We could say, “Wolf, widen out and give me a shot of the table. Thorsten, if you can come around and do a French over on this person.” We needed to know we had the coverage necessary to tell the story, and it was like real-time editing in some ways. There was so much going on. From our position in the control room, we had all the audio feeds along with the feeds from our cameras. We could click the buttons and hear this part of the room, then another.
Filmmaker: What do you think it was like for the performers to do this in front of cameras when they hadn’t met you before? In some ways, your interviews with them performed after the exercise are like debriefs from the experience. What effect, if any, might your presence have had on how it played out?
Moss: I mean, there’s no way to answer that question. I can’t run a control experiment with no cameras. You accept that with documentary storytelling. It’s not an invisible art form, we don’t hide. It’s very subjective work. The people in the room know there’s a camera there, but are they more focused on the business at hand? Are they used to being in front of cameras, because they’re elected officials? Maybe. The very beginning acknowledges the artifice of the world that’s being created here. Mostly, I think you trust the audience. If they feel like people are playing to the camera, they sense that. I also think there’s an inherent discomfort to documentary, which has to do with your relationship to what you’re filming.
Gerber: I don’t think the presence of cameras, directors or a sound department of 15 individuals impacted the performance in the room, because the stakes were so damn high for those roleplayers that they weren’t thinking about us. We melted away. And I do think that happens in documentary. I’ve shot death notifications a few times, and I thought, “Should I have access to a doctor telling a family their child is going to die? I shouldn’t, there’s something wrong with that.” But the families didn’t see me. After we finished shooting the exercise, and it was an exhausting day, we all went to a bar. That the first time any of those roleplayers met us, and some of them had no idea there were directors on set. That’s how deep they went down that rabbit hole.
