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Edward Watts

Edward Watts
Edward Watts is an Oscar nominated, BAFTA and Emmy award winning director. Ed has made documentaries for the BBC, Channel 4 and PBS Frontline to name a few.
‎Media Tribe: Edward Watts | Making For Sama, ISIS slaves & a druglord in a favela on Apple Podcasts
This episode features Oscar nominated, BAFTA and Emmy winning award director, Edward Watts. Edward has directed twenty-five narrative and documentary films, telling true stories from far flung corners of the world. His most recent film ‘For Sama’, which he co-directed with Waad al-Kateab received wo…
Media Tribe - Edward Watts | Making For Sama, ISIS slaves & a druglord in a favela
This episode features Oscar nominated, BAFTA and Emmy winning award director, Edward Watts. Edward has directed twenty-five narrative and documentary films, telling true stories from far flung corners of the world. His most recent film ‘For Sama’, which he co-directed with Waad al-Kateab received wo…

Shaunagh talks to Edward Watts

This episode features Oscar nominated, BAFTA and Emmy award winning director, Edward Watts. Edward has directed twenty-five narrative and documentary films, telling true stories from far flung corners of the world. His most recent film 'For Sama', which he co-directed with Waad al-Kateab received worldwide critical acclaim. Ed has made documentaries for the BBC, Channel 4 and PBS Frontline to name a few.

Episode credits

Hosted and produced by Shaunagh Connaire and edited by Ryan Ferguson.

Episode transcript

Shaunagh Connaire

Welcome to Media Tribe. I'm Shaunagh Connaire and this is the podcast that tells the story behind the story. It's an opportunity for you and I to step into the shoes of the most extraordinary media folk who cover the issues that matter the most.

Edward Watts

You can hear the ISIS radio chatter and someone said, "They're coming," and it was an extraordinary moment because I was in the perfect spot to capture this single shot and I think the whole film depended on this one shot which was the escapees coming over the ridge.

Shaunagh Connaire

My guest today is Oscar nominated, BAFTA and Emmy winning director, Edward Watts. Ed's documentaries have appeared on the BBC, Channel 4 and PBS Frontline to name a few and his films have won over 50 awards, including best documentary at the Cannes Film Festival. Ed, how are you?

Edward Watts

I'm very well, Shaunagh. What a pleasure to talk to you.

Shaunagh Connaire

Where are you, Ed, right now?

Edward Watts

Right now I'm sitting in my wife's personal voice over booth. We do this guardianship thing. So we live in a derelict church and protect it from interlopers. So yeah she set up a voice studio and I'm in the middle of it.

Shaunagh Connaire

Oh my God, that is so funny. I obviously wouldn't expect anything less from you. Listen, Ed, you are such an accomplished director and journalist and I think our audience would be really, really keen to learn how you got here and what did your journey look like?

Edward Watts

It's strange. Whenever anyone says that to me I just think they're talking to the wrong person. It's really odd to hear that, someone call me accomplished, because I still feel like I'm a beginner as much as anything. I still feel like I'm learning. I don't know how far I've come in the whole journey and that really is in full modesty, I promise you. I began this exciting career, left university. I studied history at university and I left with a really great degree and I thought every door in the world was just going to part ways in front of me and so that I'd be transported to my rightful place on the throne but instead of that I went to a little documentary company. I walked in saying, "Oh, well I got this marvelous degree." They said, "Great, you can make the tea. Two sugars," the boss said.

Edward Watts

That was his conclusion of my first interview. So I started as a runner in this amazing documentary company which was run by a brilliant guy called Roger Graef. It's called Films of Record. It was probably ... I was so fortunate to start there because it had so many beautiful, talented, interesting people. Many of whom I'm still in touch with now. Weirdly starting as a runner was also one of the best things I think that anyone can do because you are completely trusted by everybody. Everyone would share their secrets with me and confide in me. I knew everything that was going on and who was sleeping with who. I knew whether which program was in trouble. I'd drift in and out of these really emotional meetings clearing the coffee and I learned. I learned so much and people really wanted to help and support me. Yeah, so that's where it all began.

