Original subtitles

There are two narratives about the location of Usama bin Laden .

The one that you're most familiar with

is that UBL is hiding in a cave in the Tribal Areas.

The second narrative,

living in a city with multiple points of egress and entry.

We've located an individual we believe

is bin Laden 's courier.

He's living in a house in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

And we assess

that one of the other occupants of the house

is UBL.

We came back to Jordan , we had a great experience here on Hurt Locker,

and we were able to build this building,

which is a pretty close facsimile of the real compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Abbottabad would be like Thousand Oaks, California.

It was like one of the richest neighborhoods.

It's in a valley, surrounded by beautiful mountains.

Lots of nice houses with pools, and there happens to be a military base,

there happens to be a compound in the middle of it.

There was a lot of Internet research on the compound .

You basically took the dimensions and then guesstimate,

based on photographs,

and then we could model it up in 3D.

And once we scaled it up,

we just did architectural drawings based on that

and we built the thing in three and half months.

It's a bit surreal to be inside this house

and imagine this man who's perhaps the most wanted man in the entire world

spent the last six years of his life.

I wanted the building to be a practical.

There were no wild walls, there were no free-standing sets,

because I wanted to be able to do contiguous shots

going from the outside to inside to the outside.

So that necessitated a very rigorous shoot in many ways.

And the spaces were very small, the hallways were very narrow,

it was kind of a hot, airless structure, that when you put about 150 people inside

became even hotter and even more claustrophobic.

I think it'll look fine.

We had to replicate a moonless night,

so we had very, very, very limited light sources.

Greig Fraser, our cinematographer, designed this soft light box

that was very, very minimal.

Then when we were using the night vision lenses,

there was almost no light whatsoever.

Okay, that's a cut.

When Kathryn and I first met,

we both agreed that the film was to look absolutely authentic.

It is art directed. There's 110 sets.

You just feel like you're in the moment.

The compound was 380 feet long, some of the walls were 18 feet.

It's just a monster.

We know it so well , as a shape.

It's almost becoming an iconic image,

because you've seen the aerial photographs of it so often

and you immediately know what it is.

Bin Laden is there.

And you're gonna kill him for me.

Kathryn was very clear from the beginning .

She wanted it 100% accurate so she could recreate the raid beat for beat.

It really turned out well .

The toughest thing is that we wanted to shoot it all live

with real BLACK HA WKs flying right down 50 feet over the top of the compound.

So we built it for real with 9-foot caissons underground.

It's a solid structure. It's impenetrable.

We have been very fortunate with the crew we've got.

They're basically architectural builders.

Basically, we built it straight out from cinderblock, plaster, chalking.

And then we had to make it look like it had been around for years.

We brought two painters from London who really killed it.

It was a huge asset because we were able to build an exterior/interior structure

that served all our needs.

There's basically three structures.

There's the prayer room.

There's a guest house, where the courier lived.

And then there's the main house, which is where all of his family lived.

This is Usama bin Laden's compound as we have recreated it.

This is the main corridor in the compound, what the Navy SEALs,

when they executed the mission on May 1 , called the Diego Corridor.

This was the front gate of his compound

which kept all the outsiders in the neighborhood away from him

and enabled his courier to enter the compound

without anybody being able to see inside.

So he had barbed wire, as you can see, up on the walls.

When the Navy SEALs made a hard landing in the courtyard ,

the first door they flow through is this brown door here.

And three or four guys went through these gates into a house they called C1,

which was the nickname they gave for Abu Ahmed's house.

And Abu Ahmed lived in a house right next to the bin Ladens'.

And actually, ironically, the house is much nicer than bin Laden 's,

in that it's an open, spacious living quarters.

This is essentially the northern side of the compound, the northern courtyard,

which is an area that the Navy SEALs came through this door,

they came through a couple of different points,

but at a certain time during the raid they came through this door

and breached this north side door over here.

As you can see, we've already filmed here so this door has been explosively breached

by the SEAL demolition crew.

But when they came at night, it was locked and bolted

and it required an explosive charge in order to get through .

Go, go, go.

So they blew through this door and entered what was, at that time, the kitchen.

The lead team of Navy SEALs came through that blue door there

and came through here, passed by this gazebo-like structure,

which was used by the bin Ladens as a prayer room.

There was nobody in the prayer room and then the SEALs looked in there,

noticed that there was nobody there, and came up to this south door.

The south door, for reasons that nobody still knows to this day, was open on that night.

And so they were able to enter the bin Ladens' house

without actually having to blow open the front door.

Quite a lot of attention to detail here.

The woodwork and the glass paneling and again all the painting

is taken from the open source material that we were able to find .

So here we are in the first floor of the Usama bin Laden house, as we understand .

This room right here is the room that Navy SEALs encountered

one of bin Laden 's couriers.

This gate, that's now been blown off, was actually here.

So the SEALs encountered a big metal gate here

which they weren't able to, or they decided not to breach at the time.

And went back out and came back around the other side.

But any event, at a certain point, they flowed through here.

There was this giant gate here which they had to explosively breach .

Go, go.

This staircase was what separated bin Laden from the other families within the compound .

This is the second floor.

The tiles here that you see are something that the art department reproduced

based on images that were taken by ABC News.

This was bin Laden 's media room.

And there were computers all over the place, there were files,

there were D VDs, videos, thumb drives and so forth.

Really, the entire record of his jihad .

Do not leave a hard drive.

We come to the area, the third floor, which is where bin Laden lived ,

and spent most of his time.

He was actually shot midway down that staircase

when bin Laden was standing in the frame of this doorway right here.

After shooting bin Laden, they searched the room fairly thoroughly for

valuable objects and this is what it looked like after that occurred .

This was bin Laden's access to the outdoors.

It was a balcony that was built off the third floor.

And , significantly, he created these privacy walls around the balcony

that were seven feet high.

High enough so that you could never see

anybody walking on the balcony from the street.

He was quite conscientious in his design of his living quarters.

Even though they were Spartan and small ,

they were effective at keeping prying eyes out.

And cut there, please.

I remember walking through the compound with Kathryn.

I think it was when she finally first saw it done.

The two of us were just. . . It was...

You really. . . It was haunting . You felt like there was a ghost.

When you spend time in the site, in the compound as I have,

you do have this sense that you're in a makeshift prison.

I mean, it's a cave of his own design.

Our first experience seeing the compound was in a raid format.

We were gonna travel all the way there in our Navy SEAL gear,

so we can pull up to this compound, join up in our teams,

and do the raid without ever having seen it.

That's the way Kathryn and Mark wanted us to see the compound for the first time.

It was kind of eerie.

And it was eerie to be in there shooting the night of the first anniversary of his death .

It was so eerie because this thing, inch by inch, down to the patina,

it looks like it was there, it looks like it was lived in,

it looks like it's the place where Usama bin Laden was killed .

Everybody gave 1, 000% of themselves.

I certainly appreciate the talent of these extraordinary people.

Action !