“War Game” had its world premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where it received solid reviews for orchestrating a simulation of a coup after a disputed election. Insurgents take capitals, questioning the President’s military control. Countering disinformation is vital, highlighting bipartisan defense of democracy. With a sense of urgency in its storytelling and taut filmmaking, the film might very well be the most terrifying one you see all year. Directors Jesse Moss & Tony Gerber were both kind enough to spend some time talking with us about their experience making the documentary, which you can listen to, read, or watch below. Please be sure to check out the film, which is now playing in New York at the Film Forum and expanding to additional markets, including Los Angeles and Chicago, on August 9th from Submarine Entertainment. Thank you, and enjoy!
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Just a few short months ago, Jesse Moss released “Girls State,” the sequel to “Boys State.” Both documentaries follow a political experiment in which kids form their own fictional state governments, run for office, and create laws. It’s easy to see the connective tissue between those films and his latest project, “War Game,” directed by Moss and Tony Gerber, in which former politicians and military officials act out a fictional experiment to stop a military coup in the vein of January 6th. “I’m interested in exploring the spaces that occupy what I call the fault line in American life, spaces where people with different politics are trying to do something together,” Moss explains about the shared DNA between these films. “I think that it’s rare. So, when I find them, I want to be in them, look at them, see what I can learn from them.”
Moss and Gerber filmed this war game in the style of a thriller, dressing the set and moving the cameras to capture the tension of a nation under siege. Gerber described how the filmmakers “needed to create cinematic space that also had a practical function to it.” Though the role players weren’t actually a functioning presidential cabinet, the fictional Situation Room needed to enhance the reality of the experiment for them. “We immediately recognized this was a real-time thriller and that the audience should feel that way,” Moss explained.
As an exploration of how the government might respond to another January 6th, the subject matter is inherently polarizing. “It’s very important for us, in our release plan, to get this film into red and purple states, and we’re doing that,” Gerber says. The filmmakers are partnering with universities and museums to get the film seen, even in traditionally “red” states. “I also really do believe that, as progressives, we bring a certain amount of baggage and assumptions about how this film will play to people who don’t hold our political points of view,” Gerber went on. “Let’s not make assumptions. And, in a lot of ways, we’re in this horribly divided state because of assumptions.”
In a recent conversation with Next Best Picture, Moss and Gerber discussed capturing this experiment, how they prepared for the shoot, and how they hoped “War Game” could find some common ground in a highly divided country.
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.*
DANIEL HOWAT: Let’s start at the beginning with the origins of the project. How did you guys get connected with Vet Voice, this war game, and how did you know that it was right for a film?
JESSE MOSS: Well, we read this op-ed by these three generals in the Washington Post calling out this threat that they see of extremism in the military and the risk that the next insurrection could be worse. And I think that caused a lot of people to sit up. You know, these were people from within the institution saying this is something we need to take seriously. And Vet Voice, not an organization that I knew, but a national, nonpartisan veterans organization led by Janessa Goldbeck, took up the challenge of organizing this war game. They weren’t going to wait for the U.S. government to run it. They were going to run it themselves. They’re friendly with people in both parties, and a lot of former service members are nonpartisan. We learned about them through some colleagues in the entertainment business, so we reached out and started a conversation. I’ll say that when I heard that they were going to run this war game, I thought, “This is extraordinary.” What a film would this be if we could get access. We won’t get access, but it’s something I’m thinking about, we’re all thinking about. What’s our political future? What did we live through on January 6th, 2021? Is it possible we could have a military-backed coup in this country? I think so. We know our democracy is not as impregnable and sturdy as we would like to believe. I didn’t know what form this film would be, because it’s a war game. It’s a work of improvisational theater, not unlike a film that Tony and I made about 15 years ago (“Full Battle Rattle”), also a documentary, also a work of dystopian science fiction, all wrapped up in some crazy package. And, I just thought, if we can raise the money, and we can get access, this will be an incredible film to think about what’s next.
So, it sounds like Jesse – you kind of heard about this first and then Tony came on board. Is that right, Tony? What were your first impressions?
