Yasmine Hanani as Hiba Battle and Duraid A. Ghaieb as Rashied in Battle for Haditha Courtesy of HanWay Films

You focus on some of the soldiers involved in the massacre. You focus on some of the commandment at HQ. You focus on the two guys that detonate the bomb and two families. How did you decide on whose stories to tell?
Well again, it was very much going through the witness statements, seeing who that family was, seeing who the family members were who were killed. For example the Hiba's relationship with Rashied was based on a real relationship. And I actually met the Marines who shot her husband. He described that incident, exactly what happened when they shot the guy.

Including high-fiving each other when he hit his target?
It's just how it went down. And they don't see anything wrong with it at all. For them it's like you shot someone who might be an insurgent. And that's what they're there for. So yeah, they do high-five it. They did watch it through the scope. That's all based on exactly what happened. But if you really get into it, it's a thousand times worse. You might call it harrowing, but it's a very diluted form of what happened.

You portray the marines as disconnected from this war, ensconced in their Humvees, rolling through the streets to death metal music and taking out potential threats by getting a visual on them and pressing a button, much like a video game. Did you find in your research that for some of the younger soldiers the war has been reduced to a glorified gory video game, as a means of survival?
I think by 2005, especially in places like Haditha, the Marines weren't able in their R & R to walk down the street. So there was minimum contact between them and the Iraqis. They didn't speak the language. They don't understand anything about Muslim culture. There was no training program that would tell them anything about it. So the Marines I knew were very distrusting of the Iraqis. And when we started filming, we had a number of difficult incidents where Iraqis would discover that some of the Marines had been to Fallujah. One of the guys had lost 3 of his brothers there, and there was an ugly incident where I thought there was going to be a fistfight, because both sides think the other one is completely evil. The Iraqis think the Marines are just like Darth Vader or something. And in a sense, the Marines see the Iraqis as dirty, untrustworthy. They say hello to you and stab you in the back: all that kind of stuff. And war brings all that kind of emotion out. Then they sort of got over that initial period. And 3 weeks later, they're all playing football together and swapping jokes and being amazed that they like each other. And in a sense I think that's very much what the film's about. It's saying that when you have a war situation, only the worst is going to come out. There's going to be nothing good coming out because it's a completely negative paranoid situation where everybody is operating on a worst case scenario. And [it is] dialogue between people and the ability to actually discover each other's humanity and humanness that is the way forward. I think that's very much the message of the film.

Falah Abraheem Flayeh as Ahmad and Oliver Bytrus as Jafar in Battle for Haditha Courtesy of HanWay Films

The scene where the bomb detonates in a built-up suburban neighborhood was shot in Jordan. How did people in the area respond to the filming?
Well, it took a lot of preparation. And we were fortunate that the Royal Jordanian Film Commission were behind the film and the royal family came down to the set to sort of sanctify what we were doing. The actual explosion of the Humvee happened about two-thirds of the way through so we'd been there for quite a while before that happened. We obviously had to block roads off and re-direct the traffic and keep people away. There were hundreds of little boys who were completely uncontrollable. So it was a big operational thing to pull that off.

You did not shy away from scenes of bloodshed. The single soldier that was killed is portrayed as recognizable but blown to bits. And you show it.
Well he was blown in two.

The execution-style killing of the five men in the car that was pulled over just before the killings is graphic. Did you ever think: maybe I should not show this, pan away, censor myself? Perhaps for the families involved?
Well the killing was much, much worse. All of it's much, much worse. What you have in that film is a very diluted form of what happened. In reality you have soldiers urinating in the heads of the people whose brains were hanging out. And that's all in the transcripts. You've got soldiers chasing each other around with body parts having a lark with people's legs and arms. I can go on.