Shaunagh Connaire

It's a great answer. I actually didn't know that. So how did you then become the associate? The coveted position of associate producer on Channel 4's Unreported World program where I ended up myself as the AP?

Edward Watts

The golden AP role, Shaunagh, which you had, too. This is something I always say actually to people that are starting out. I was like a smart bomb for what I wanted to do. I just seen Unreported World in the late '90s. I think I had even seen the first ever series with Sandra Jordan who was an incredible journalist and yeah. She was just a force. I'd seen her in Bolivia, I think, zooming around Bolivia, navigating burning road blocks and telling important human stories. I just saw that and I already had an interest in film but I was like, "That is where I want to be. I want to do that." So I just kept looking for opportunities to get closer to that coveted horse of Unreported World.

Edward Watts

That was what I did. If there was a job that was working for Channel 4, then that ticked the box because Unreported World was for Channel 4. If there was something else that was more entertainment, even if I was out of money, even if I hadn't worked for two months I'd say, "No, I'd prefer to starve than do anything that kind of deviated from that path." Eventually after a lot of blood and sweat and toil, I got the gig.

Shaunagh Connaire

Amazing and then from the AP road, how did you go on to become a director?

Edward Watts

Well it's not easy, as you know the journey. Unreported world is a hard school, which is a great school, but it's very tough and the guy who was in charge in those days was the legendary Ed Braman. Anyone who worked for Ed Braman will know that, what that word legendary contains. But essentially I worked for him as an AP for I think it was maybe a year and just constantly trying to say to him, "Look, I want to direct one of these," and doing a good job in the day but always hassling and saying, "When can I direct one? When can I direct one?" What was quite good about what he said, he said, "Look, you got to train yourself basically. Show us that you can get there and we're not going to support you're training. You got to go out there and prove it that you're worthy of this position which is one of the best positions in foreign affairs certainly in this country, if not the world."

Edward Watts

So many programs have followed it. Vice has followed it. Unreported World really set that style of fairy tale reporting, which we're so used to now. So I did teach myself and again, thanks to some great people who were working there I would shoot my own stuff, show it to them. I taught myself, I took camera courses, I learned about editing. I was just trying to build up all those skills so that when that moment did come, which was at the end of a series I'd been working on, Ed just said, "All right, do you want to do this one?" Even though I was terrified at the prospect I obviously went for it.

Shaunagh Connaire

No doubt it was a baptism of fire as all Unreported Worlds are. Where did you end up on the first film, Ed?

Edward Watts

Well that was one of the best experiences I've ever had because I was with an incredible reporter, a guy called Evan Williams. Absolute legend, consummate professional, also good fun and with a good sense of humor and yeah. We were going off to Japan to cover right wing nationalists in Japan who at that time, weirdly it was the same prime minister, Shinzo Abe, who they've got at the moment. He was there. At the time he was seen as severely nationalist, taking Japan back down into it's history, trying to re-write it's constitution to remove the sort of defensive nature of it's armed forces. He had a lot of weird connections with these right wing activists on the streets.

Edward Watts

So it was a kind of quirky, weird, odd and unusual film and story to make and we bombed off and made it. We met Japanese mafia guys and we just had quite an extraordinary experience and the film, I think, was actually ... It was one of my favorites. It was like the best thing I made probably out of my first five films that I made.

Shaunagh Connaire

Well lets move onto your other films. One question that I'm asking all of the guests that we have on Media Tribe is if you could pinpoint a story or film that you're most proud of, what would that be?

Edward Watts

The obvious one for me is For Sama, which is what I've just finished traveling the world with. It was probably the film I worked on the longest. I worked on it for two years and also weirdly I was in a very unusual position in that because it was the first film where I had made where I hadn't shot it. It had all been shot by the amazing Waad al-Kateab that I'm sure all your listeners know. It was odd because it felt like as much as anything in that film it was trying to do it for Waad and trying to do it for Syria and for all of us. That there was something so important for humanity, if that doesn't sound too hyperbolic, in what Waad and Hamza and their friends had lived through but also what she had managed to capture on film that was so extraordinary. I just felt this sort of burning weight or responsibility that we had to do it justice.

