Director Raoul Peck. Photo: Matthew Avignone
Raoul Peck did not consider himself an expert on George Orwell until fellow documentary-maker Alex Gibney approached him with the opportunity to make a film approved by the Orwell estate, with full access to its vast archive. Working on Orwell: 2+2=5 transformed Peck's sense of who Orwell was and how his work continues to illuminate our understanding of power and oppression 76 years after his death.
He presents Orwell as an endlessly curious international figure – born (as Eric Blair) in India, a colonial policeman in Burma, an anti-fascist volunteer in Spain – who spent the last year or so of his life confined to hospital beds with tuberculosis while finishing his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell’s piercing words, read by Damian Lewis, are illustrated by a startling array of images culled from movies, news reports, documentaries, cameraphone footage and even AI, spanning numerous countries over more than a century.
Peck identifies with the ambition Orwell expressed in his 1946 essay Why I Write: “What I have most wanted to do … is to make political writing into an art." He is also an internationalist: born in Haiti in 1953, he was educated in Kinshasa, New York, Orléans and Berlin. He worked as a journalist, photographer and taxi driver while making his first short films in the early 1980s. He has since directed seven feature films, including biopics of Karl Marx and the Congolese politician Patrice Lumumba, and 10 documentaries. I Am Not Your Negro, his innovative 2016 study of his personal hero, James Baldwin, won a César and was nominated for an Oscar, while his 2021 HBO series about colonial genocide, Exterminate All the Brutes, earned him a Peabody. Between 1996 and 1997 he was Haiti’s minister of culture.
I made my own investigation of Orwell’s life and legacy in my 2019 book The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, so I spoke to Peck for an onstage Q&A after a screening of his film at the Curzon cinema in Bloomsbury earlier this week. This is an edited version of that conversation.
How has the experience of making this film changed the way that you see Orwell and understand his work?
First of all, the idea that I had about Orwell was what most people who went to school know. He's a dystopian author, borderline science-fiction writer. He writes about the future world. For me, when I was younger and active in politics, he was not somebody I would go to as a priority, because I had many other authors that I thought were closer to me – closer to what I was doing or fighting. It wasn't until much later, and also starting to work on this film, when I discovered a totally different Orwell, a more humanistic Orwell, an Orwell that has really travelled, that knew my world. Somebody that has been misused by Cold War propaganda in the 40s, the 50s, and even after. He was never just talking about the Soviet Union or communism or Stalinism. People forgot that he was a socialist and always thought of himself as one. And the bottom line is that he died too early, so he was not there any more to do the spinning of his books.
I could tell that you felt very close to James Baldwin in your 2016 documentary, I Am Not Your Negro. There is also an actor reading some of Baldwin's writing [Samuel L Jackson]. But you've got so much video and audio of Baldwin in action. You presumably knew going in, unless you were very lucky and found some buried tape, that we have no audio of Orwell and we have no video. We've got photos and that's it. How did that shape your approach?
Well, it had already worked with Baldwin, despite the fact that, yes, we had very strong footage of him. But everybody did not mind hearing Sam Jackson being Baldwin.
No one minds hearing Sam Jackson!
So I knew that it's just a cinema convention. People accept that convention as long as you're telling a story with a character. And what I asked Damian Lewis, in fact, is to be Orwell. His voice is very close to the mic and he's giving a performance. He's not a narrator. He's not Attenborough, [giving] a fairly neutral rendering of a text. It’s immediately a very personal voice and you know it's a writer speaking to you.
He's got the tone. It's like how I want Orwell to sound in my head
Yeah, that's true. You know the film that I quote at the beginning [The Crystal Spirit, starring Ronald Pickup as Orwell, telling the story of the author’s time on Jura]? The team that did the film searched a lot to find that voice. They never could. They tried to meet Orwell's or [his son] Richard Blair’s former friends so that they could describe to them what his voice was like, and what his voice was like after Spain, when he was shot in the larynx.
There’s an extraordinary amount of footage and different sources. Was that an exploratory process, seeing where the material led you?
No, it's a much more complicated process because you have to make certain choices. My first choice was Orwell telling his own story – the whole text is only Orwell, meaning novels, essays, diaries, journals. And the second thing was, I'm not making a biography. I write screenplays as well, so I know what I need to tell a story. I need to understand the character and I need to put him in a dramatic structure. And the dramatic structure is Orwell in the last two years of his life, struggling to finish his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. That's what you follow throughout the film, but at the same time it allows me to digress. So it's not random, it's not a collage. The dramatic structure will of course change over the editing process but we need that to start the process. The whole team has a written “libretto”, I call it. We know more or less how it's going to end. We know more or less what will come in the middle. We know more or less what we will start with.
It’s approved by the estate so you had access to the whole archive. There are quite a few photographs that I've never seen before. The one that you begin and end with is baby Eric Blair with his nursemaid in India. You’re saying something about Orwell as an international figure and somebody shaped by the age of empire. How did you feel when you found that photo?
That was an important entry point for me. Because through that photo, I recognised where Orwell came from. He said in order to understand the motivation of a writer, you need to go back to see where he came from. And that's what I did. The first touch, the first emotion, is a black nanny in India, and probably closer to you than your own mother. And that feeling, you never lose it. That's why I understood why he went to Burma later, when he was 19. He was still searching for that feeling that he had lost. Otherwise, how do you explain a 19-year-old British guy eager to [spend] five years as a colonial policeman in Burma? That photo was important because it's a real artefact of the absurdity of racism. Mothers would give their most precious being to somebody they profoundly despise. I wanted to finish the film with it because it shows that black woman looking at you and saying: “Look at my humanity. I'm protecting this little baby even though it's not mine.”
