 I know where I came from. I come from God. I didn't come from monkey. I came from God through Adam through a long lineage of man Did Jesus look like the Son of God? No one thought so except a few people in his days David Koresh was a spiritual leader who saw himself as the final prophet in a world that was coming to an end Though Koresh and his followers were largely peaceful They were amassing weapons as a way to defend themselves when the apocalypse came Numbering about 100 the branch Davidians lived a quiet existence in a compound known as Mount Carmel located just outside of Waco, Texas Then in 1993 the federal government obtained a warrant to raid their headquarters on the grounds that they possessed illegal weapons So Texas we have been watching as they have sent vehicles in to ram holes When they showed up on February 28th of that year federal agents with the bureau of alcohol tobacco firearms and explosives Thought they would be in and out The main problem we had I don't believe is that we were out maneuvered or out planned the problem we had is that we were out gun But the branch Davidians resisted 50 ATF agents that come here armed with search and arrest warrants They were greeted with lots of gunfire Four ATF agents and six branch Davidians were killed during the initial raid and after a 51 day standoff The siege ended with the burning of Mount Carmel 76 branch Davidians including 25 children perished after being trapped inside Waco was the largest gunfight on American soil since the civil war and many people point to it as a pivotal moment in American history That created new levels of distrust in the federal government They were amassing enough armaments to outfit a small army The ultimate goal was to arrest David Koresh and to seize all of the illegal weapons Almost every preconceived notion I had about Waco changed by the end of it Tiller Russell is the director of Waco American Apocalypse a new docuseries on Netflix Which brings to light never before seen footage of the government's siege of Mount Carmel It's easy to look at this story and sort of say, okay Here's the you know jackbooted thugs of the government coming in and taking away people's right or you can You know, read it contrarially from it from a radically different perspective But what I felt hadn't been done was just taking all of these individuals who lived through this incredible moment of American history and treating them like people and just Allowing the audience to engage with them as human beings and to draw their own conclusions from it What captivated me and hooked me was My producers had unearthed this amazing archival footage Which had been shot inside the FBI's hostage negotiation room and it really showed the day to day Kind of like mechanics of hostage negotiation, which I don't think the world has ever actually seen The FBI had shot it initially thinking we're gonna, you know, blow into town. This will be over in 24 hours We'll get everybody out and then it became this, you know epic Um, you know epic story that ended up stretching on for 51 days And so the footage was shelved and nobody hit the world had never seen it There's also all of the recordings that the FBI made of the individual calls They'd planted bugs inside the compound. There were recordings of that You described the series as like an exploration of what leads people to the brink of the apocalypse and what happens when they've arrived Could you kind of expand on that? What did you mean by that? In this like small town on the outskirts of Waco, Texas You have this vast and diverse array of people who show up and They feel that they're in the hands of a latter-day prophet somebody who is able to take every single book in the bible and See this sort of master vision for the end of the world in a future new world And he's so convincing and so charismatic as a speaker that he's enabled to kind of enrapture and capture the imaginations and attention of all these people and it's a very diverse group of folks right some of the folks who are there They literally grew up there their entire lives had been spent there and some from had come from halfway around the world from australia Some had master's degrees some had come from different religions and so you have this like fantastically powerful orator who's painting this vision of the end of the world That vision is so strong that it literally engulfs You know the press it engulfs the fbi and it ends up being manifested in the end You know years before there was a shootout before there was a standoff You know david koresh had been preaching the end of the world is coming You know tanks are going to roll up on our doorstep We're literally going to be facing the apocalypse and we are the chosen ones that'll you know lead on to the new life And it was such a powerful vision that he conjured that it that he literally manifested that in the world You're talking about you know abram's tanks and and bradley armored personnel carrier Arrayed around this compound in a cow field in texas. It was just a kind of Truly astonishing historical moment How did you kind of wrestle with like there are so many facts from this 51 day siege that are still being disputed like who shot first who started the fire What happened to the door? Do you think knowing the truth even now still matters? I think that the truth always matters, but there's this There's this poet simon orteez who once said there is no truth. There is only story And I think that there's something really powerful about that in the sense of Everyone does conjure their own You know version of