Edward Watts

That was a sort of level of commitment, weirdly, that was stronger than any of my own films that I made. Even though I'd been like, do or die on all of them, this was just ... Because so many people had died in Syria because Aleppo had suffered so much because Waad and Hamza had shown so much courage it just felt ... I think all the team felt this as well, that it was beholden on us to honor that. Yeah and then it was ... The strange thing about it was when we were making it, it took two years of Waad and I working together to get it to the final form it's in. She had been filming for five years before we even started so it was this huge journey. When we were working together everyone said, "Oh, look, the world's bored of Syria. No one cares about this. No one's going to engage with it."

Edward Watts

When we really thought that it might just appear in one festival and disappear so then to see the opposite happen, to see it capture people's imaginations and reach all the corners of the globe just really gave you faith in humanity again. People do care about these kinds of stories when they're told well or when they have a certain essence and people can connect with.

Shaunagh Connaire

Well that's it. I mean, For Sama, it was just so much more than a film. It was a real call to action for the world. It was a campaign for truth and justice. How do you feel now? I hope the world and it's mother has seen For Sama. If you haven't seen it, shame on you. But how do you feel now when hospitals and schools in Syria are still being bombarded by the Russians and the Syrian regime?

Edward Watts

It's tough to be honest because it's something I've wrestled with all my career is does the work that we do make any difference? When I started out I very strongly believed that it did and I feel that the scales, whatever that prase is, the scales dropped from my eyes during several films that I made. I remember I made one in Congo about some crimes committed by the laws resistance army and it was such a horror, horrific instant that they committed and we had got in ... A reporter and I, Nima Elbagir who's now at CNN, had got into the jungle. We were the first people to film these massacre sites where people were literally lying where they'd been killed and we filmed it all and it just got no press attention.

Edward Watts

I think it got the worst ratings of any Unreported World in that series and that was a real blow to me because I just felt that was such an important story, why didn't people care? This is what someone else said to me on this journey because you do get depressed. When we were working on For Sama as we reached the kind of apex of the awards campaign as they call it, trying to get the BAFTAs and the Oscars and all of that, the regime and the Russians were intensifying their campaign against the last opposition controlled part of Syria which was Idlib and we were living in this world where we were sort of being fated and going to these parties where everyone was like, "Oh, congratulations on the film," and yet in the real world people were dying and tens of thousands of people had been put to flight and it was almost impossible for me to square the circle, let alone Waad and Hamza.

Edward Watts

In that moment when I was feeling quite depressed I guess about our ability to effect things I met some complete random in LA and he just said this thing. He said, "You know, you don't ... It may not directly make that influence, like stop the bombing that minute, but in some way what we do, these films that we make enters the consciousness of people," and someone who saw For Sama, maybe even someone who's like, a teenager now, maybe in 20 years they'll be inspired to, I don't know, be the next secretary general of the UN or something like that. You just don't know how your work can affect people at a deep level and you just have to get used to the fact that if you're doing your work with integrity and with a good conscious that it will make a difference even if you can't necessarily see it yourself.

Shaunagh Connaire

You've said that in such a profound way. I remember you and I at protests, I think it was obviously 2016 but it was a protest about Aleppo in London. We weren't supposed to be there because I think we'd directly been told not to do protests but we met up anyway. But journalism and activism, for me as well, it's really important if you're going to make these films and tell these stories, they have to have impact. It kind of begs the question, do you think that such a crossover between journalism and activism, is that a line that we should cross or not cross?

