When Michael Ware got back from Iraq, he dumped all the handycam footage he'd shot there in a tupperware container at his mother's house.
When the former correspondent for Time and Newsweek finally brought himself to dredge them out, he realised he had a film on his hands.
"I was sitting there with a friend of mine who's an editor, and she helped me realise that there was a story buried in that archive", Ware said. "That led to us to ingest those tapes, which I'm extraordinarily thankful for because the first of them were just starting to deteriorate".
Ware first approached Screen Queensland with the idea of fashioning his footage into a feature.
"I sat down with a three-person panel, very clumsily talking about a project I didn't yet have a handle on, about financing I didn't yet understand, and about logistics still beyond me. One of the three people on that panel was an Irishman called Paddy McDonald, and soon after that he left Screen Queensland, and the first project he wanted to do was Only the Dead. It was Paddy's industry savvy that ushered the film into existence back in 2011".
Screen Australia and Screen Queensland were on board, as well as Foxtel.
"Foxtel came on board before we even entered the edit suite", said Ware. "They invested as much as Screen Queensland. Then we raised gap-finance and a few other kooky bits and pieces to get us over the line".
"It was a long, torturous process. Settling upon the narrative took me years. Paddy and anybody else who popped in to help – including David Michôd, who flew up from Sydney to sit and watch tapes for two days – all told me that we needed a personal narrative to drive the story. That's something I struggled with, because as a journalist the story is never about you. It took a long time for me to come round to the idea of a story that would be built around my journey, with my narration".
"What really helped with that was that by accident I picked up a dog-eared copy of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which I hadn't read since high school in the 80's. Reading that again helped me settle upon the idea of one man's journey in the pursuit of something far darker than himself".
Ware was joined in the cutting room by editor Jane Moran, who came on board off the back of James Cameron's underwater documentary Deepsea Challenge 3D.
"Whoever was in that edit suite had to live day by day in the full horror of the Iraq war", Ware said.
"It wasn't an easy process for anyone involved. Once we raised the finance and were given the space at Cutting Edge in Brisbane and had two edit suites running simultaneously, Jane started driving the process and sharpening the narrative".
Moran was joined in the cut and thrust by the film's the co-writer and co-producer, an American named Justine Rosenthal.
"Justine comes from a foreign policy background working for the government in the US, and later ended up running Newsweek, which is where I met her", Ware said.
"Jane and Justine were there all day every day for eight months, even when we brought on board the American co-director, Bill Guttentag. In terms of having an experienced hand on the tiller to help guide me, and help raise the finance and give our backers the surety that this project would see itself through, we needed someone like Bill".
"I was also mindful of the fact that this is an international story, but it comes from the midst of a very politically charged American war".
The challenge was making Ware's footage palatable enough for an audience to endure without distorting it beyond recognition.
"There is hour after hour after hour of material that was left on the cutting room floor. There's only so much you can subject an audience to. But at the same time we weren't making a film we wanted people to watch, we were making a film we wanted people to experience. We had the rare privilege of being able to transport people in to the midst of this experience. We don't let the audience out of the war, we never give them a moment to breathe – because that's what it's like over there".
Transmission released the film last year after it premiered at SFF, and FanForce is spearheading a cinema-on-demand campaign.
Ware is now working on both factual and scripted, and based in Brisbane but spending more time in LA. HBO has bought US rights to Only the Dead, and intends to air it during the election year.
"For five years, I was on the American people's TV screens every single night, representing the face of the Iraq War", said Ware, who was with CNN from 2006 to 2009.
"There's still lots of stories about Iraq yet to be told. Think back to Vietnam. The last chopper left the embassy roof in '75, and then America, culturally, took a breath. It didn't exhale until 1979, when we started to see films like Coming Home, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter".
"To a limited extent with The Hurt Locker and more significantly with American Sniper, the conversation in Hollywood has now begun. Whatever its flaws, The Hurt Locker was the first to punch through. And then American Sniper, which you can argue is a very one-dimensional story, but it really stormed through the beach-head that The Hurt Locker had established".