I originally thought of it as this very simple hero-villain story.
It can’t be that simple.
It wasn't that simple.
And very quickly, I realized that the lines between good and evil
were much more blurry than I thought.
Hi, I'm Kathryn Bigelow.
I’m here with Matthew Heineman to talk about his movie
for
I believe what I am doing is good
and what I’m standing up against is evil.
We are the meth cooks.
We know we do harm.
It’s the cartels.
They’re the ones terrorizing their own country,
and now they’re starting to do it over here.
What would you do?
Wait for when they come for you?
Or defend yourself?
[The Unbelievable True Story]
[About Two Vigilante Leaders Fighting The Mexican Cartels]
Arm yourselves! Unite!
The cartel scouts keep getting away.
[On Both Sides Of The Border]
Where did you learn about cartel land and the vigilantes?
I read a few articles about these citizens who were rising up against
the cartel, and it fascinated me, it was a world I knew nothing about.
And I really wanted to go out and see the effects on everyday people,
and see everyday people who are rising to fight back.
And how did you find, how did you get access to the vigilantes?
So the story exists, there’s two different vigilante groups,
one in Arizona, one in Mexico.
The group in Arizona,
it actually took several months to gain their trust
before I stepped foot down there.
Once I was down there...
they welcomed me with open arms.
You’re talking about Nailer.
Nailer, on the Arizona side.
And I filmed there for about four or five months,
and then I heard about the Autodefensas, these citizens
in the state of Michoacán who are fighting back against
the Knights Templar cartel.
And I reached out to El Doctor, who’s the leader of this vigilante group.
You became aware of the doctor.
Now, how did you actually get access to him?
It’s not like you necessarily had his cell number.
I mean, how do you get access to this man
who’s rising up against the cartels?
I read this article and I reached out to the journalist, and I asked her,
this article featured the doctor, and I asked her, you know,
what what he was like.
She said, “He’s the most interesting man I’ve ever been around.”
And as a documentary filmmaker, you know,
that’s a nice thing to hear.
And so I said, “I think I’m on to something here.”
Yeah, you’re on the next flight to Michoacán.
Two weeks later, I was down there with him.
So yeah, I called him, I got his number through through her and...
called him and he said, “Come on down.”
You know, there’s many similarities and differences between
the two storylines.
But at its heart are these two men,
Nailer and El Doctor.
They’re both 55.
They both believe that the government’s failed them.
They’ve both sort of taken the law into their own hands
to fight for what they believe in.
But the circumstances are quite different.
You know, in Mexico the violence is real,
it’s visceral.
80,000 plus people killed since 2007.
20,000 plus people disappeared since 2007.
Whereas in Arizona, that violence is more theoretical.
It’s more a fear that these Mexican drug wars will seep its way
across our border.
Technically, we’re vigilantes upholding the law
where there is no law.
But the phrase ‘vigilante’, it’s been given a bad name by the media.
They are heavily armed and claim to be protecting our state
from foreign threats and from our own government.
But the state’s growing militia movement
is causing concern among law enforcement.
Back in the day, ‘vigilante’ wasn’t a bad thing.
Say the bandits was riding into your town,
the townspeople would all get together and defend their town.
You start with Nailer
and these self-appointed vigilantes who are there to guard the border.
Now, does border control know about them?
Are they working in conjunction with them?
That’s the thing, I’m from New York City,
and when you when you step foot in Arizona,
when you step foot on the border,
you really don’t feel like you’re in America.
You drive along on these missions in the valley and you can look up
on the hillsides and there's cartel scouts watching you.
You can break into their radio frequencies
and hear them talking about you.
So again, you sort of feel like you’re in this world that’s
controlled by the cartels, even though you're on American soil.
And when you talk to Border Patrol,
they feel like they’re undermanned, understaffed, and...
like the vigilantes fighting this David and Goliath battle
against the cartel.
Now, do they appreciate people like Nailer?
It’s complicated.
You know, I think it took me a while to understand the dynamics.
I think, officially...
no, you know?
“We have nothing to do with the vigilantes,
we don’t approve of what they’re doing.”
But the reality on the ground is so different.
I mean, they’re--
They basically collaborate,
they talk, they share information.
I think Border Patrol actually sort of welcomes them.
I think they need all the help they can get.
Anybody touches me, drop them.
If you are seeing this
it is because I’m no longer alive.
This doctor had not just the charisma,
but the courage to rise up against them, kind of single-handedly
until he was able to inspire a movement.
I mean, that’s that’s the crazy thing about this.
I mean, these are not trained soldiers,
on the Mexican side.
These are not trained soldiers,
these are farmers, storekeepers, doctors, lawyers.
People would cover this story in Mexico, a little bit.
And they’d often sort of fly in and out, go in for a day or two.
