Killing Them Softly
THE KILL TEAM I Dan Krauss adapts his awardwinning documentary to show another side of war.
After The Kill Team won Best Documentary Feature at Tribeca in 2013, writer/director Dan Krauss felt there was another way to tell the film’s story. Teaming with beloved indie distributors A24 (Uncut Gems, The Lighthouse), Krauss adapted his documentary – about a 21-year-old soldier in Afghanistan who tried to alert the military to war crimes being committed by his platoon – as a narrative feature.
“I’m very proud of the documentary, but the documentary can’t do what the feature attempts to do, which is to place the audience in a present-tense, firstperson experience, asking the audience to face the same decisions that [Specialist] Adam Winfield makes,” says Krauss.
The film follows Private Andrew Briggman (Nat Wolff), whose platoon becomes enamoured with their new leader, Sergeant Deeks (Alexander Skarsgård). “There’s this aura around him,” explains Krauss. “This magnetic force that Alex brings with him as an actor, but also in the performance. He’s incredibly careful and astute in how he rewards loyalty and punishes disloyalty.”
Briggman slowly learns that Deeks is not the role model the other soldiers see, and fears for his life when he attempts to make their criminal actions public. “This young soldier has these threats that are
coming at him and he is being forced to make decisions that have life and death consequences in the blink of an eye,” Krauss says. “So that was the creative challenge that got me excited.”
Even though the real-life events behind the film happened a decade ago, Krauss believes this type of story will never feel dated. “War crimes are a part of our history as a people that engage in armed conflict. And I think that’s a story that doesn’t have a timestamp, that we can examine at any time in our history, because it’s about who we are as a species and the vulnerability of the human psyche that doesn’t go away and then makes the story endlessly relevant.” AM