TONY GERBER: Well, you know, when Jesse called to describe to me what was on offer, my heart began to beat. I thought it was the perfect way to deal with an issue that folks don’t want to deal with, right? It’s this notion of intentional blindness that the big thing that’s right in front of you, people can’t see it. So, how do you do that? The Russians have this great expression, which is called the knight’s move. It’s the movement that the knight on a chessboard takes. So, your opponent thinks you’re going in one direction, but you go in another direction. Filming and having access to this roleplay exercise, which really was this grand theatrical initiative, as Jesse had mentioned, was fake by definition. We know the theater is fake. We know those are actors, or in our case, they’re not actors; they’re playing parts, but we had the ability tohook the audience in a really fresh and interesting way. When folks watch a horror film, they know it’s not real. They still get scared, but they know it’s not real. So, here’s something in which we lead the audience to understand that this is a construct that President Hotham is not a real president, and he’s played by the former governor of Montana, Steve Bullock. We see folks in hair and makeup. We see them learning their role, reading their roles, their area of operation, and their duties. Then, once the game begins, the clock begins to tick down, and news of the sort of fictionalized world begins to creep into the room; you see the temperature rise. These folks become a president and his inner circle of advisors on January 6th, 2025. There’s no doubt. And the way this film works on an audience, it’s proof positive that in this theatrical alchemy, something that’s not real becomes more real than real.
Did you have any part in casting this experiment, or was that done exclusively by Vet Voice?
MOSS: No, we didn’t cast the role players. We certainly had the power to emphasize which role players we could choose to focus on. Of course, the President was going to be a central focus, but it was really a surrender of control that we normally would have in the documentary. Who you choose to focus on – that’s the power of the director. So, that was part of the terror of this project, but the thrill as well. And, until we actually started filming the exercise itself, we didn’t know if they could play their parts. We knew they had plenty of experience. That doesn’t mean the camera is going to be compelled by them or that their ability to inhabit the role is going to make us lean forward and pay attention. And yet, when it started, we were hooked, transfixed. I felt like I was sitting in the White House Situation Room, pulling up a seat at the table, watching a president and his advisers wrestle with this most profound of questions to deploy the active duty U.S. military on domestic soil to stave off a potential civil war. That was super interesting. On the other hand, to counterbalance that risk, we had a great deal of control over the environment that would be constructed in which they would play. And how we could build our team of filmmakers and collaborators around us, which is enormous by the standards of documentary. So, I think it was that balance of control and chaos that I think is the place where really interesting work happens. I’m sort of happy to live if I can find the money, or we can find the money, to support this endeavor. That’s where I like to make films.
I want to hear about the nuts and bolts of capturing the actual war game. You did interviews pre- and post-with them, but the majority of this movie is this six-hour experiment. So, how did you prep to make sure you didn’t miss any vital moments during that day?
GERBER: That’s a good question. Just to clarify, we did not have access to the role players before the exercise. These folks are so busy, and they’re spread across the country. I mean, it’s something we asked for. We thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could sit down with all the principals and get a sense of who’s who and who’s interesting and just have that kind of advantage?” We didn’t have that. So, we met these folks on January 6th when we filmed. So, to answer your question about how we prepped, We did not design the game scenario. The way a war game scenario is constructed by the game designers is that there are tentpole events, right? And these tentpole events, in a screenplay, you’d call them inciting incidents. The sort of big events that happen, like the crowd growing and the National Guard letting some of the protesters through. That’s the first event, and it’s marked in our film and in the exercise by a news report. So, we have television news. We created a T.V. news network. We knew that we needed to create these fake news pops. But, again, we didn’t write them. The scenario team wrote them and gave us a script. We knew that bringing some verisimilitude to this would make it a better movie. But, we also knew that the verisimilitude of the set design of the table, of the coasters on the table, would enhance the experience of these role players because we really wanted them to slip into the dramatic scenario and not be conscious of cameras, not be conscious of artifice. And that happened beautifully. It happened really beautifully. We had access to this hotel ballroom, which was not cinematically interesting. The light in there was dreadful. So, we needed to create a cinematic space that also had a practical function to it. You needed to bake in a habit trail with gerbils, in a sense. How is the space going to encourage people to move? How is it going to encourage them to interact? What sort of tools will they have? For example, the intercom that you see at a moment of crisis in the film. Those are all things that we needed. The fact that the red cell could be down the hall, but there would be a level of connectivity between the red cell and the blue cell, between the President in the Situation Room and the would-be insurrectionists, but they don’t see everything. The red cell does not see everything that the blue cell is seeing. They see selectively, right? They can see the news reports. They see the same news reports that the blue cell reads. Everyone shares this sort of fake Twitter, you know, social media universe, which is full of some legitimate sources but a lot of propaganda. So, how did you parse that? That was a big part of the game.