Edward Watts

Yeah, I mean I think impact is a great word for it and activism, it's interesting. I think one of my very strong feelings is that we have come to a part, like journalists in general have come to a path where objectivity, this sort of holy grail of objectivity has actually come to slightly distort our attitude to stories and so that we're afraid to call things out. I think the best journalism knows where it stands morally. I remember seeing this. The example that brings this home to me is when the Russians or Russian backed rebels shot down that airliner and the BBC were putting out ... They put out a news report and it went into all the evidence for how the Russian rebels were responsible and then at the end there was this whole paragraph saying, "Well the Russian ministry denies it and they say this happened and that happened and that happened." I just thought, "This is how they're getting us. These regimes that are tearing down this international system that for all its imperfections has kept the world in relative stability for the longest period I think in our history. They're tearing at us through these noble principles that we have of objectivity."

Edward Watts

So in Syria, for example, you had people saying, "Well yeah the regime is bombing civilian areas with fighter jets but the rebels are also killing regime soldiers." And as there's some sort of moral equivalence in a lot of journalism, sometimes you have to say, like in Syria, "There is a party there that is responsible for 95% of the civilian deaths. There is the one that has dragged that country into the maras of violence that it's in now." I think we shouldn't be afraid to call that out and to point fingers. In that sense, I don't call it activism. I think it's about knowing where you stand even though you're a journalist.

Shaunagh Connaire

Yeah, well I think the point is you can still be objective while also pointing out right and wrong.

Edward Watts

I think the difference between activism and the kind of impact led journalism that I think is valuable is activism ignores the blemishes of its own side. It won't criticize the side that it's trying to promote and I think that's what we tried to do in For Sama was say, "These people are not perfect. They're facing impossible decisions whether to leave and give up the fight or whether to stay in the fight but endanger their families," and all of these kind of difficult, moral place that they were in, we were very honest about that. I think as long as you're honest about yourself then you're in a position to go off to others.

Shaunagh Connaire

Absolutely. I mean, you were so well known as being the co-director of For Sama but also you have such an amazing catalog of other films. Escape from ISIS springs to mind, Ed. I would love for you to tell our audience a little bit about that. The one scene in particular that always springs to mind is you're in Northern Iraq, you're waiting for a potential release of Yazidi women who've been held captive by the Islamic State. Do you want to kind of set the scene there and tell our audience about that film?

Edward Watts

So it's a crime to keep it simple, yeah. It was one of the most devastating stories I ever covered. It was a story that I'm sure people know about the Yazidi women and girls who'd been abducted and carried off into unbelievable life of sexual slavery in the Islamic State and I, through chance and through fortune, had met this group of very brave individuals who were trying to coordinate these rescue operations and I'd been tracking this one operation I think for over a month and a half. I met the guy who was trying to organize the operation but also the guy who was trying to get his family out on like my second or third day in Iraq. I had been there for a month and a half and it just kept going wrong. They weren't ready to go or there was rain which had blocked their escape. Then finally there was this moment where it was like, "Wow, yeah, they're gone. They're out and they're moving across ..." Well it wasn't even no man's land, it was Islamic State territory.

Edward Watts

There was, I think women and children, I can't remember the exact number of women and children but some of them were barefoot and they had two days to walk up into the mountains to try and reach safety. There was all sort of complicated things going on because the rescuers themselves were nervous about me going up to the front line because it was right opposite the ISIS position and all the production company obviously were worried about their security risk, too, but it was also the moment that you wanted to see. The moment of liberation and yeah. After persuading everybody, managed to get up there, get to the front line. There was a Kurdish forces secret service general who was like, "Who the hell are you?" Wanted to arrest us because we had a camera in this highly sensitive area.

