The Kill Team

By starrymag | June 20, 2019

By: Ashlee Dell’Arciprete

 

 

Nat Wolff

 

Q) Hey Nat! Huge congrats on the film! Please tell me a little bit more about your character, Andrew.

 

A: I get to play Andrew Briggman who is based on Adam who was kind of corrupt into this really difficult situation and had to make a lot of judgement calls and really explore ethics. And it was a really uncomfortable shoot sometimes because it’s a really difficult subject matter and we want to stay true to what happened and also honor the film. I got to meet Adam. He is a really complicated guy. I was really happy to get to portray him. Also, we just had to stay true to what happened in the story, it was really intense.

 

Q) How familiar were you with the original documentary before working on the film?

 

A: I watched the documentary and I was blown away by it. I just thought it was really upsetting and critical. I thought he did a really gorgeous style of directing it. And then in the feature film, we got to explore all these questions I had while I was watching the documentary. Like what actually happened, we got to act out. It was really exciting.

 

Q) How important was it for you to accurately portray Andrew Briggman in the film?

 

A: It was really important. I feel like we call him Andrew in the movie and he’s Adam in real life. There’s certain things that are different, but I think the core of the story is the same. He’s a really great person. I got to meet with him and hang out with him in Seattle and he had me stay over at his house. I really feel grateful to him for letting me into his world. At the end of the day, we had to stay true to exactly what happened and it’s a lot of pressure to play a real person. I haven’t done it much in my career so that was a real challenge but also an excitement.

 

Q) I know you and Alex [Wolff] have been working on music again and playing a few shows here and there like the pop-up show you guys did on Halloween a few months ago. Do you have anything else coming up soon that you’ve been working on?

 

A: You were there, no way! We actually had two new songs just come out with my brother called “Cool Kids” and “Note.” And thank you so much. And, yeah, I get to do a movie called Mainstream with Andrew Garfield and I have a couple of other movies coming out and it’s been great so far.

 

 

 

Alexander Skarsgård

 

Q) So, what was your training process like to be able to play this role, as far as military training?

 

A: It’s a world that I’m quite familiar with as I’m a sergeant in real life in the Swiss Navy. I was there for a year and half in the navy in Sweden with a small group of soldiers out on the islands of Stockholm, so I was quite familiar with the bond that you’re creating and how strong that is between the soldiers. And I did an HBO mini-series called “Generation Kill” ten years ago, so we spent seven months in the dessert in Scandinavia and that was also an incredible experience. When we shot it we had a lot of real Marines with us and I learned a lot from that so it was very helpful having that experience going into this.  So, again, it was a world I was familiar with and that dynamic that I was quite familiar with. And, also, how in a hierarchy it made me understand how something as horrific as this can happen when you have such a strong hierarchy. The younger guys…When Deeks, my character shows up, they look up to him. He’s done three tours in Afghanistan; he’s been out there. He’s killed across the board. He’s a very experienced soldier and they’re so green so they look up to him and it makes it easy for him to morally corrupt them because they want his attention and they want his approval.

 

Q) You’ve played a lot of characters with complicated moral background. What was it like to get into that mindspace when you’re playing someone who thinks they’re doing the right thing whether it’s the right thing or not?

 

A: Well, that’s the best thing about my job. That’s what’s so incredible. When you start working on a project and a character when it’s in this case someone who is repulsive like who is this monster and you’re trying to understand where this guy is coming from and how he grew up in this position because I had to justify it and understand that it makes perfect sense to him. In his world he’s not a villain. He knows what he’s doing. And it’s fascinating to me to go into that kind of headspace and explore that. Not to justify what he’s doing, but in order to be able to play it, you have to believe it.

 

 

 

Brian Marc

 

Q) How familiar were you with the documentary before being apart of this project and what was your research process like?

 

A: I was familiar with its existence, but I was more familiar with the story. That’s kind of how we hear about a lot of things, right? You see the headline and you kind of build your own graphic idea of what it means, but once it was in discussions to take on the role I went and watched the documentary and took a break. Then, I watched it again and then said, “Well, alright, the story’s going to be told so let’s tell it.”

 

 

 

Dan Krauss

 

Q) Congrats on the film! What was it like being able to go back into this story to come back and direct The Kill Team as a narrative?

 

A: Well, it was an amazing experience. I think going from the documentary to the narrative version of the same stories, artistically (both challenging and completely exhilarating), you’re going from a place that’s very objective. You’re going from reportage to an exceptionally subjective and emotional storytelling mode. So, I think what was fascinating to me was the way in which you can liberate yourself from the facts in order to find the truth, if that makes sense. I come from a non-fiction journalism background so that was a hard thing for me to let go of. You cling to facts. Facts are your lifeboat. It’s how you make your bounds as a documentary filmmaker and to let go of that safety (that buoy, that safety net) and to swim freely in more interpretive waters, that was, again, incredibly challenging to stay afloat but also exhilarating to just be out there exploring new, creative territory.

Q) And were you able to revisit conversations you had to talk to other people from the documentary again to help with this?

 

A: I actually didn’t revisit and talk to those people again. I felt like my job at that point was to take everything that I had heard and learned and take all the experiences that had been generously given to me and to intercept them and make them my own. I think their existence attracts for some filmmakers doing nonfiction storytelling where you become so enslaved to the facts that you forget to entertain. I don’t think that’s always true, but I do think that you have to remind yourself, or at least I had to remind myself, in the writing and directing of this film that my first loyalty is to the audience and not necessarily the facts, which is a weird thing for a person from journalism to say or even to believe. But I came to believe it in the making of this film that I had to let myself find the deeper emotional truth by not being as coherent to the fact that I was accustomed to believing.

 

 

 

 

The Kill Team held its World Premiere at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival and is expected to be released by A24 later this year.

 

Read our review of The Kill Team here!

View the rest of our red carpet coverage from the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival here!