And I told them, “Look, you know, I want to come down,
I want to document your story,
I want to document the story of the Autodefensas.
I don’t want to just come down for a day or two.
I want to come down for weeks, months, however long it takes to tell
the story.”
And I think he really appreciated that.
I think that helped me gain his trust and get access to the story.
And I’ve always found that, whether you’re filming in an emergency room
or wherever, that once you’re sure to get buy-in from the top,
that people underneath them sort of fall in line.
And once I got his approval, once he got on the ground there,
I pretty much had carte blanche access to people within
the Autodefensas.
When the government can’t provide basic security for its people
we can take up arms.
If this happened to you
you would be on our side.
They’re taking back what is theirs from the cartel.
It’s the way it should be done up here, too.
Talk to us a little bit about Michoacán itself.
You know, here you are, you’re obviously not a local,
and what did it feel like to be down there, shooting on the streets?
I think, for me, what was so striking,
especially when I first got down there, was the suffering.
The suffering of these people living under the control of the cartels.
You know, it’s not an accident that the film’s called
I mean, you really feel, both in Arizona, but especially in Mexico,
that this world is controlled by the cartels,
that there's an absolute lack of government,
that the very institutions that are there to protect us
are either not there or they’re there in collusion with the cartels.
You know this, with the films that you’ve made,
in a traditional warzone, there’s often a line
and there’s the danger zone.
And when you’re behind that line, you’re somewhat safe.
Here it was such amorphous warfare.
The violence can erupt at any moment.
You’ll just be riding down the street and there could be bodies hanging
from the bridge.
You could be at lunch and, you know, masked men could just come and grab
people next to you.
But they continue to live their lives.
There could be a shootout one day and then they’re out,
dancing in the streets that night.
Shooting there was unlike anything I’ve ever done.
Yeah, I can imagine.
Normally on a documentary shoot,
you have a call time, you have a lunch break,
you know, you have a wrap time, and like...
You’re on call, you’re on call 24/7 on this.
Yeah, I mean we’d shoot sometimes 18, 20 hours a day.
You know, we’d be sleeping in cars, on the ground.
At one point we slept in the backyard of the head of the cartel
after they tried to find him and he escaped up into the mountains.
You know, it was it was a very abnormal way of shooting.
You're with this doctor.
You're with the auto defense.
Many times in the movie, auto defense is advertising themselves
with t-shirts that say “auto defense,”
so you’re not undercover.
And... did you fear for your life on a daily basis?
Yeah. I mean, I’m not a war reporter.
I've never been in situations like this before.
My last film was on healthcare in the U.S.,
which is just a different type of battle.
But it was scary, you know? It was scary filming there.
And the story led me in places I never could have imagined
or dreamed of.
Ultimately, I ended up being in shootouts between the vigilantes
and the cartel,
meth labs in the dark desert night, places of torture.
And it was frightening. It was frightening filming there.
And what was also frightening is you often didn’t know who you’re with,
especially as a story’s sort of evolving--
Like, are these the good guys, are these the bad guys?
-Yeah. -Are you auto defense
or are you transitioning to Knights Templar?
Yeah. At first I really thought of this sort of heroic,
simple story of good guys versus the bad guys.
And then, the more and more time we spent down there,
the more and more these lines between good and evil became blurry.
And for me as a filmmaker, that was obviously as things
started to get more and more interesting.
And I almost became obsessed
with trying to understand what was really happening,
who these guys really were.
And that, I think, led me also into some pretty dark places.
I think part of the way that cartels work,
and part of the way especially the Knights Templar work,
is through fear.
You know, they invoke fear in every aspect of life.
And one of the things that made the Knights Templar particularly unique.
Well, first of all, they sort of had this pseudo-religious,
sort of Christian, medieval, twisted way of operating--
-Hence the name. -Hence the name, Knights Templar.
Where they believe that they’re doing good.
They believe that they're there to protect the people.
And obviously doing quite the opposite.
But they they actually came into Michoacán as almost like
a vigilante group, really professing to be there to protect the people.
So the cycle kind of keeps repeating itself, although...
the imprimatur is different, you know,
on which side of the goalpost you find yourself.
Despite leaders who perhaps have noble intentions,
you can’t always control... people within your ranks.
Or when the law is part of the organization
that the common man has to fight against.
-Then what are the rules? -What are the rules?
And that’s what part of this story is.
The lines between all these groups were so blurry.
The lines between the Autodefensas,
the government, the cartels, the meth cookers.
You know, in the end...
-It’s this big fabric. -It’s very hard as a--
-Very interconnected. -Completely.
On the ground!
Put your hands behind your back.
-He’s on Ruana Street? -Yeah.
Put your hands behind your back.
Shut up, you son of the bitch! We got you now.
Weapons! Check if he is carrying weapons first!
