When you make a movie, a dramatization based on the real experience of a living subject, you cant airbrush that away into to a perfect movie arc.
There's a lot of personal stuff that can go into songwriting but there's also a lot of dramatization and fictionalization. You have to do that to make a good song.
Documentaries are the first line of education, and the second line of education is dramatization, such as 'The Pacific'.
I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.