There’s nowhere on earth the Navy SEALS in “In Waves and War” wouldn’t go, but nonetheless Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk find the vets of the war in Afghanistan in a most unexpected place, considering an unorthodox treatment for their unresolved PTSD that involves venom of a poisonous frog (5-MeO-DMT) and the bark of iboga trees (Ibogaine) for their psychedelic properties. The remedy may be off the beaten path, but getting their head around actually acknowledging they have an issue in spite of torturous memories of their time in combat is difficult enough before even introducing the thought of participating in any “hippie stuff,” as one of the men puts it and speaking about any of it in front of a camera would seem utterly impossible when they’re loathe to share anything about their experience to even those closest to them.
While the vets D.J. Shipley, Matty Roberts and Marcus Capone tread lightly into the unknown, bereft of the usual weapons and armor that they’re equipped with for protection, Cohen and Shenk, who previously helmed harrowing docs such as “Audrie and Daisy” and “Athlete A,” can be counted on to observe them work through their trauma with a sensitive touch. Although the film tracks the trio as they eventually find their way to Coronado where the unconventional cure awaits, with considerable encouragement from one another and spouses Patsy Dietz Shipley and Amber Capone, the film gives shape to a far more abstract journey when the SEALS entered combat eager for a fight, with Marcus registering early disappointment when he was deployed to Germany rather than Kabul for an early tour of duty, and came away as shells of their former selves upon their return to America, disillusioned not only by the horrors they experienced, but no longer feeling as if they were part of a unit and left in the wilderness of their own minds to find a way forward.
Although that time can be understandably hazy as much out of self-defense as what they can remember, Cohen and Shenk bring it to the screen vividly in deeply vulnerable interviews with the men as well as unusually affecting animation that maintains a recognizable realistic streak even as it takes audiences inside their psychedelic trips and equally surreal reminiscences of having boots on the ground for some of the most dangerous missions there were during the war. In opening the film with testimonies from a variety of vets participating in a Stanford study on the effects of Ibogaine on the alleviating some of the mental strain they’ve experienced since their return, “In Waves and War” shows what a widespread condition PTSD is as well as the unexpected glimmers of hope that the unorthodox treatment can offer to ease minds and while the subject as a whole would seem like a heavy lift, Cohen and Shenk’s deep compassion for their participants translates into understanding what they’re going through with ease.
While his partner Cohen couldn’t make the trip to the film’s recent bow at DC/DOX, we were fortunate to be able to catch up with Shenk when he was in Washington this past week to talk about how the two could craft such a touching film around abstract ideas of trauma, convincing those that served in the military to speak about what they saw and honoring the late, great documentary maven Diane Weyermann of Participant Media with one more film of considerable importance and impact.
Well, this is a Participant film, actually [the late COO] Diane Weyermann’s last green light. She ended up passing away during the making of this film, but my God, she was such a special person. She started the Sundance Documentary Fund and was at Soros [Open Society Institute] before that and then headed up an amazing career at Participant. Participant discovered this film and at first, she was skeptical of the subject because who wouldn’t be? Navy SEALs taking psychedelics. It just sounds like an insane clashing of two different worlds, but she met Marcus Capone and Amber Capone and she was just blown away by them as people and the story they told about Marcus’s deployment and subsequent treatment with Ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT. We had done “An Inconvenient Sequel” with Diane and I think she thought Bonni and I have dealt with some really difficult subjects, so maybe we could find purchase with this subject. And it turned out to be quite a journey to get access to the community. Navy SEALs aren’t exactly trained to share their most intimate details with filmmakers, but that’s how it started.
The access is something that took me aback from the first frame when you’ve got tapes of a Stanford psychological study that seem like they must’ve been privileged. What was it like to find your way into this?
We met Amber and Marcus, who were very keen to spread the word about this treatment. It was 2019 and Marcus had only done it about a year-and-a-half. But the suicide rate among American veterans of the global war on terror is just off the charts. The official stat is 22 a day, and it’s probably double that in reality. There’s a crisis. If you’re a Navy SEAL veteran and you spent years of your life deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan, chances are many of your friends have taken their lives. It’s a giant issue and a big part of their lives and an emergency as far as they’re concerned, but as far as we all should be concerned, so they wanted to get word out about this amazing thing that helped Marcus.
Amber said to us, “Guys, the people that you want in this film are actually the people that aren’t going to want to be in this film because Navy SEALs that toot their own horns and write books aren’t really looked well upon by the community. It’s a secret community that likes to play their cards close to their chest for good reason, so we went about trying to find people who would genuinely tell us their story from a place of earnestness. D.J. Shipley and his wife Patsy turned out to be amazing people and Matty Roberts, who was very reluctant to be in the film, ultimately agreed because he and his family thought that by telling the story, it could potentially help others. That’s really what motivated them.
The Stanford piece of it, Amber and Marcus had been working with Nolan Williams, the neuroscientist at Stanford, just as we were starting the project and we met Nolan and we thought, “Gosh, if you ever actually do a study, we’d love to be in on that” because we wanted to show that it wasn’t just our main characters. This has repercussions for many, many people. And in our minds as storytellers, that was a chance to multiply the effect of what the story was doing. We were just so blessed to get access to the study and be in that on the ground floor from the beginning and watch that cohort go through the treatment as well.
