^{Photo: Frank van den Eeden}

Full Contact explores the psychological torment suffered by an UAV drone pilot. He has been sitting in an air force base in the Nevada desert, taking out targets on the Afghan/Pakistani border. Thematically, the project has overlaps with Verbeek’s 2010 feature R U There, about a gamer existing more and more in a “virtual” world and struggling to make sense of reality.

Verbeek began developing Full Contact way back in 2010. As part of the research, he “reached out” to real drone pilots. Eventually, he made contact with Brandon Bryant, a drone pilot turned whistleblower who spoke out to the media about drone warfare. They met at IDFA (International Documentary Festival Amsterdam) 2014 and struck up an immediate rapport. “At that stage, we were already in post-production,” Verbeek recalls. “It was a surreal experience. He (Bryant) saw the film on the editing table and he actually noticed that there were so many similarities to his own life that I couldn’t have known and that weren’t in the articles about him. Somehow, I just got it right.”

In Full Contact, the pilot takes up cage fighting. “We go from the most distant engagement with an opponent possible, through satellite links and on screens, killing without being touched, to the most extreme engagement, just with your bare hands.” It turned out that Bryant had also tried cage fighting in his desire to experience warrior combat.

Another overlap was that both the fictional and real-life pilots worked in mundane jobs as baggage handlers after leaving the airforce. The fictional pilot dated a stripper – as did Bryant. All these coincidences convinced Verbeek he had managed to get under the skin of his character. With Bryant involved, Verbeek was able to ensure Full Contact had a documentary-like accuracy. “We managed to get very close to reality,” Verbeek says. “For me, that was the biggest compliment – that he thought the film was so authentic and that he was a bit freaked out that I knew so much about what he went through.”

The project proved hard to finance, an unconventional script with an impressionistic feel. He was determined that Grégoire Colin, star of Claire Denis’ Beau Travail, should play the lead. (“I was looking for a character who had the right sense of mystery to embody this role.”) Potential backers were wary about a film that didn’t stick to traditional genre rules or feature big-name cast.

The Film Fund was aboard from the start. Eventually, Lemming Film secured extra financing from Croatia, where Verbeek ended up shooting the entire film. “Croatia has a very diverse landscape. They have very remote, rocky islands in the middle of nowhere, they have cities that look like they could be in western Europe and they have some scenery that looks like desert.”

Verbeek had hoped that Full Contact would be the first feature film dealing directly with drone warfare. In the event, other drone-themed films, among them Good Kill starring Ethan Hawke, were completed before Verbeek was able to shoot his film. The writer-director, though, is delighted that he was able eventually to make “exactly the film I wanted, without any compromise… The other drone scripts all basically end with the drone pilot quitting the job with a guilt trip about what he has done.”

In Full Contact, by contrast, that is only the starting point. Verbeek isn’t making the movie as a polemic. Its real subject is the “journey the mind undertakes to process a guilt trauma…that is a psychological level the other films don’t have.”

^{David Verbeek. Photo: Bojan Mredjenovic}

Script: David Verbeek Production: Lemming Film (NL) Co-production: Nukleus Film (HR) Sales: BAC Films