Phil Donahue and
Tomas Young
Interview By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com
Last year, Hollywood got political, and the results weren't pretty. So many Iraq-related films bombed at the box office that Jon Stewart even joked about it at the Oscars: "If we stay the course and keep these movies in the theaters, we can turn this around. I don't care if it takes 100 years, withdrawing the Iraq movies would only embolden the audience!"
From a business perspective, it seems like a risky time to put out a documentary about an injured Iraq veteran. But it's refreshing, almost freeing, to know that the filmmakers and their subjects are motivated not by business or fame, but by passion: they're only mining this territory because they feel there's a story that needs to be told. Urgently.
After seeing Body of War, it's hard to disagree with them. The main subject of the film is Tomas Young, a young man who enlisted in the military on September 13th, 2001, in what he admits was a "knee-jerk reaction" to the September 11th attacks. Planning on hunting down terrorists in Afghanistan, he instead was sent to Iraq, where he was promptly shot in the spine and paralyzed.
Some time after his hospitalization, he happened to meet talk show legend Phil Donahue, who had the idea for the documentary and brought on board filmmaker Ellen Spiro as the co-director and cinematographer. We had the opportunity to sit down and talk to both Donahue and Young about the film.
"I met Tomas at Walter Reed Army Medical Center," Donahue says, "and I just learned about the nature of his injuries and how serious they were. Now Tomas not only can't walk, he can't cough. His respiratory system is kind of knocked a little bit into whack. He overheats because his neural system doesn't activate what you and I have, and that is body regulation. So many things like this."
Young himself, now wheelchair-bound for the rest of his life, appears in relatively good spirits. "The film was made during the first two years of my paralysis, which doctors will say is the hardest time to recover," he says. "And so, many of the problems I encountered during the filming I don't deal with as much. The ability to regulate my body temperature, I can get that, for the most part, under control. I still have some issues with dizziness and some other things. I took a bad fall and cracked the back of my head open pretty bad a few months ago, and so I've been prone to falling asleep and losing concentration at random times." He mentions that he still takes about thirty-five pills a day.
"Oddly enough," Young continues with a tinge of sarcasm, "since the documentary started to come out, my care at the V.A. [Veterans Affairs hospitals] has started to improve. I've been told that that's the way it is across the board for all