It was interesting to see all of the people in the film doing their interviews separate and individually as opposed to ever in a group setting. Did you know that was going to be the best way to tell this story from the start?
A total no brainer. Once you start meeting the women in the lives of these Navy SEALs, you realize what strength really is. The dudes are strong physically and mentally — they have to do insanely challenging things in the field — but often their partners are working just as hard, if not harder, especially once these guys start suffering with traumatic brain injury, PTSD, physical wounds and injuries. They’re often holding young families together. Amber and Patsy are just two amazingly strong women, and Marcus and D.J. would tell you they would not be alive, and certainly wouldn’t have the healing that they’ve had if it wasn’t for their wives’ determination to really get them help. Bonnie and I are a couple and we work as a couple, so we approach people as a family, and we relate on that level to our participants in the film. But it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out we needed to have Amber and Patsy in the film.
It’s hard to know what it is we do because it’s who we are. We approach people as human beings at a basic level. All these films that we’ve made, “Audrie and Daisy,” “Athlete A,” now “In Waves and War,” they have commonalities, but they’re wildly different venues and people have wildly different life experiences. Bonni and I really see the commonalities as the things that make us human. We all have things in our childhood that we carry with us that make us who we are. We all have dreams and hopes that we hope and try to move towards and achieve in life, and then we all stumble.
We did some stuff on this film that was a little different. Like, for example, when we met Patsy, she was very reluctant to go on camera. She’s just a shy person and didn’t necessarily want to share her story, but we felt there are a lot of people out there that could be helped by her story, so we ended up telling her, “Look, let’s do the interview. You can hold off on signing an appearance release, and we’ll send you the transcript of the interview, and you can sit with it and decide what you want to share.” And she basically ended up letting us use the whole thing. That practice, I think, is becoming a little bit more of a thing in the documentary film world and when I started, that was like, “No way, as a journalist, would you include your subjects,” as we used to call them, “in that process.” But Bonni and I have come to see this process as a much more complex and a trust-building thing and a genuine relationship and working together. It’s D.J. and Patsy’s stories, it’s Amber and Marcus’ story, and it’s Matty’s story. This is not a simple piece of journalism that you go out and do in an afternoon. This is years and years of our lives and theirs, so we did stuff like that on this film that helped that part of the trust-building.
This also seems like a difficult film to illustrate for as vivid as the memories are. When you’re able to find artifacts like the videos of Matty’s training or the photos Marcus and Amber have, does it actually help you piece a story together as much for yourselves as eventually the need to share it with an audience?
In the film, you see a real kitchen sink approach to a documentary. You’ve got amazing personal archive that these Navy SEALs have — photographs and video from their deployments, which really helped bring that 20-year period of war to life. You see home video. You see Amber and Marcus’s children growing up, and you actually see Marcus deteriorating a bit in the film. Marcus and Amber opened up their storage unit for us and handed us six plastic bins full of old video cameras with tape stuck in them and photo albums that we had to take apart and scan, and that was a real moment of trust as well for us to take that and get that all digitized. But when people see the film, they’ll see just a rich tapestry of the lives of all of these guys and their wives and their children. Then you also see the animation, which brings their inner life to the screen in a way that we were really excited about.
Our approach was to really listen carefully to what these guys said. Ibogaine, the drug that comes from this plant in Africa, when you take enough of it, as these guys did in the film, almost everybody who we talked to described this amazing cinematic journey — people would say it was like sitting in a movie theater, or it was like a slideshow or an iPad that you could swipe. They always used visual metaphors, and the other thing they did, and you’ll see this in the film, is describe this multi-level thing where they were almost like a tourist in their own life, and they could go back into childhood scenes or battle scenes, and they could see it from a new perspective.
We were really inspired by some of the Linklater films with the rotoscope animation [like “Waking Life” and “A Scanner Darkly”], and we wanted to have animation that felt like it was based on reality, and we took that to a documentary level where we used archival material, photographs, and home movies, and images of Marcus and D.J. and Matty life to bring that to life. It was amazing. We worked with these guys at Studio AKA in London, and they assigned a different artist to each of our main characters, so the animation style is [somewhat] the same, but also different from character to character. It was a real learning curve for Bonni and me. We had never done something quite like that, but it was just creatively such a pleasure to be able to make a movie about something that you can’t film, which is the inside of a mind under the influence of really intense psychedelics.
What’s it been like getting this out into the world?
Bonni and I have never had a film that is getting such emotional response from audiences. It’s an emotionally really intense film, and a surprising film. I think people don’t quite know what to expect. Some might think it’s a war film. It’s really not. It’s really a film about people exploring the deeper most recesses of their psychology and their emotional life and it’s the most unlikely people taking you on this incredible, surprising journey. I think that almost any human being that watches this film can relate to it on a pretty deep level and audiences are getting to the end of the film and they’re not moving. We have something like a 100% retention for the Q and A’s that we’re doing [when] usually half leave because people want to sit in it, process it for themselves, and then discuss it with their family and friends. Then we’re getting like 50 e-mails the next day [about] when can I see the film and how can I show it to my family and friends? Because people want to share it and we’re so happy to announce that Netflix has picked it up and it’s going to be on the service on November 3rd, just before Veterans Day of this year.
“In Waves and War” will next screen at the Bentonville Film Festival on June 18th at 1:30 pm at the Skylight 3. A full list of theatrical screenings ahead is here and the film will start streaming November 3rd on Netflix.