People forget we had Berlusconi, we had Sarkozy in France, all those Arturo Ui figures where the absurdity is in your face
You’ve got so many brilliant bits of archive footage from so many different wars and crises. How did you go about making the list of what you were going to cover?
The whole thing is a really slow process of layers after layers. There’s stuff that I felt in putting the text together. Orwell suggests some of them. I knew I needed a big bulk of images, the way I work, so I made a deal with Universal to have access to their catalogue, so it's 2,500 films. With my editor, we use placeholders so that we can make a first draft of the film and we change them as we go. I don't start shooting until I'm in the middle of the editing because then I know exactly what I'm shooting. It's a long process and it includes a whole team of archivists.
Also I'm an old film-maker and since my first film I've been using archives, so I know by heart so many archives – whether in the US, in Germany, in France, in African countries. I use that memory and I use, also, the emotions that I felt when I saw those images. I watch a lot of news. For me, it's part of my profession. I need to be aware of what's going on everywhere. So I have that archive bank in my head as well.
You use several clips of Trump and America but I read an interview where you said you had to kind of cut some of those scenes. Did you decide there was just too much of this?
Yes, the danger was to make a film about Trump. That was not the idea. I'm making a film with Orwell. And also I didn't want to date my film; I want this film to be seen in 10, 20, 30 years. Trump will go, you know. He's just the last caricature of that kind of authoritarian regime. When we started working on the film, the hope was that Kamala Harris would be the next president. So the film was even more urgent for me. Because Trump did not just pop out like this. It's a long degradation of democracy in America and in Europe. So we need to understand how we came to Trump. People forget we had Berlusconi, we had Sarkozy in France, all those sort of Arturo Ui [figures] where the absurdity is in your face, and Trump is just the most dangerous one because he's at the head of the most powerful country.
In this term, he seems to be becoming even more Orwellian
He’s basically using Orwell's toolbox: the destruction of language, the erasure of history, the personality cult, the transformation or introduction of words. People don't really know how to react to that, and that's also the strategy – to reduce you to silence where you don't even have the words any more to have a normal conversation. There are “alternative facts”. When you get to that point, what else can you do?
Talking of alternative realities, you worked with a film-maker called Vincent Lannoo on the AI sections, where you’re using AI to comment on AI. It seems like such an obvious authoritarian tool
Well, you need to make a distinction between technology as such and the use of it in capitalism. That's the big difference. The technology as such is not the problem. It's the decision or not to regulate it. We do that for cars, we do that for medicine, we do that for a lot of things that, if we do not regulate, they become dangerous. So there is no reason not to do that for the internet and for AI. It's just a matter of political will. We live in a capitalist world built on profit, and as long as it's the corporation that is the one doing the selling you're bound to have all these abuses. Big Brother is part of it as well, especially with this huge concentration of the media world. Orwell wrote about that because he could see that already. It's not something new.
That’s the thing. People talk about him being prophetic but actually I think the message is that it's the continuity. He’s not predicting things. He's observing things that were happening in the 1930s and the 1940s. We're still doing the same things, we have the same problems – they’re just new iterations.
Yes, it’s the same capitalist society. The rules are the same. The way for capitalists to continue are the same, from crisis to crisis. It’s always the same cycle and it’s becoming even more dangerous because it can explode the whole planet. Orwell was analysing his own society. That's the mistake we make about Orwell, to think that it's his imagination. No, he was writing about stuff that he went through. He has to deal with it: that craziness, the lies, the abuses. It's a warning he's giving to us. [The working title] of Nineteen Eighty-Four was The Last Man in Europe. That was a warning to his own people, to say, yes, we can have fascism in the UK.
He changed that title, very famously and wisely. Did you have the title 2+2=5 in your head from the beginning or did it change as you went?
My working title was George Orwell, and then Orwell, because I thought “Orwell” is sufficient. It's as known as Coca-Cola in the whole world. But I needed something [to say] that it's not just another film about Orwell, and the formula 2+2=5 is just the craziest formula ever. That’s a formula you can use every day for yourself. It's like hanging on to a boat so that you don't sink in the water. You have to keep telling yourself 2+2=4. Don't tell me that what I'm seeing is not what I'm seeing. That scene in The Crystal Spirit, talking to his son, where he says there will be people who try to make you believe that 2+2=5, and they are called governments, and they will torture you and they will kill you – I think the whole Orwell essence is in that dialogue.
I wonder, after immersing yourself in Orwell’s text and his headspace, whether you carry a little bit of him around with you – a certain way of seeing things?
I think it’s the other way around. I was able to make that film the way I did it because I found common ground with Orwell. I felt at home. I went to the point where I felt he's a brother, you know? I recognised him the same way I recognised Baldwin: a man who travelled the world, who went to meet the other, to understand the other. That kind of humanity is something that connects you, and then you can trust them. And so I could trust him. When he says, of Animal Farm, I know that I have to mix politics and art, that's what I've tried all my life to do. So Orwell did not raise me – Baldwin did, Marx did, Césaire did, Fanon did – but I was so happy to find Orwell as well in that group.
Orwell: 2+2=5 is in cinemas now.
Dorian Lynskey is the Nerve’s theatre critic. He co-hosts the politics podcast Origin Story (and previously co-presented Remainiacs). His 2019 book The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 was longlisted for both the Baillie Gifford and Orwell Prize.