“He really shared the darkness and there is a lot of responsibility as a filmmaker in dealing with someone’s deepest traumas,” says Men of War director Jen Gatien of her participant Jordan Goudreau. “I felt a responsibility to protect him.”
Gatien, speaking with POV and co-director Billy Corben at the Toronto International Film Festival, delivers one of the wildest character studies that audiences will see this year. Men of War follows Mississauga native turned American mercenary Jordan Goudreau in the aftermath of a failed coup d’état on the Venezuelan government. Gatien and Corben get astonishing access to a dedicated soldier and, in turn, the covert workings of the American government as Goudreau puts all his cards on the table.
The former soldier is visibly reeling from the betrayal that left several of his colleagues dead or captured, and he unfolds an only-in-the-movies narrative that involves all levels of the White House and an unfortunate Hail Mary tweet to Donald Trump mid coup. But Goudreau instills his story with a sense of duty and honour as he explains how he pursued his dream to fight for America.
Moreover, the responsibility that Gatien notes echoes throughout Goudreau’s compelling story. This tale is an extreme microcosm of the war machine in which men and women are trained to give their all for America, only to be discarded as a matter of convenience. As Goudreau confronts the question of what comes next, Men of War unfolds his thrilling and extremely entertaining web. He and numerous players in the Macuto Bay invasion, alternatively known as Operation Gideon in formal channels or “the Bay of Piglets” by the media in reference to the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba once shit hit in the fan. It’s a zany story with a paper trail to prove it. And yet the twists and turns sometimes seem too preposterous and absurd to believe, but given the state of America in 2020, Men of War offers a case that could (hopefully) only happen with the Trump administration.
The film harnesses the absurdity of the situation, too, telling Goudreau’s series of unfortunate events with deadpan humour in the pacing and the cutting as the story unfolds at breakneck speed. The filmmakers don’t make Goudreau the butt of the joke, either. Rather, he’s part of it as he hands them contracts and correspondence connecting all the dots in an illegal state-sanctioned invasion and an effort to put a puppet president in office. It’s an extraordinary feat of embedded journalism and political exposé, with a final punch that adds unexpected gravity to the story given Goudreau’s arrest for weapons charges shortly before the film’s TIFF premiere.
POV spoke with Gatien and Corben prior to Men of War‘s world premiere at TIFF.
POV: Pat Mullen
JG: Jen Gatien
BG: Billy Corben
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
POV: Jen, you had been following Jordan for quite a few years. How did you first track him down and what was your interest in pursuing him?
JG: It was right at the height of COVID. Sometimes I work in scripted and sometimes in documentary, but scripted was obviously on pause, so I was looking to see if there was a story I could pick up and start shooting. I read a Sunday Times and New York Post story, and I was immediately drawn to this story about this coup and this guy who had gone rogue. There was something about it that didn’t ring true to me in that someone could single handedly lead a coup into Venezuela without government backing or private backing. But it felt like this guy had done it independent of anyone, and that’s certainly how it was being reported.
I quite easily found him. Honestly, it was a Google search and I found his phone number. I texted him and when I saw that the text was blue [meaning that it had been delivered]. I got an immediate response to my inquiry and that’s how it all started.
POV: What was Jordan’s interest in participating in this film? If he’s on the run, being covert and making a film might be tough, no?
JG: When I met him, he was not on the run. In fact, the failed mission had just happened and news outlets were reporting it in a certain way. It was almost like he was a deer in the headlights. He had gone from anonymous veteran to suddenly being on a world stage. For him, the most important part of participating was the idea that he could tell his story and have it come from his mouth as opposed to people contextualizing or expressing what they thought of him.
POV: How did the partnership between you two come about?
BC: Jen called us. Lots of blue text bubbles. Jen read between the lines of those stories and her instincts were spot on that there was more than meets the eye here. By the way, even if you told the story as it was first reported, it’s still a very fascinating story. But the idea that there were layers to peel away here and the profound Florida connection is why she thought of us. Our genre at Rakontur [Corben’s production company] is Florida fuckery. That’s what we do. This was a classic case of that, and we love these butterfly effect stories where a Florida man misbehaves or acts out and then there’s suddenly international implications. We were very excited about the prospect, but then Jordan left for Mexico for a year, and we didn’t hear any more about it until a year later, which is when we picked it up and started to interview Jordan. Beyond the Bay of Piglets element of the story that struck us as a pop doc, this is about a Venezuelan coup originally hatched in a WeWork in downtown Miami. Jordan was a very complicated and compelling figure, and the idea that this could evolve into a character study was really exciting.