Edward Watts

We managed to persuade him to let us stay. Then we were just waiting, waiting for these hours. One thing that people don't appreciate about Northern Iraq is how beautiful it is in the Spring. You have a vision of Iraq as this dusty battlefield but it was green and flowery and the hills were covered in these yellow and purple flowers and beautiful day and so serene. It was impossible to believe that there was a war there. All the Yazidi guys were like, "Oh, we got hit by a car bomb two days ago. Two guys were killed. There's the ISIS post over there," and we could hear the ISIS radio chatter. We just waited and waited for these guys to arrive and they didn't. I was like ... Eventually I just ran out of things to film. I filmed everybody and I just thought, "Well I'm going to try to get a picture of the ISIS post." So I went to the furthest most place in the trench and I put my tripod down, got my camera, made sure I had the right lens, turned it on, clicked everything into place, put the camera on the tripod and someone said, "They're coming."

Edward Watts

It was an extraordinary moment because I had the perfect lens, I was in the perfect spot by complete accident. I'm not blowing my own trumpet here, it was a complete miracle to capture this single shot. I think that whole film depended on this one shot which was the escapees coming over the ridge, basically. They were just almost like little black dots running down this beautiful hillside and it was a shot ... It was a sort of moment that lasted no more than five seconds. You could see them and then they disappeared behind a dip in the hill. I just turned my camera and I had the longest lens on so I was able to just grab this shot of these little figures scurrying down. It was an incredibly special moment. It also goes to show you that all your training and everything you learn and all you think you know, it does also come down to a bit of smiling from the Gods in order to get what you need.

Shaunagh Connaire

I mean, that scene, it was just extraordinary. It was maybe 20, 30 people coming across the mountain and as far as I remember, Ed, did somebody from that group have to go back into the ISIS stronghold? The person who had essentially delivered all of these people? Did he have to go back?

Edward Watts

He did have to go back and that's someone I've always wanted to make a film about in whatever form. But I think those people are lost. The way that the rescue operations worked was the guys I were with were on the, let's say, the good guy's side of the front line. The non-Islamic State side. They were coordinating with guides and rescuers who were inside the Islamic State. These guys were a whole raft of characters. There was a shepherd, there were taxi drivers, there were also some very seedy criminal elements. A lot of guys who'd been running, working with cigarette smugglers. When the Islamic State took over their land they couldn't smuggle cigarettes because the Islamic State obviously banned them so they were desperate for money so they started doing these rescue operations. It was one of those guys, I don't know anything about that particular bloke, but it was an amazing moment where we saw the family run in. We just saw him on his own in all those mountains and he just turned around and started strolling back the way he'd come back into the Islamic State.

Edward Watts

Yeah, I often think about that guy. Who he was, why he'd done what he done and what happened to him because we know so many people in the Islamic State territory were killed.

Shaunagh Connaire

I mean, no doubt. Another really brutal and unsettling scene in the film was a woman who was accused of adultery in an ISIS propaganda video. She was being stoned by men, even her father I believe, and I just wondered, Ed, you're looking at footage like that all of the time. You're either filming it or you're looking at it and does this ever take a mental toll?

Edward Watts

It used to. It used to take a severe mental toll and it's particularly that, in fact the Congo film that I mentioned earlier and this film took a huge mental toll and I found it very hard to come back to normal life after those experiences because I think when you're seeing such extreme horror and such extreme human cruelty and barbarism and then you sort of come back to this world and it's so alien and it feels like a nightmare, that really took a huge toll on me mentally and I had counseling for it, I had PTSD, therapy, I did the whole shebang. Since those experiences I have thought about it and there's ... I heard this, a friend of mine who sadly died in Libya, a guy called Tim Etherington, I heard an interview he once did where he was talking about that and someone asked him a similar question like, "Doesn't this take a toll on you?"

Edward Watts

He said this beautiful thing. He's like, "Look, I choose to be there. I'm not forced to be there. This isn't my home. These aren't my family members who are being killed. I choose to go into this place and I see the courage of these people who are in that place. Their ability to endure and still keep smiling and telling jokes. I'm just not going to let myself ... I'm not going to make this about me and my trauma and oh God, poor me watching this stuff or interviewing these people." I thought that was such a important message and I've tried to live up to that ever since I heard that because it's not about us. We're lucky, we can always go home, we can turn off the monitor, we can leave. But for the people who actually have to live there that's their lives.