You hinted at the way the movie looks as well, which is really striking. You guys shot this really like a thriller, from both the colors and the aesthetic of the set that you’re in, but also camera movements. Tell me about developing the look and feel of this documentary.
MOSS: Well, thank you. Yeah, the references immediately were works of narrative film. We started with “Dr. Strangelove,” in particular the production design of the War Room set, probably the most famous built set in Hollywood history. But, it’s a kind of theatrical space, you know, and that was permission to not try to be totally faithful to the realWhite House Situation Room, which is a bit of a dingy basement room if you’ve seen pictures of it. So we could elevate our space. We looked at some theatre. That inspired us in the fluidity of on-stage and off-stage action unfolding simultaneously for the audience. That’s exciting. We looked at the work of Edward Luttwak, a writer who wrote this famous book called “Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook,” a kind of strange political science text. That’s what was exciting to us: Drawing from all these places and feeling like we were doing something also a bit new. And so, we did have control of that space. We had exceptional documentary cinematographers who also worked in fiction. Fiction looks like fiction because of the control and the scale of production. And so, we were able to build a lighting grid in the set that we could sort of dial in settings through the war game that corresponded to the sequence of events the tentpole injects that Tony mentioned. We immediately recognized this was a real-time thriller, that the audience should feel that way, and that we should strive to depict it visually in a way that drew people into the action and the fluidity of the camera movement around the table as people kind of pass from one space to another. These were all intentional. But then we couldn’t say anything about action or cut. And fiction looks like fiction because you can shoot coverage. But I think great documentary cinematographers understand the grammar of coverage and what it means to shoot a conversation as it looks like a movie like we’re making a movie. Tony and I wanted to make a film that could stand up on the big screen. I mean, we all say that, but I think we recognize that this film, as a work of theater and a work of cinema, could draw people together in a space to share this experience, and that could be cathartic and provocative at the same time.
You talk about bringing people together to experience this. I was watching the movie as a liberal person who’s already frightened and horrified by the events of January 6th, but I was also having a hard time imagining someone watching the film who thinks January 6th was overblown and not really that bad. Of course, you would love everyone to see it, but how do you avoid preaching to the choir in a sense?
GERBER: We don’t want to do that. It’s very important for us, in our release plan, to get this film into red and purple states, and we’re doing that. And one way is through partnering with museums, through university museums, and partnering with universities. You could say those are sort of liberal pockets in red states, but regardless, just getting into those spaces and having the conversation is critical to us. I also really do believe that, as progressives, we bring a certain amount of baggage and assumptions about how this film will play to people who don’t hold our political points of view. By way of example, you’ll remember that in the film, Janessa Goldbeck talks about her father going down the QAnon rabbit hole and some of the crazy conspiracy theories that he had bought into. We’ve been asking Janessa since we made this film, “Has your father seen the film? Has your father seen the film?” She’d say, “I’m waiting for the right moment. I’m waiting for the right moment.” Well, two weeks ago, she sat him down and watched the film with him. There couldn’t be a more ardent Trump supporter, and he loves the film. And he thought it was reasoned. And he thought that Steve Bullock as President Hotham was fabulous. You know, Bullock is sort of right out of Central Casting for a Kennedy-esque president. But, that aside, he thought that the logic and the parsing of issues and concerns about security made a lot of sense. So, to me, that said, Let’s not make assumptions. And, in a lot of ways, we’re in this horribly divided state because of assumptions. We have to all approach the present with curiosity about one another, right? And with an agreement that there are certain elements of our democracy that we need to protect, regardless of political persuasion. The peaceful transfer of power is foundational. Can we agree on that, at least?
