Sitting in a posh suite of a boutique hotel in Washington's fashionable Georgetown neighborhood, with at least a day's worth of room service trays balanced on an ornate coffee table, film director Andrew Niccol readily admits the Department of Defense opted out of cooperating on his new film "Good Kill," which depicts his interpretation of the strife faced by modern drone pilots. The "period piece," as he quips, is set during the height of drone warfare in 2010 and is not meant to be a documentary, but rather a medium to jump-start what he considers an overdue public conversation on unmanned warfare.
Ethan Hawke, the star of the film, interjects.
"Whenever you guys say 'DOD,' I know you're thinking 'Department of Defense,' but I always think 'Day Out of Days,'" Hawke says, grinning through two-day stubble as he reclines on a cushioned couch with his tie loosened. He describes the staple Hollywood document that lays out a movie's production schedule and is given to actors, producers and crews. "I'm like, 'Why is he talking about the Day Out of Days?'"
It's a perfect moment of candor to explain how the pair, who previously teamed up on the dystopian drama "Gattaca," view their latest work. It is easy for those ensconced in national security and foreign affairs to forget perhaps how little the public knows about terms like "unmanned aerial vehicle" or "remotely piloted aircraft" – or even that the U.S. remains at war in Afghanistan after 14 years and through the CIA has expanded the post-Sept. 11 hunt for al-Qaida into tenuously legal battles in Pakistan and Yemen.
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"You'd be surprised how little knowledge there is out in the public at large about exactly how a drone strike happens, which we've never seen," Niccol explains. "And also the public has no idea about the effect it's having on the people who are performing the strikes.
"We've never had this type of soldier before."
Hawke admits that before beginning research for the movie he didn't know what a drone was nor how they operate generally, let alone in the midst of an active battlefield. Two years ago, he wouldn't have known enough to have an opinion, or even to ask a question.
"There's no doubt that the drone program is an excellent and efficient and powerful tool. The question is how we use it," he says. "The atomic bomb was dropped long before the public had a real meditative thought about whether that was a wise decision or not. That happened, and we've spent years processing that it happened."
The two believe their latest movie will help the average citizen better understand what it's like to serve as a "virtual warrior." It depicts a former F-16 fighter pilot who traded in yet another combat tour to instead accept a posting to Creech Air Force Base, an outpost within Las Vegas' neon halo from which he leads a team flying surveillance and attack drones over Afghanistan and other faraway battlefields. The character can see his family each day, though the nature of his work puts a strain on his marriage. His commander plays the de facto narrator, constantly griping to his subordinates about his own misgivings regarding drone operations as a way to convince the audience that they, too, should criticize what's happening on the screen.
Ethan Hawke as Tom Egan and Bruce Greenwood as Jack Johns in "Good Kill."
The movie gets a lot of things right, including its depiction of "signature strikes," or drone attacks that are justified only by a target's pattern of action and not his or her specific identity. President Barack Obama and CIA Director John Brennan have hinted that the criteria for a kill may be strengthened, though the revelation last month that the U.S. had accidentally killed two Western hostages, including one American, in a strike confirmed the former rationale was in place as recently as January.
"Good Kill" also accurately depicts some of the stresses facing drone pilots, who may spend hours diligently observing a potential enemy hideout to glean intelligence. They might, as depicted in the movie, have to watch a combatant rape a woman, but because that doesn't pertain to their rules of engagement, they would not be able to do anything about it.
And unlike their deployed counterparts who remain in a wartime mindset around the clock, these fighters may just minutes later be standing in their backyards barbecuing with friends, unable to tell their spouses the details of what they experienced at work.
There are, however, some glaring holes in the content of the movie, according to Air Force sources. And they extend beyond the usual Hollywood depictions of the military that invariably cause veterans to cringe. (It would be incredibly rare for an Air Force pilot to land on a Navy vessel, for example, as Hawke's character reminisces about at one point, let alone for one to perform a night landing on an aircraft carrier in an F-16, which is not designed to be compatible with American carriers. And despite the deeply rooted wishes of many jet jockeys who spoke with U.S. News, young flyboys cannot take a first date for a flight in the $150 million fighter jet, even if it's January Jones.)
