A few weeks ago we wrote about Gunner Palace: Baghdad Musical , a documentary film of American soldiers in Iraq. Today's Guardian has an interesting interview with its creator, Mike Tucker.

For eight weeks, the documentary-maker Mike Tucker lived in Uday Hussein's "obscenely ornate" Baghdad palace with 400 soldiers, filming as they took mobile phone calls from wives and girlfriends in the middle of firefights, searched family homes for weapons caches and rapped out their fears and frustrations to the camera. Tucker shadowed the soldiers of 2/3 Field Artillery, also known as the Gunner Battalion, in September 2003 and February 2004. The documentary he came away with, Gunner Palace, follows soldiers as they go on patrol, come under fire from insurgents and try to relax in the grounds of the sumptuous palace.

Tucker describes the now-overcrowded home of Saddam's older son as "Gone With the Wind meets Dubai". Uday left a pool, a putting green and stocked fishing pond, and the US military added Playstations, a gym and an internet centre. But the filmmaker found that, far from softening the reality of war, the modern communications seemed to make the situation more difficult.