MOSS: And I think we could probably agree, red and blue, that the Insurrection Act is hazardous.
Absolutely. And Jesse, you’re no newcomer to this world of conflicting political ideologies in film. There’s some clear shared DNA between “War Game” and “Girls State” and “Boys State.” Very different in numerous ways. But in terms of this kind of political theater of sorts. What’s your view on the shared DNA between those films?
MOSS: Well, I think I’d say two things. One is, I’m interested in exploring the spaces that occupy what I call the fault line in American life, spaces where people with different politics are trying to do something together. That’s very interesting to me. And I think that it’s rare. So, when I find them, I want to be in them, look at them, and see what I can learn from them. And I’m interested in finding new ways to engage audiences. Ways that are playful and are not the same old media diet that is either repellent, fatiguing, or traumatizing. And humor, playfulness of form. Tony calls them the blind spots that we all kind of live with, and if we look at them from the right perspective, they offer something new. That’s what the story, its form, and its content offered. For me, it wasn’t a revisit. An autopsy of J6 2021. Been there, done that. Traumatizing. I love the idea that we could go into the White House Sit Room, pull up a chair, and watch the President, played by a governor, be President. So, that’s what I’m looking for. I keep swearing off political films, and then I’m confronted by something like “War Game.” I thought there was no question I’d have to ask. I’d have to try to make this.
Tony, you already started hinting at some of what’s happened post-film, post-war game, and post-the film’s release. Tell me more. What has happened since?
GERBER: Well, it’s extraordinary. Since we premiered the film in January at Sundance, the world has changed. And it’s changed at an unprecedented rate. So, every time we see the film, and I’ve seen it probably three times a month with an audience, it feels like a different film altogether because of the context that’s brought into the theater. So, in some funny way, it’s truly an interactive film, you know? Not in the sense that frames of footage are shuffled or the ending changes depending on the whim of the audience, but in what the audience brings emotionally to the experience of watching it. Into the tenor of the conversations that occur afterward. This film is truly a provocation for a conversation. We never screened it anywhere in which there was enough time for the Q&A. The Q&A always spills over to the lobby. Folks always want to just hang out and keep talking. So, it kind of is like a provocation for a conversation that people didn’t know that they needed to have. I’ll just add that when we made this film, Donald Trump wasn’t the candidate, and it seemed that he had faded from political relevancy and that Ron DeSantis was the likely candidate. That’s how much has changed since we shot this film, you know? So, it’s extraordinary.
Well, we are recording this on July 30th, 2024, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t take the opportunity to ask this. Jesse, you followed Pete Buttigieg in your film “Mayor Pete.” And now, they are in the midst of Vice President Harris’s “veepstakes,” as it were, finding the right candidate for vice president. As someone who followed Pete on his run for President, what do you think about the potential of Vice President Pete Buttigieg?
MOSS: You know, I was just with my producer on that film and another filmmaker, who is very politically well-connected. Last night, I asked them what they thought. I mean, I wish I had some insight or knowledge. Other than Pete’s Instagram posts and Chasten’s, I’m kind of out of the loop in that space. I guess if I’ve learned anything in the last few weeks, it’s that I don’t know what the next week is going to bring, and, probably will be surprised. Maybe it won’t be anybody on that list, you know? Pete’s certainly making himself pretty visible. And I think he’s really an impressive politician. I love the film. I love that he’s still in that world. I feel like the film was honestly criminally underseen. Maybe people are ready to revisit “Mayor Pete” whether he’s the V.P. pick or not.
“War Game” is now playing in select theaters from Submarine Entertainment
You can follow Daniel and hear more of his thoughts on the Oscars and Film on Twitter @howatdk