Shaunagh Connaire

Well said, Ed. I think I read a term, "Parachute journalism," the other day and I felt in some ways that that's sometimes what it feels like, what we do. We go to a place and report it and document it and then we go home again. Exactly what you were saying there. Another question, Ed, I'm asking all of my guests is, is there a particular bonkers experience that you've had in this industry that you would like to share with us?

Edward Watts

Okay, I'll give you my most bonkers one. I was thinking about this. I was filming in Rio in the favelas and the favelas in Rio are overrun by very dangerous drug traffickers. If you've seen City of God, that's a documentary, it's real. There were kids armed to the teeth, selling drugs on tables in the middle of the favelas. It's very hardcore. We wanted to film a particular guy who's like a young boy from the favelas who was a brilliant dancer and he was kind of trying to get out of this life of dangerous drugs and crime. He'd lost his father to the fight in between the drug traffickers and the police through dancing. To do that we had to go down, the drug traffickers throw these massive street parties every Saturday for the whole favela where they do most of their business. This is where the kid went down to dance.

Edward Watts

We were constantly trying to film this and get permission from the drug traffickers to go into this space and I at the time had a full head of hair, I looked like a Norwegian tourist and I had a big ass camera. Back in those days it was like a 305, so like not a surreptitious camera and so it was not like I could film in there quietly or subtly so we had to get permission from the drug traffickers. Had an amazing fixers who was about seven foot tall and he was like huge, human egg who knew all these guys, total legend called Alan. Anyway, he got the permission. We went into this long street full of drug traffickers where everyone's like waiving guns in the air in time to the song. We filmed our stuff and we started walking back out the street and what we didn't realize was the street was actually the domain of five different drug traffickers. Well we had permission from two of them at one end but not the other three.

Edward Watts

What was extraordinary was the moment we crossed from this invisible line from one guy's territory to the other, we were surrounded by like, armed people pressing guns into my head, pointing guns at all of us and the reason why I started panicking was Alan started panicking. I was like, "If Alan's panicking we're in big trouble." So they were like, "What are we going to do with these guys?" Anyway, we waited for the boss to come down. He literally was a one armed bandit. Like he'd lost an arm. And he came down and it sounds weird to say about a drug trafficker but he was a gentleman. He was just this lovely bloke. He was like, "So sorry for the mix up, so sorry for the upset. You're welcome here. It's fine. I'm sure you're doing what you say you're doing. I just really apologize for stressing you out. So please come back next week to the dance as my guest."

Edward Watts

I'm not sure I want to get into the whole second part of that story but we did actually turn up as his guest.

Shaunagh Connaire

So that was another great film, Ed, you made for the BBC. So what are you up to now after For Sama?

Edward Watts

So I'm trying to do something different now. I guess I'm always a believer in keep evolving and For Sama did a lot of what I've always wanted to do in documentary. It was an example of a film that makes us understand our shared humanity with people who think ... We think we have nothing in common with people who are in Syria in the middle of a war but you see in For Sama people who were just like you who have the same values as you and that's my big message in all my film making. What I want to do now is write and get into some narrative and features and working with actors. Still probably telling true stories or stories inspired by truth but yeah, just trying to move to a different kind of filmmaking where it's not just me and a reporter or whoever zooming around in the dust with a camera.

Shaunagh Connaire

Amazing. Ed, thank you so much for being on our podcast. It's such a pleasure to chat to you, as always.

Edward Watts

Oh, thank you, Shaunagh. Thanks.

Shaunagh Connaire

If you liked what you heard on this episode of Media Tribe, tune in next week as I'll be dropping new shows every week with all sorts of legendary folk from the industry. If you could leave me a review and rating, that would be really appreciated. Also, get in touch on social media @Shaunagh on Twitter or @ShaunaghConnaire on Instagram and feel free to suggest new guests. Right, that's it. Until next week, see you then. This episode is edited by Ryan Ferguson.

Edward Watts