POV: He’s such an interesting character, but to what extent is he a reliable narrator? I was always second guessing some of his testimony, but I don’t know why. How do you fact check a film like this?
JG: There’s something wild about Jordan for me. Often he speaks and you don’t know whether to believe it or not. Then he produces the receipts. It seems so outrageous and impossible, and then you see the text messages or the contract that’s signed and it checks out. A large part of the time making this film was spent checking out his story.
BC: And with different lawyers. Honestly, nowadays with nonfiction, these things are pretty heavily vetted. But part of what makes this so fascinating is the absurdity of the story and that if not for the receipts, you would not believe a word of this. There’s also this really charismatic element that might at times feel performative part of him. He’s a real character in terms of expressing his ethos, as he puts it, expressing his priorities. While he may seem like an unreliable narrator, he believes what he’s saying most, if not all of the time, by my estimation.
POV: Hearing what you’re saying, my reaction probably says more about me being hardwired not to believe anyone I perceive as right wing.
BC: No, no. I believe that that’s very much in his personality and very much in the documentary: “Is he or isn’t he telling the truth?” I think that’s inherent to him and to the story, and I think that’s what motivates him. He keeps getting nudged. First he’s brought into this by Keith Schiller, the right hand man to the President. Then he turns on TV and everyone in the Trump administration from the Secretary of State to the Vice President to the President is talking about a policy of regime change and overthrowing the Maduro regime. Then he’s in touch with Drew Horn, who works in the Vice President’s Office, and then he’s in touch with this Guaidó government that was acknowledged by the United States and dozens of other countries as the “legitimate” government of Venezuela. Suddenly, he signed a contract with them worth a minimum of $1.5 million and, on the high end, $300 million.
POV: When there are so many players involved and governments, and you have the paper trail, to what extent were you in Laura Poitras mode à la Citizenfour? How were you able to keep everything secure?
BC: We took every precaution we would ordinarily take. The workflow was crazy. At least a dozen times we interviewed Jordan. There was also terabytes of material that he turned over to Jen, which you see in the film. We were not in Colombia at the training camp. That was all material that he brought to Jen. With most docs, by any means necessary, you’re juggling an abundance of material through multiple countries, multiple editors in multiple cities. It was a lot, but nothing for an enterprising hacker to have found their way into if they were so inclined to infiltrate our system. But I think to an extent, it showed that Jordan felt that he had nothing to hide.
Part of us was going, “Why is he participating in this?” There was the red notice from Interpol from Venezuela. There was talk of a grand jury in Florida that we couldn’t confirm that was investigated. There are news reports in the doc contemporaneously saying that he’s under investigation, at the very least, in Colombia for arms trafficking, etc., but he was very eager to be out there up front and centre and tell his own story.
POV: As things were escalating and those alerts were coming out, how did that affect the process of meeting with Jordan? Did you have to go off the grid?
JG: By the time we’re shooting with him, he had opened up to the idea being out in the open in the United States. We were shooting with a crew of 12 people following him.
When the FBI raid happened, it definitely spooked him to the core. I truly believe that he felt that he was in danger of being killed, and that precipitated him leaving for Mexico not really knowing what was happening. I don’t think it is a matter of him not having permission from the government or not. I think he felt incredibly vulnerable. He said, as a veteran, “They never point guns at people unless they’re going to kill you.” That’s the mentality. So when he sees people with AK-47s outside of his window, his mind is trained that you don’t point those things unless you’re going to use them. I think the raid was the catalyst for him leaving the country and asking, “Where am I safe? I have the Colombians after me, the Venezuelans after me, and my own country’s after me.” I think once the dust had settled, he was ready to not be silent anymore about what had really happened.
BC: The year in Mexico perhaps was a continuation of the operation. He was still on mission and had to decompress or recalculate where he is. That’s abundantly clear in the footage that he self-shot in Mexico where he’s on the phone, isolated in this small apartment and trying to process all of this. By the time we were filming with him, he was back. He was checking into hotels or camping under his own name. He wasn’t off the grid at that point anymore.
POV: In those shots where he’s by a campfire and you can see his motorbike, I had just assumed you guys were having clandestine meetings out in the middle of the forest.
