While few are likely to mourn one of China's most colorless leaders, his death could be used as a way to criticize his former boss, Xi Jinping. One thing I would just—I think it’s sort of just culturally maybe germane to bring up, and Jamie and I were talking a little bit about this before the session started, is—and maybe why the Marines want their story told—is, you know, these wars have been waged increasingly out of sight for most of America.

Escape from Kabul: The Inside Story by Levison Wood - Goodreads Escape from Kabul: The Inside Story by Levison Wood - Goodreads

But no, really, it was a year after or thereabouts we were putting the film out and I was actually delayed by about a month and a half because it was impossible to get our kit over there at the time because there was barely anybody there. And, as Laurel says, there are some brilliant journalists there working with very small means. You’re talking about just people on their own—I think Charlie Faulkner at The Times and some excellent people at the New York Times.And so I think—and what he gets at in the film is that one of the huge challenges the Marines faced was, you know, Kabul International Airport was barely a functioning airport, and Jamie has amazing footage of showing what the Marines were having to do to keep the runways clear of people, at one point using Apache gunships for crowd control. I mean, literally flying helicopters about five feet off the ground just to move people off the airfield. ROBERTS: Well, this—I wanted to actually say it was actually HBO were by far the lead partner in this and we make films at the—Amos Pictures, the production company I work out with HBO a lot, and HBO are very willing to do deep dives into difficult subjects like this like nobody else. So we’re very appreciative of that. The conundrum is how does the United States and others in the international community provide support in ways that lead to no benefit for the Taliban. That’s really impossible.

Escape From Kabul: The Inside Story by Levison Wood and

So when I was with the 2/4 MEU in 2006, Israel invaded Lebanon. We ran what’s called a NEO, a non-combat evacuation operation. So the mission in Kabul was a NEO. The 24 th Marine Expeditionary Unit has what’s called a battalion landing team attached to it and in this case it was the First Battalion of the Eighth Marine Regiment, which was led by Colonel Chris Richardella, who features, you know, very prominently in Jamie’s film. So I wondered if you can talk about just the process of gathering those cell phone videos and how you went about doing that. And so it was the U.S. that unilaterally decided what the date certain was going to be. It wasn’t the Taliban that set those terms. And, in fact, the whole reason for the negotiation with the Taliban was that the U.S. wanted to withdraw. I mean, there was a political decision to withdraw. So if you’re going to do that, at some point you have to set a date and it was the U.S. that set that date and changed it over time.

That’s a huge amount of money. A huge amount of lives have gone into this war and it doesn’t feel like it’s being covered enough. I mean, it was incredibly difficult, even for people who had all of the appropriate documentation, to just get into the airport. Escape from Kabul, directed by Jamie Roberts, embeds in the chaos, blending horrific images familiar to news consumers – crowds crushing toward a closed gate, children pushed against barbed wire, anguished people clinging to the wheels of a moving plane – with first-hand accounts of the evacuation. As with Roberts’s previous film Four Hours at the Capitol, which used first-hand accounts and archival footage for an on-the-ground accounting of the January 6 insurrection, Escape from Kabul trains specifically on a discrete event: the 15 days at Kabul airport before the US withdrawal deadline of 31 August 2021. You know, I don’t really see—they’ve got—it’s hand in glove. There’s complete control. I can’t really see how it can change.