We don’t celebrate our wins enough anymore, so here goes: Usama bin Laden’s dead. High fives, everyone.

Now that that’s out of the way, I thought Zero Dark Thirty was one of the profoundly great films of 2012, giving it “all the stars” in my review. Naturally the film takes some liberties, it’s the nature of the biz. But it’s a rare thing when the guy who lived it goes on record with with both the accuracies and inaccuracies of a historic moment’s recreation.

That’s exactly what happened when Esquire sat down with “The Shooter,” bin Landen’s killer, to discuss Kathryn Bigelow’s film. I suggest reading the entire piece as it covers more than just bin Laden and the film, going in-depth with the rigors of our servicemen and women’s personal lives as well as their motivations and anxieties. Since this is primarily a movie site, here are some of the more interesting nuggets pertaining to the film:

• It was a Belgian Malinois and not a German Shepherd that accompanied the team on the mission.
• The helos turned the wrong way.
• The SEALs in the film sport ugly tattoos.
• They actors talked too much during the mission where simple hand signals would have sufficed.

That’s pretty damn accurate, all things considered. In truth, ZDT’s accuracy is something of a non-story, as no Holloywood film puts the truth before entertainment. Even so, Bigelow’s always been adamant that she and screenwriter Mark Boal did their homework. The film actually started out as a story about the futility of the unsuccessful hunt for bin Laden. This was before Shooter and his team killed the terrorist dead. All of the years of work and research that Bigelow and company invested into their earlier film was then carried into Thirty, culminating in an immensely powerful film.

Source: Esquire via Slashfilm