JG: We were embracing his lifestyle choice. When he left the army in 2016, he was living a nomadic life, which was a testament to his ability to be such a good soldier. He never rooted and it was in large part so he could be deployed without a second thought.
POV: How did you balance the humorous tone? This is something you’ve done in films like Screwball, Billy.
BC: These are the checks and balances that Jen and I placed on each other. It stood out to us immediately as something we’d be drawn to because it’s a Florida fuckery tale, but what I love about it, and this is very much Jen’s priority and rightfully so, is its arc. It starts off as this misadventure of the Bay of Piglets and then evolves into a nuanced character study about this complicated guy who by all accounts, is a decorated military hero who—epilogue alert—has been branded an enemy by the country that he dedicated his life to fighting for, and watched his friends die for.
I’m very proud that Jen continued to direct the arc of the story into a direction of this is ultimately about not just Jordan, but what happens when governments are done playing with their Captain Americas and GI Joes and GI Janes. They throw them like kids do when they’re done playing. They neglect them, like Toy Story, but with real soldiers.
It’s a call to action in that way that it doesn’t have to be this way. 22 veterans don’t have to commit suicide in the United States every single day. Sometimes, the best case scenario might be that if they don’t assimilate, they go and try to overthrow a foreign government. But what are we doing to direct that energy with the investment that we as taxpayers make in these men and women? That a question we were asking Jordan throughout the process.
POV: Jen, you’re coming to this as Canadian, and it’s such an interesting view of American politics and the military system. How do you feel about that and what Billy was saying?
JG: That’s where I actually felt an immediate interest in Jordan: knowing his blue collar Canadian background and myself sharing that. Our exposure to machine weapons and military and this “rah rah, we’re number one in the world” – that doesn’t exist in Canada. To me, it’s a testament to the conditioning of the army and that they break down a person’s individuality. They are designed to take orders without questions, so for Jordan, I can see the effects of war on him—truthfully, the trauma. By sharing his trauma with us, we got a deeper portrait of veterans. I learned a lot about the veteran community making this film and certainly the Special Forces community, which makes up 1% of the army. We’re talking the upper ranks, and when you are no longer in a place of being able to do what you do best and you are the best at what you do, especially for a man, I wanted to understand that journey for him.
BC: For all the experimental chronology of the storytelling in the doc, we really shot it in that order. Every step of the way, we ask him questions about the wisdom or the logic or the strategy behind his decision making. There were good answers and sometimes, in my opinion, I still don’t understand maybe why he did that. Finally, when we got to Fort Bragg and even beyond Fort Bragg, when he becomes more pensive and becomes more self-reflective and emotional, that didn’t happen at the beginning. That happened at the end the interviews. With some of our tougher questions, he was forced to figure it out.
POV: Did you see the arrest coming?
JG: I didn’t see it coming, personally. I don’t think Jordan’s a criminal, so I have a hard time with what’s going on, but I don’t think there was criminal intent. He’s got the ultimate fight of his life. Whatever battle he had in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, is going to pale in comparison to what is up ahead for him.
POV: How does it affect a film when you have legal developments?
JG: We’re about to find out. I mean, we are about to quite literally find out.
BC: But it’s not done yet. I think this is now a work in progress screening due to breaking news and what are now weekly developments in the story that we’re telling. Does this become chapter one of the prologue to an ongoing story? Do we have to continue to work on this edit? That decision’s being made in real time as we sit here.
POV: But going back to this film having all the receipts, to what extent can things in this film be used against Jordan, and how do you deal with that?
JG: To Jordan’s credit, he holds firm on his story. I don’t know that he’s ever wavered on his position.
BC: I think that we did our job here as journalists. Jen entrusted us many years ago making a documentary called Limelight about her father, which is quite a display of faith and trust. She did not have final cuts [in that case], and she put the whole damn thing together: She put the financing together, she put the people together that we had to interview. We had to show up and do this job. I remember telling her at the time, “This is not going to be Memoirs of a Geisha or a sort of EPK. We’re not his crisis management team or image rehabilitation squad or anything. We’re just going to tell this story.”
We did it pretty well in the end and I think we did that here. I think it is a strong piece of journalism and evolving as it turns out, as a piece of journalism. There will probably be things here that the government will flag for their case, and there’ll be just as many things that the defense would flag for their case. The definition of a compromise is when both sides are unhappy, so I think that piece is imminently fair, and I think it’s both legally and journalistically sound.