Do you know who I am, faggot?
You are so fucked, dog.
Holy fuck, this is crazy.
In spite of it being an incredibly life-threatening shoot,
you managed to create images that are breathtaking.
You’ve got these extraordinary shots and yet...
many times you’ve got your camera, and you’re running for your life.
So, how do you, how can you do both?
I’m very envious of that.
Do you want to go down and do the sequel?
You can head down there.
The aesthetic, the look was really important.
You know, I think it was such a dramatic story that we’re telling.
The characters were very dramatic, and the setting,
the scenes were, too.
And I really wanted to try to match that
with the visual look of how we were shooting the film.
And actually being behind the camera for a lot of it,
and being behind the camera during the shootouts,
and other scenes like that,
the craft of filmmaking actually calmed me down.
Almost inoculates you to fear.
Yeah. I mean, in that first shootout,
you know, every day we wore bulletproof vests,
but this was a really hot day.
And we’re at a car dealership--
And you didn’t have it on?
I was like, “There’s no way anything is going to happen.
This is kind of a dud of a day.”
And I get this call saying, “We know where these two assassins are.”
And everyone just jumps in the car and they head to this warehouse.
I didn’t have my vest on.
And... boom, we’re right in the middle of it.
There are lookouts everywhere.
For me, in that scene,
I just really tried to focus on just focusing, on framing,
on making sure I was recording.
And I think that helped calm me down.
The scariest moment for me was an interview that I did
with a young woman, who was kidnapped by the cartel with her husband,
taken to a safe house, and she witnessed him...
being chopped up to pieces,
and then burned to death in front of her.
And to be next to this woman,
to look at her and to see her, to see this body that was there,
but when you looked into her eyes, they were so deeply hollow,
and almost as if her soul had been sucked out of her.
And for me to hear her, and hear the horrors of her describing this,
and to think that we’re the same species of human beings
that would do that to other people,
that stuck with me much more so than any other
more ‘bang, bang’ or action scene.
Just psychologically.
When the Knights Templar let her go, they said that
the gift that they were going to give to her for sparing her life
was to be crazy for the rest of her life.
That was their gift to her.
It’s crazy. I mean, the suffering down there is really unbelievable.
We can’t become the criminals we’re fighting against.
Who do you work with?
Talk a little bit about what you think the impact in America will be.
And how little, I think, we know about what’s going on
south of the border.
I think part of what I hope happens with this film is it really opens
people's eyes to a world that they've never seen before,
especially in America.
You know, we’ve seen this narco-violence sort of glorified
in various shows and movies, but...
I really want people to understand that there’s a war that’s happening
in the country just south of us.
In a country that we share so much history with, we share a border with.
And we talk about ISIS,
we talk about all these groups around the world.
But there's this this war that's happening that we're connected to.
That we’re tied to it.
You know, the drugs that we consume here are the basis for that war.
-We’re perpetuating it. -Yeah.
We’re perpetuating it, and the basis for that violence.
As long as there’s a demand for drugs here in the States,
there’ll be a supply of drugs from Mexico and South America.
And even as we legalize weed,
the amount of marijuana coming across the border has gone down.
The amount of meth, cocaine, and heroin has gone up.
So, the cartels will always find a way to make money.
And, you know, unfortunately,
this cycle will continue.
What kind of impact do you anticipate this film will have in Mexico,
once it’s released?
Do you think it will inspire a new auto defense?
Do you think it will inspire ordinary citizens to rise up against
the oppression of these organizations?
You know, it’s a complex film, and it ends in a complex place.
But I think, hopefully, one of the legacies of Autodefensas
is people feeling...
they’re sick and tired of this,
and people going out there and speaking out.
And right as we were finishing the cut that we submitted to Sundance,
there was a horrible thing that happened in the state of Guerrero,
which is just south of Michoacán, where 43 students were murdered.
They were kidnapped by the police, taken, arrested by the police,
handed over to the cartel,
and then incinerated.
43 students, 18 to 30 years old.
Was that ordered by the cartel?
Yeah.
And it shows, you know, it shows the story of what this film shows, too,
of just the blurry lines between cartel, police, government.
I find hope in people speaking out
against these horrors and being tired of living in this fear.
They really live in a world, in a lawless world,
where their government isn’t there.
And so I hope that this film shows people this world.
I hope it shows...
sort of takes this issue away from the headlines.
And really gives you entree, viscerally, emotionally,
to what it’s like to be there,
and into this story, this complicated story of citizens taking
the law into their own hands to fight back.
And, I really, really hope that this film will provoke a dialogue.
And we fought really hard to get the film distributed down there.
There was a few hiccups along the way,
but it’s being released the same time it’s being released in the States.
And, you know, I’m really excited to see
the conversation that it provokes.