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"House Of Saddam": Interview With Director Alex Holmes

2008-12-07T17:30:19Z

"House of Saddam," a four-part miniseries that begins tonight on HBO, chronicles the rise and fall of the former Iraqi leader as seen from the perspective of life inside the palace. Covering a quarter century of Iraqi history--from Saddam's 1979 coup up to his months in hiding after the fall of Baghdad--the series provides an intimate look at how the charismatic, cunning, and ceaselessly brutal dictator eventually self-destructed, taking his country down with him in the process.

Produced jointly by the BBC and HBO, parts 1 and 2 air tonight at 9pm. Parts 3 and 4 air next Sunday.

The Huffington Post recently spoke to the series' director, Alex Holmes, about the project.

You had originally set out to make a documentary about the siege of Fallujah in 2004. How did you come to make a film about Saddam's rise and fall instead?

Alex Holmes: I was trying to do something much more contemporary about what happened in Fallujah and I was trying to get inside the mindset of some of the insurgents. I had the possibility of meeting some of them and in order to prepare myself I started getting more into the details of the recent political history of Iraq. I, like most other people, had the received picture of Iraqi politics from the news, which was mostly about the Baath party and what have you, and what I hadn't understood was just how closely Saddam's family and his family connections mapped onto the politics in Iraq.

I had started thinking about what an astonishing journey Saddam had been on. I was looking at some of the old news footage, and he had made this incredibly heroic trip to France in the early 1970s when he was the deputy president. He really is a sort of film star in this footage, and he was incredibly popular at home. How he had gone from that to being this hunted fugitive, I was just taken by the story.

What made you want to tell the story of Iraq specifically from Saddam's perspective?

There are many ways you could address the history of it. You could make a very fine documentary on Iraq's history, but I was interested in making a drama that got inside the characters, and I think given that those characters aren't available for us to interview or to psychoanalyze, recreating them in a drama was the best way to get a sense of that perspective.

I saw what I was doing very much as portraiture. This is my version of Saddam. Other people will paint different portraits of him, some of them significantly different, others subtly different, and they will all of them, in their own way, be valid.

A lot of reviewers have compared the series to the "Sopranos," given the way it focuses simultaneously on the dynamics of power and the dynamics of family. Were there any particular works you used as a model or inspiration?

As I mentioned, one of the things that really fascinated me was this overlap between politics and the family, and that immediately reminded me of the gangster genre of films. And so that was always in my mind, That mingling of pressures--pressures of loyalty but also pressures of business--that you find in gangster films is very clearly reproduced in Saddam. That was a constant point of reference.

What did you do in terms of historical research for the film?

Obviously, you start by reading everything that's been written about, or by, Saddam. I had a small but very hard-working team of researchers that were reading a lot of stuff in Arabic and translating it for me. What was fascinating was that the perspective of a lot of the biographies written about him changed hugely over time as his standing in the international community changed. You could see the hand of political interest stirring the pot sometimes; some of the things that were written about Saddam were clearly written with a political agenda.

Though, that's not to say that most of the stuff coming out of Iraq didn't have it's own agenda, that of presenting him in a very positive light. There was a great deal of hagiography, and Saddam personally took that to extreme degrees. I was quite interested in the way he continually identified himself with the state in a way that really went beyond any other dictator I've certainly heard of. Often his physical being stood in for the state.

How so?

Two examples always stood out for me. After the first Gulf War he put the words "Allahu Akbar" ["God is great"] across the middle of the Iraqi flag to identify more strongly with the Islamic world. But he did it with his own handwriting, which I think is a fascinating turn.

Also, after the Iran-Iraq war, he had monumental arches, the swords of Qādisīyah, built at either end of the parade ground in Baghdad. They're held there by these great big strong arms, and they are actually taken from plaster casts made of Saddam's arms. They are anatomically correct in every detail, down to the thumb, and the fingerprint swirl on the thumb of the arch is that of Saddam himself.

The series presents a remarkably intimate look at the inner-workings of Saddam's world. Were you able to interview many of the people who were around him during those years?

Yes, but after the invasion, a lot of the people we wanted to talk to were scattered to the four winds. So we had teams of people interviewing in Iraq, but we also interviewed people in Jordan, people who had come to the UK, the United States.

I was surprised at how willing people were to speak to us. I'm talking about people who were members of the government, people who worked in the intelligence arm of Saddam's state, but also right through to people who worked as cooks and cleaners in the palaces, people who actually saw Saddam as much as anybody towards the end on a day-to-day basis.

What was particularly striking about the way these various people presented him?

What was interesting was that almost everybody had ambivalence towards him. Even those who hated him absolutely recognized he had been a strong champion for Iraq at one stage. And even those who were his supporters also recognized that he wasn't this flawless leader. Since he was deposed, there was a reality check, and people were able to say, 'yes he did have his faults but actually he was still the best thing for the country.' Often it reminded me a little bit of what I understand to be the case when you have an abusive father in the family. The family despises him for his abuse, but at the same time he's still their father, and there's a loyalty and an affection there that somehow is never quite erased. That ambivalence was very prominent in almost everyone we spoke to.

Was the ambivalence in some way a result of a distorted view of him--does this speak to the success of his mythmaking?

I think by the end people had come to have a pretty clear view of his strengths and his weaknesses in their own minds. Enough evidence had accumulated over the years. His mythmaking was a veneer. I don't think it went very deep for the Iraqi people.

Looking at the years between the two wars from Saddam's perspective, as opposed to that of the West, did you get a sense of what was the biggest misperception he had about what was going on?