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Primarily, the Air Force rejects the depiction in the movie that most drone pilots eventually doubt the virtues of their work.
"The general public may walk away with the perception that a good percentage, or a significant percentage, suffer from moral injury or [post-traumatic stress disorder] and elevated alcohol use or alcohol abuse," says Wayne Chappelle, a clinical psychologist for the Air Force and a principal adviser to top combat commanders on airmen's mental health. "That's just simply not the case."
Studies Chappelle conducted in 2010 and 2012 are readily available online, as the latest numbers will be later this month. Fewer than 17 percent of drone pilots experienced and expressed cynicism about their jobs in 2010, and that amount had dropped significantly by 2012 following new Air Force initiatives.
It does not appear that the producers of "Good Kill" consulted these studies, Chappelle laments, nor did they make any effort to contact him, he says.
"Yes, there are [remotely piloted aircraft] pilots that do see [post-traumatic stress] in response to some of the missions they have participated in. That's very natural," he says. "But it's not the epidemic, nor is it the crisis that has been previously reported."
There is also a scene in the movie in which Hawke's commander (who perpetually reminds Hawke, and thus the audience, just how terrible his life is) tells a hangar full of young recruits, "Half of you were recruited in malls, because you are a bunch of f------ gamers."
The Air Force says it has never engaged in such recruitment strategies.
Indeed, only 30 percent of current drone operators weren't combat pilots before accepting their new position. The Air Force is trying to get the number of recruits who go straight into drone operations up to about 90 percent of the force, though that remains a faraway goal.
The ethical dilemmas in the movie largely center around the unseen voice of "Langley," the CIA boss who commands the central drone unit via speakerphone to cease recording missions and start engaging in strikes that are tantamount to war crimes. He forces the crew to attack those who appear to be innocent under the justification that the value of killing a nearby target outweighs civilian casualties. And he requests that the crew perform "follow-ups" or "double taps" to attack first responders coming to the scene of a Hellfire missile explosion.
Ethan Hawke and January Jones as Tom and Molly Egan in "Good Kill."
Niccol says all of the strikes in "Good Kill" have occurred in real life, and were based largely on anecdotes from the film's consultants and from information he gleaned from WikiLeaks. He admits, however, that the two primary advisers to the film who reportedly were former Air Force drone pilots wouldn't comment on operations that took place under the purview of the CIA.
Two drone operators who spoke with U.S. News about their experiences say it is not uncommon to be "sheep dipped" out of the normal chain of command and into missions at the behest of the CIA, though the resulting missions are usually more benign than the movie depicts.
All pilots are also trained in the law of armed conflict, international regulations that govern what they are and are not allowed to do behind the throttle and joystick.
"It's always been very clear-cut," says Chris Stiles, a former drone operator for the U.S. Army who retired from the service in 2009. "You can always tell who the enemy combatant is, who is engaging something, and you never engage a target that wasn't fighting. The rules of engagement prevent that. If the target isn't actively engaged, then they usually like to grab them up with a ground component and use them for intelligence."
Drone pilots also are endowed with the right to question orders they believe illegal or unethical, says Air Force Maj. Lewis Pine, who flew B-1 bombers before he was switched over to drone operations from 2006-2013.
"Our folks by all means have the right to speak up and ask for more information," says Pine, who now works for Air Combat Command at Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia. "They have an obligation to raise their hand and ask questions."
Despite its Hollywood stylizing, Hawke insists the movie is not designed to drive a political agenda, but solely to, as Niccol also says, "open the debate."
And if the current state of warfare is any indication, that debate will have plenty of opportunities to unfold.
"There's a conversation that's not happening in a large public way about what the drones are capable of and what the future of them is," Hawke says. "I'll be so curious in 20 years to see what this movie looks like. This is probably the infancy of an unmanned military, whether it's tanks or whether it's full-on robots running into battlefields, whether it's unmanned Humvees operating remotely."
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