Original subtitles

Stand by for doors open.

"Zero dark thirty" is a military term for 30 minutes past midnight.

-Eyes on target. -Stay tight.

That essentially means wait till it's dark enough to where no one can see you

and then come in.

The SEAL Team Six is the name of the special forces unit

that executed the assault on Usama bin Laden's compound

in Abbottabad , Pakistan .

There's so much of that community that is obscure to the general public.

I really looked at it as a tribute to those people on the operation

who work in the shadows.

B marker.

And action !

My interest as a filmmaker was to put the audience on the ground

with those operatives

and then, finally, at the end of the movie, with the assaulters themselves.

And cut.

This movie needed to look and feel very real.

We did hire a number of military experts.

Ex-Navy SEALs, DEVGRU guys and Tier 1 SAS guys

to walk us through so we could see exactly how these guys do it.

-We'll start a run-through . -Right on .

I spent 21 years in the SEAL teams,

and my role is advising on the SEALs' authenticity.

The way they move, the way they hold their guns,

the things they would say, making sure that it looks real .

-Probably the top three guys. . . -Would always be there.

-Yeah . -Yeah . Okay, that's cut.

I spent 1 0 years in the New Zealand military and Special Forces.

I've got the actors, I've got stunt people, and military people,

took them on a pretty extensive exercise to get everybody to be able to work as a team .

Crease there. Good to go.

We're very fortunate, the team of SEALs that we've compiled here,

both in soldiers, stuntmen and actors, congealed very quickly and easily.

Close your eyes.

It was really a matter of trying to create a balance and a degree of authenticity.

The soldiers bring to the team a credibility that also gives the actors

a really credible context within which to work.

We went to this massive military training facility in Jordan .

KASOTC, which is King Abdullah Special Operations Training Center,

this is a place where all the Tier 1 guys go, compete and train.

It's a state-of-the-art facility.

Train to use weapons.

You're looking at the target. Not closing one eye, you're not squinting .

Then train to clear rooms and raid buildings.

Getting together as a group, understanding each other,

working together, looking after our own equipment.

All the gear that we got to use was so amazing .

SEAL Team Six get the best equipment.

We went through a lot of research to make sure

that we were getting all of their equipment as close as we could to what they actually use.

All the weapons we're using in this film are actual firearms,

down to the T, what the SEAL team used.

This is the SIG 226, 9 mm , 1 5 rounds in the magazine, one in the chamber.

It's a double action , has a de-cocker. This is a standard US Navy issue pistol .

This is the H K 41 6 D.

It's a .223 caliber, Magpul 30 round magazine,

it's got a 1 0. 5-inch barrel , it's got a silencer attached to the end .

This here is an infrared laser. The only way you can see the laser is with night vision on .

NVGs, night vision goggles, they can see perfectly.

They do have some pretty high-speed QUAD2 night vision setup,

which has better focusing ability and gives them a lot more peripheral vision.

You got 1 80 degree field of view.

You're lookingjust like it's noon but it's midnight, you know, it's zero dark thirty.

If you don't have these NVGs, you know what you see? You see nothing .

You don 't see me, you don 't see the laser,

you could have three laser dots on your forehead , you wouldn't even know it.

And those were challenging to get our hands on and to replicate.

And a lot of times their equipment is designed specifically for them .

And it's not just that it's not available to the consumer marketplace,

it's not available to anybody else because they're one-offs.

Well, the stealth helicopters we created with an avionics tech adviser.

Thirty seconds to first turn.

Because of the nature of what they were doing ,

they wanted a stealth version of the BLACK HA WK.

We were insisting that the stealth helicopters looked as authentic as possible.

In Hollywood, you can build anything, really.

But the biggest challenge was to figure out what they looked like.

Talk about classified information.

Everybody knows that the stealth helicopters exist

because the SEALs left a chunk of the tail behind.

Arguably, you could extrapolate from the tail section

that was left behind at the compound

what the rest of the helicopter might have looked like.

Using avionics experts, we basically built on to that tail section

what might be the most logical conclusion for the stealth helicopter itself

There's a lot of discussion that goes on about what they should look like

and how they should perform.

We knew we could get the interior authentic, so it was just, really, the exterior.

The infrastructure happens to be the Sikorsky helicopter.

So we created the armature on the outside that was designed to defeat radar.

The people that have seen the helicopter that have also seen the stealths

have told me that we did a pretty good job.

We made two because we had one that went on a gimbal, that was hung from a crane,

and then we had to blow one up.

The one with the gimbal had a lot more metal work in ,

it had to be spec'd to have people inside.

They look the same on the outside, but not the same on the inside.

Transporting them was probably harder than actually building them .

We shipped them in three pieces, in containers, they took forever.

Not a fun thing to get through customs into the Middle East.

BLACK HAWK helicopters, stealths, that no one's ever seen .

And they arrived and we got them to base,

and we got them mounted under a 200-ton crane and that's how we shot it.

I'll never complain about flying coach again

after shooting the scenes we shot in those helicopters.

It's hard enough to get 12 Navy SEALs in a helicopter with all their gear and guns.

But we had 1 2 Navy SEALs plus two cameramen

plus two camera loaders and a cable guy, you know.

And to know that they travel four, five, six hours like this,

shoulder to shoulder, knee to back, just crunched together.

We were sardines for a good week.

Hey, J ustin , what are you listening to?

Tony Robbins.

Tony Robbins, really?

Because of the shape of the walls around the compound...

Too much updraft off these walls !

...the wind was going down,

it was being channeled back up and going back through the rotors

so it basically lost lift.

We've lost power.

Hard landing.

They couldn't leave that helicopter in the hands of the enemy.

Chopper 4-6, we are demoing 5- 1.

They put on these giant magnesium strips that just turned it to dust.

I've never seen so much work go that quickly.

It's been pretty amazing .

Life-size BLACK HAWK helicopters being hoisted from

the biggest cranes in Jordan and stuntmen dangling from them.

Lights, wind , gunshots, amazing spectacle.

-And cut it! -A marker.

It's kind of like playing army except for they're filming it for a movie

that is gonna recount one of the historic war achievements in this century.

-Well done, Patrick. -Thank you .

It's kind of a real privilege to depict one of these guys on screen.

I have such admiration and respect for these guys, these Navy SEALs.

It's important that we take real care

and real concern to tell the truth about what happened .

They don 't do what they do so that we can make movies about it.

They do what they do because it has to be done.

And someone has to step up to do it.

And cut!