Saddam's biggest misconception was that, in order to represent to himself what had happened during the first conflict in the Gulf, in 1991, he convinced himself that it was a conflict that he had won. He had invaded Kuwait, he had made his point, and he had then withdrawn. And the coalition forces back in 1991 showed themselves to be weak in his mind by not pursuing the Iraqi army back into Iraq, by not actually, to put it bluntly, finishing the job, and pursuing Saddam all the way to Baghdad.

And when the same situation seemed to be arriving again in 2004, I think Saddam felt that the West was likely to act in the same way. He saw the UN faltering, he thought the coalition won't have the stomach for the fight and it won't have the political will to make this happen without international support. I think in a way he was himself quite taken by surprise that the invasion happened, and that it had happened so quickly and with such force.

So many of the films about Iraq since the invasion seem to have focused on the role of US foreign policy in trying to understand what went wrong. It doesn't seem there's been much of an attempt to see things from the other side. Is making this film in some way a critique of that?

That's absolutely the case. I wanted to see things from the inside. I made this film because no one had ever tried to say what it's like from the Iraqi perspective, certainly no one in the West--people weren't free to in Iraq. I think that if we had done a little bit more of that a little bit earlier, the results wouldn't have been as cataclysmic, and so many lives wouldn't have been lost as they have been. I think Saddam was someone we always wanted to keep at arm's length, whether he was our friend, our ally or our foe. There was an inadequate understanding of what his agenda was, what would motivate him in certain directions or in others. We assumed he would have the same motivations and value systems that we have, and I think that was a mistake.

How Environmental Activist Van Jones' Book "The Green Collar Economy" Reached The NYT Best Sellers List

2008-10-20T12:02:11Z

Social and environmental activist Van Jones felt he had important message about the economy, energy prices and global warming to impart in his book "The Green Collar Economy," which was published this month. What he didn't have, as a first time author with an almost non-existent marketing budget, was the kind of money and name-recognition that typically helps place a book on the best sellers list and in the national conversation. So he improvised.

Using a Web-based, viral marketing strategy, Jones and Green For All, an environmental organization he recently founded, worked to get the word out about his book far and wide. The result was a place -- number 12 to be exact -- on the New York Times best sellers list in the book's first week.

"Everyone is stunned," Jones told the Huffington Post. "Usually to get to number 12 the first week as a new author you've got to spend a million bucks or be on Oprah."

Through a combination of emails and phone calls to friends, bloggers, and a network of activists, Jones estimates that the viral campaign he and his co-workers launched resulted in emails being sent to millions of people, many of whom surely forwarded it along. The initial commercial success of "Green Collar Economy" proves that Internet buzz combined with online activism can push a book onto the best sellers list.

It also helps to have something original and important to say, which Jones clearly does. His book is an innovative and impassioned account of how transforming America into a greener society would not only address the global warming crisis but also generate enough jobs to help turn the around the economy around and provide work for the Americans who need it most. As New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote last year in an admiring profile of Jones:

Mr. Jones has been on a crusade to help underprivileged African-Americans and other disadvantaged communities understand why they would be the biggest beneficiaries of a greener America. It's about jobs. The more government requires buildings to be more energy efficient, the more work there will be retrofitting buildings all across America with solar panels, insulation and other weatherizing materials. Those are manual-labor jobs that can't be outsourced.

So how do you achieve success in viral marketing? Green For All contacted around 150 different organizations, large and small, national and local, according to Alli Chagi-Starr, the Grassroots Publicity Coordinator and Business Partners Manager for Green For All. They reached out to everyone from community gardening groups to labor unions to the Hip Hop Caucus. They got the Environmental Defense Fund to recommend the book to its 500,000 members; they got the organization who owns the domain name greencollareconomy.com to promote the book on its website. They contacted big environmental blogs like Treehugger. And they called everyone they knew.

"I've never personally called or emailed this many people in my life," said Chagi-Starr, who had spent the previous year cultivating these relationships. "I've never seen anything like this before. People got out their rolodexes and really went to town."

"Not having this book reach a lot of people was not an option," Chagi-Starr said. The book's success, "reaffirms once again the power of the grassroots."

It's hard to know when a viral campaign has truly taken off, but one measure could be how many times people received an email about the subject more than once, which was the case for "Green Collar Economy".

"A friend called and told me she got the email from 10 different sources," Chagi-Starr said.

One of the groups that helped promote the book was 1Sky, a sister organization of Green For All. 1Sky discussed the book in several emails sent to the more than 100,000 people on the group's list, featured a blog and video from Van on their homepage, and utilized Google ad words, according to Gillian Caldwell, 1Sky's campaign director. It was the first time the organization really put their weight and energy behind promoting a book.

"This was obviously one of the most successful viral marketing strategies for a book in recent history," Caldwell said, reflecting on the book's sales. "If it wasn't for that network this wouldn't have been a successful campaign."

Successful grassroots campaigns, she said, require a combination of strategic advantage, trust, commitment and friendship.

It doesn't hurt that Jones' platform seems to be one that inspires. Rev. Lennox Yearwood, the president of the Hip Hop Caucus, whose group sent out a series of email blasts on behalf of the book to its network of 700,000, said he was impressed by Jones' commitment to the green economy message.

"We don't put forth anything unless we really believe in it," Yearwood said. "I'm a believer in what the book stands for and obviously our members, mostly young people aged 18 to 29, really found Jones' book exciting."

"In the 1960s we had revolutionaries, in the 21st century we have solutionaries," Yearwood said. "Van Jones is a 21st century solutionary."

Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund, said via email, that he was happy to send out a message to his group's 500,000 online members. "I was delighted by how responsive they have been," he wrote.

Jones ultimately attributes the success of the book's marketing campaign to what he calls the "invisible network of networks," and he thinks this "network effect" is here to stay.

"There are too many products coming from too many directions, people ignore the hype," he said.

"But if you're in a network that's about respect and reciprocity, people will take action."

::Q&A With Van Jones About His New Book