what happens and no two people's memories ever aligns exactly There are these fundamental questions. Okay. Who shot first and how did this you know gunfight break out? And you interview people and immediately, you know, they give you completely opposing versions of it and And I think there is this sort of symptom of the fog of war, right? And then the same set of questions exists, you know at the end of the story vis-a-vis Okay, here's this massive fire and conflagration and loss of life and all these You know people and children and it's all happening in real time on national television and Every person only holds a piece of the story They only know what they saw what they remember what their history tells them and then it kind of gets cemented in memory But at the same time I didn't live it. I wasn't there. It's all based on Reconstructing it to the best of my ability with the full cooperation and participation of the people there David Tibido is one of the nine branched evidians who survived after escaping the fire at mount caramel reason interviewed Tibido back in 1999 at the time of the interview He believed that koresh had been unfairly demonized by the media What role did the media play? In waco and do you do you agree or disagree that um koresh might have been demonized somewhat by the media? Well, the media played an absolutely fascinating role in waco and and and I think like at the center of waco is this massive failure of communication It's the failure of the fbi to communicate internally within itself. It's the failure of You know the fbi to understand what the branched evidians want and what would motivate them It's the inability of the branched evidians themselves to communicate with the outside world And so the press ends up being you know caught between You know the folks inside the compound the fbi and the rest of the world understanding the story koresh showed himself Pretty quickly they immediately Wanted media everybody wants to find an angle and put a simple You know lens and define him as this and I think my assessment is that he was many things and And and and I think when you try to reduce it to just one thing I think that he did in fact probably feel himself to be a prophet I think he also was having sex with underage kids and I think he was a powerful orator and speaker and I think he also was You know somebody who was lying and changing his mind and manipulating Everybody's just trying to build their own portrait of who this guy is and and how he brought us to the doorstep of the apocalypse If your business is to go into a building at four o'clock in the morning And kill the bad guys and save the good guys and risk your life in doing it That's a different mindset than somebody who's going to sit in a room And try to talk A bad guy out In the year since we go we have discovered many missteps taken by both the negotiation team and the hostage rescue team and kind of Miscommunications that were going on between them. Can you describe the dynamics at play and why these two groups? You know had such a hard time Kind of working together to resolve the situation We tend to think of the fbi as this monolithic entity, right? Which is you know And this is a sort of great institution But really at the end of the day the fbi is composed of individuals individual fbi agents And in this case there was this very profound conflict between the hostage rescue team Which is the door kickers the shooters the snipers and then on the other hand, you know The negotiators the crisis negotiation unit and their sort of jobs are the same the job is You know in a crisis where you have hostages to get everybody out as safely as possible But they're two radically radically different approaches Waco like it's hard for us to remember but nothing like this had ever happened before So everybody was into this completely new scenario in terms of scale intensity and duration And of course there were failures and mistakes that were made many of the things that are roiling our culture still today The the seeds of which were were kind of planted at Waco, which is like distrust to the federal government Um conflicting viewpoints about you know, does god belong in in our society and not to the right to bear arms And and so there are all these fundamental issues which are you know god and guns and children in america They've been with us since the founding of this country. They'll be with us, you know through the end But Waco was a particularly volatile and explosive example of when things go horribly wrong You know what that powder keg can be like the bombing of the murra building in oklahoma city two years later by timothy mcvey Is a direct, you know one to one Result of what happened in Waco. There's you know, what happened the school shooting in columbine You know people subsequently being inspired by mcvey and david koresh and the you know, arguable missteps of the government And you know, some people will draw a line all the way to to january 6th Then in terms of you know, the the distrust of of government and sort of what you do when institutions fail And what are the rights and boundaries of citizens? And so I think the legacy of Waco is That we are now in this in sort of most incredibly politically divisive moment that certainly since the 1960s in america and maybe not since the founding of the country and By looking at these stories where things went horribly wrong My hope is a storyteller and as a filmmaker is we can revisit them and understand them with a greater amount of humanity So that those same mistakes don't reoccur on the future