Villordsutch chats to Tom Petch, writer-director of The Patrol…
Tom Petch is both writer and director of The Patrol (Soda Pictures), which follows a physically and mentally exhausted British Patrol in Afghanistan as both ammunition and morale run dangerously low. Tom himself spent 8 years within the British armed forces and later the Special Forces, and was able to draw on his experiences and other solider accounts to form the story of The Patrol. A winner of the Raindance Best Film 2013 and described as “A Must-Watch” by the London Film Festival, Villordsutch managed to catch-up with Tom to ask him a handful of questions about his time he spent involved in the film.
Villordsutch: Tom can you tell us a small bit about your 8 year career within the armed forces?
Tom: I joined the army in ‘89 and left in ‘97 so I didn’t do Afghanistan. I joined a tank regiment in Germany and the moment I arrived the Berlin wall came down and everyone started fighting. I belong to a generation of officers who got sent everywhere. I went to Cambodia, the Middle East, Bosnia but we didn’t really intervene like in Afghanistan. At that time NATO didn’t have a role, it was the United Nations, it wasn’t till the end of Bosnia that NATO actually started to intervene, though all that actually meant to me on the ground was swapping my beret from blue UN one. We learned a lot and I think my generation of officers got to see a lot of fighting and that informed us, it was very interesting times.
V- You obviously have undertaken so much work when it came to writing and of course directing the film from equipment, tactics, personal accounts (of past and present soldiers) but when it came to getting your actors ready for their roles did you ask them to read anything in particular, or did you put them through their paces physically to prepare them for their roles?
T: I gave the actors playing officers some instruction on how we were taught as officers, and so Ben particularly would come and ask me questions about his role, and how to handle the situation. They were depicting a reality, of sorts, a film is not real, but I wanted to give the audience some insight into this world. Everyone on The Patrol I gave footage from Afghanistan to watch, not just the constant action which is more usually portrayed in war films, but some more idea of what it is really like. Then we took everyone to a basic training camp in the UK and we taught them all their weapons drills and their contact with the enemy drills. We also gave them their first taste of living in the field and route marches. Their instructors had done tours of Afghanistan so the cast really respected that, and paid attention, and like all good actors asked loads of questions. Then in the desert we issued the actors with the real equipment, and because they had been taught how to put it together we let them get on with it. I had this idea that the more real we made it for them the better they would seem as soldiers. And that kind of worked, because during the course of the filming the actors got better, they started looking a bit like a basic training unit. When they started out their kit was all over the shop, they always needed a bit of help, by the end of it they looked good. I would watch them and they always practiced, whether we were filming or not. Think they all developed enormous respect for the soldiers in Afghanistan as they did all this in the same heat.
V: The monologue that runs throughout the film is quite clear with its message and also so is the story that unfolds during the unfortunately named Operation Icarus in the film, was this something you’d felt during your 8 years service that you had wished to capture on film or did the other accounts you read later bring you to writing this story?
T: It was something later, my inspiration, the path to The Patrol, was when the 2006 NATO deployment in Afghanistan started I thought this doesn’t look good. I started asking questions, reading reports, and it was apparent the deployment had gone wrong. When I came to developing an idea of a script some of that was my own experience, like in Cambodia in ’93, where we held the first elections in the country while the Khmer Rouge tried to derail the peace process. I guess that is a similarity with Afghanistan, a violent minority, but that give the majority the choice they will never chose violence, and that just happened in Afghanistan with the elections on Saturday, just as it did in Cambodia. But it probably could have happened without 448 British soldiers dead and a load more civilian casualties. When I actually started writing I drew on incidents in my own career and set them in Afghanistan. Those incidents, death of a friend, insubordination, stress in combat, they are constant; you can read the Iliad and it’s all there, the reluctant hero, the misguided leader. In fact the Operation Icarus is loosely the real Operation Achilles, can’t believe they actually used that in Afghanistan but they did? The characters themselves are a mixture of people I knew when I served, but they are also archetypes, if they repeat, which they do, in Journey’s End, Norman Mailer’s ‘Naked and the Dead‘ then there is a reality to these portrayals of men in combat.
V: Where did the confidence come from in writing and directing your own debut film? Has this been a long time want for yourself or did you feel you couldn’t trust anyone with this material?
