Extraordinary Director Michael Winterbottom took time out from making the film to explain how the idea for The Road to Guantanamo developed and why it’s been made a certain way.
Q. Your films take in an extraordinary variety of subject material. What attracted you to this project?
A. We’d heard about The Tipton Three from the news, and read about them in the papers.
Q. What was the experience like, talking to the three of them about their experiences? Was it traumatic?
A. What was fascinating about the way they described the experience was that two of them were teenagers when they left, and one of them was 21, and none of them were particularly religious before they left or particularly political. And when they described it, it was in a very matter-of-fact way, like someone telling you about their holiday, the holiday from hell.
Q. Was it difficult to persuade the three of them to come on board the project? How did you win their trust?
A. In the first place, we had two or three conversations with them and with their lawyer, and on that basis we got their agreement to start working on the project. And the first thing we did was Mat Whitecross (the film’s co-director) spent about a month with them in a house interviewing them. So at the end of that they knew Mat quite well and we had 650 pages of transcript of interviews. So that was the starting point of the process.
Q. Were there any moments when you questioned their version of events?
A. The events as they describe them, once you get into the main narrative of the film, regarding what happened to them in Afghanistan onwards, all seem to be fairly indisputable. We’re telling their story in their words, and trying to tell their version of what happened to them, just as a lawyer would tell their version of what happened to them. So we weren’t trying to independently check or cross-reference what they were saying. At the same time, I wouldn’t remotely want to suggest that I think what they’re saying is not true; but the point was for us to tell their story.
Q. Why did you decide to mix their interviews in with the drama in the film?
A. We were all told that the people in Guantanamo were the most dangerous terrorists in the world, and that’s why it was necessary for America to create this bizarre extra-legal prison. So we wanted to show the gap between what you thought people would be like in Guantanamo and the reality of meeting them. The simplest and most effective way to tell their story was to have them tell it within the film.
Q. As with Welcome to Sarajevo, you’ve inter-cut the film with news footage. Why did you feel that was an important thing to do?
A. Different reasons, really. Partly as a way of helping the narration, because all of us saw what was happening in Afghanistan through the news, so to remind people what was going on. Partly to contrast between their experience on the ground as three individuals caught up in it compared to us watching it from the outside. On a slightly more specific basis, virtually all the news that we were seeing was from the point of view of the cameras and news crews who were with the Americans or the Northern Alliance, they weren’t in the places where our guys were. So you get a double perspective – them on the ground being bombed as opposed to reporters with the guys doing the bombing. And also using newsreel helped us tell the story as quickly and simply as possible.
Q. Why did you choose cast people who had never acted before?
A. We tried to choose people who were from as similar a background as possible as the three, and obviously two of them were teenagers, so we were bound to end up with people who’d not done much acting before.
Q. There’s something very honest and real, as opposed to staged, about their performances. Was a lot of it improvised?
A. What we tried to do was create the situations for them and let them experience them – so in that sense, it was all improvised. But we had to keep it very close to what we’d been told by the three boys. We tried to deviate from that as little as possible. But also we were trying to not have too much drama about the relations between the characters – we wanted to just tell the simple story of what happened to them.
Q. So there is an element of this being a campaigning film. What would you like its legacy to be?
A. The truth is films don’t have a huge impact in general terms. So in the end, I think you’re more concerned about the impact it has on the individuals, and particularly the three guys whose story it is.
We’re still making the film, so God knows how they’ll feel about it in the end. What happened to them was extraordinary and terrible, and I think it’s good that people hear about it, and it’s good that people see that these are three ordinary guys who were caught up in these events, to contrast the messiness of reality and real people’s lives and of who they are with the simplicity of Bush and Blair’s insistence that they know these people, they’re bad people, that it’s a fight of good against evil, it’s a war against terror.
All these absolutes are so deceptive and so misleading. If you just look at the details of their experience, it makes you realise that things are not like that in the real world.
