‘It never goes away’: survivors have their say in 2017 Vegas shooting series

The most subtly horrifying aspect of the frequency with which mass shootings occur in America is how they all start to blend together for those not directly involved. This year has already witnessed enough acts of public violence to fill a sprawling list on its own Wikipedia page, leaving the average human brain with no choice but to inure itself for the sake of self-preservation. People outside the sphere of an incident forge onward because if they didn’t, contending with the unthinkable mounting of grief would be all they would ever do. Ask someone off the street to name the single deadliest shooting in national history, and chances are that they’ll realize the events of 1 October 2017 have already receded into the homogenized soup of memory.

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The creators of 11 Minutes, a new documentary miniseries streaming on Paramount Plus, want to break one harrowing day out of the numbing stream of bad news. “If you’re touched, if one of your loved ones is affected by this, it never goes away,” director Jeff Zimbalist tells the Guardian. “But the news moves on, people go to the next headline. So, how do you continue to engage people? You tell it through the archive, through the journeys of people with unexpected stories. The biggest balancing act was how you get this to be so visceral that audience members fortunate enough not to have experienced a mass casualty incident still understand it in an authentic and deep way, and how you do that without re-traumatizing anyone.”

In second-by-second detail reconstructed through a mosaic of footage from cellphones, police officers’ body cameras, and CCTV setups, the four-part series recounts a night of surreal terror and inspiring heroism. The Route 91 Harvest Festival had convened 22,000 country music fans on the Las Vegas Strip, a valley flanked by luxury hotels, one of which provided a perch to a lone gunman armed with an arsenal of 24 firearms. Loosing a hail of more than 1,000 bullets, he took the lives of 60 attendees, injured over 400 others, and left hundreds more wounded in the ensuing stampede for safe cover. By the time the authorities reached his room, he had made himself his final casualty. Though it might seem that the night ended with a bleak lack of resolution, 11 Minutes counters that that depends on where one chooses to stop telling the story.

“I was never completely satisfied with the story that was being shared in the media, to be totally honest,” says Ashley Hoff, a survivor and executive producer on the project, putting her years of nonfiction experience to more personal use than ever. “I felt like the only narrative that had been fully explored was that of the worst person there, and everything made it out of the headlines pretty quickly. I thought, ‘Gosh, I could be really upset about this, or maybe this is the reason I was standing in the field that night. Because I’m a storyteller.’”

She and her fellow survivors saw the production as a way of reframing tragedy as triumph, focusing on the individual acts of valor in the midst of chaos. The series deliberately omits the name of the shooter in an effort to deprive him of the notoriety those in his position often crave, instead familiarizing us with a handful of ordinary citizens who rose to an extraordinary call for help. Strangers laid their lives on the line to defend perfect strangers, and as they all returned to their respective home towns with a trauma no one around them shared, they formed a community of solidarity and support. “This is the best of us,” executive producer Susan Zirinsky says with a tear. “And the best of us can conquer evil. We may not be able to stop these lone-wolf attacks, but what we can see are people breaking through what are unbelievable barriers, psychologically.”

Deferring the record of this shattering event to the voices of those who lived through it proved essential to Zimbalist as he threaded a delicate needle. “You’re asking yourself what’s enough to get people to see this, and what’s too much,” he says. “Our rule was to get feedback from the survivors. They dictate the parameters, and we make revisions accordingly.” Thirty-plus interviews gave him guidance in a sort of empathetic editing process. The most minor stylistic choices, from music to the time between cuts, meant the difference between a profile in resilience and a potential trigger. “In earlier edits, you really did feel the claustrophobia and helplessness, but it was too much,” he adds. “The feedback was that we didn’t need that much to get it, and it was not productive for them to watch this. We dialed back and adjusted.”

One such sounding board was radio DJ Storme Warren, a survivor at Route 91 Harvest and one of the principal interview subjects for 11 Minutes. He opens the first episode waxing rhapsodical about the high stakes of writing the account on such a gravely serious topic, but he never wanted that responsibility for himself. “When I was first contacted, my immediate reaction was hesitation, caution, red alert,” Warren says. “But what was going to be a short chat turned into two and a half hours of emotional conversation. I was made aware of her care, and the assurances of the producers behind the documentary. There’s expertise behind this, and I felt comfortable that they’d take care of this story.” He provides some illuminating color on one of the other dimensions unique to this shooting in specific: the communal positivity of country music, a genre founded on the need for solace from hardship. “Country music is a family, created by artists years ago,” he says. “Concerts happen at family farms, in fields. It brings people together at the end of a long week … Love of the music, love of the people making it – that brings people together.”

Zirinsky clarifies that she doesn’t consider 11 Minutes to be an advocacy film, well aware that she and her cohort don’t have the political heft to reverse the ban on civil suits against gun manufacturers. All the same, the producers hope that all viewers – those acquainted with the brutal reality, and those striving to conceive of it beyond the hot-button concept – come away with a fresh appreciation for the swell of courage that invariably follows an attempt to sow fear. For the survivors, gaining this new perspective offers a measure of re-empowerment, with painful memories held in over the years now dissected and demystified. With the smoke cleared and dust settled, only the footnotes of valor are left standing, clearing a way for the convalescing to begin.

“They made it easy to open up the vault,” Warren says. “I found details that I’d stuffed away for a long time. As painful as it was, and as hard as it was to recall these visions and sounds, it was still so important and cathartic for me at the same time. Most of us have had one form of therapy or another, and through that healing, you learn that these stories can only stay down for so long. This was the release of five years of pressure.”

• 11 Minutes is available on Paramount+ on 27 September with a UK and Australia date to be announced