Sometimes, a film about the past can tell us a lot about the present. That’s the case with Raoul Peck’s “Orwell: 2+2=5,” the year’s timeliest documentary about a writer who’s been dead for 75 years.
The film uses the British author George Orwell’s final years, 1948 to 1950, in which he finished “Nineteen Eighty-Four” in a sanitarium on a remote Scottish island, as a jumping-off point for an examination of the playbook for totalitarianism as it was practiced in Orwell’s dystopian classic but also by governments around the world over the past century. The film’s narration is delivered by actor Damian Lewis in Orwell’s own words, laying with remarkable prescience the ways in which oppression takes hold.
“I Am Not Your Negro” director Peck, a native of Haiti whose family fled that country during the dictatorship of François Duvalier in the early 1960s, deliberately downplayed the use of Orwell’s tactics by Donald Trump’s administration. But viewers of his film, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, will make those connections.
It feels to me that this is a film where every week since you finished it, something has happened that would’ve been in the movie if you were still working on it.
Peck: Oh, yeah. The most characteristic one is “Secretary of War.” Come on. I think even Orwell would not go that far. It’s crazy. But the guideline for me was that I didn’t want to make a film exclusively about Donald Trump.
And by the way, when I started the movie, we were all pretty much sure that Kamala Harris would be president, and the film was as urgent for me as it is now with Trump. I don’t make films for just a moment. I make a film the same way Orwell wrote, in a way that is as efficient today as it was in his time.
That’s why throughout the film, I use the character of the great leader — whoever he is, whether in democracy or in fascism or in socialism. The cult of personality of the great leader is a way of controlling the people. The tools never change. You know exactly when the king is naked, even though the king and his enablers do not want you to see that. But when Bush in Iraq had to duck when a journalist threw a shoe at him, that was a moment of history where for a little bit, he became just a man, you know? And that’s what will happen to Trump at some point. Something will show the ridiculousness of the whole thing — despite, of course, the tragic implications for everybody.
Was it an easy decision when (executive producer) Alex Gibney approached you about making a movie on George Orwell?
Orwell, how can you say no? If it was just a film on “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” I would’ve said no. But the total body of work, I know what I can do with that. I knew that the first thing I needed to do was to find the core story, because I’m telling a story, not a biography. And in this particular case, it didn’t take me long. I settled on the last year of his life. He’s dying. He knows “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is an important book for him, and he doesn’t know if he will be able to finish it. So right there, you have a story with a dramatic structure and a character.
And that character supplies your entire script, which must have required a lot of poring through his writings.
It was work. Because if you go into that big trove of stuff, you’ll be lost if you don’t know what you’re looking for. I made a lot of new discoveries. I was surprised sometimes that he was so precise in his descriptions and that it fit exactly what’s going on now. There were moments of “Oh my God, that’s impossible.” The richness of the text was so great that my first libretto, as I call it, was absolutely incredible.
Living in Haiti and then in the Congo, you must have grown up sensitive to the signs of totalitarianism.
Oh, yeah. That’s something that even today, when there is a police roadblock, I know anything can happen. All my life, I’ve seen roadblocks. In Haiti, I remember I was in my pajamas in the back of my mother’s car around midnight. My mother was looking for my father, who had not come home. There were roadblocks because there was an 8 o’clock curfew. And I remember flashlights all of a sudden. I used that image in several of my films because it stuck in my head. It’s sheer terror.
If you were making the film thinking that Kamala Harris was going to be president, did you change the film at all to focus on the world into which it was going to be released?
No. On the contrary, I made sure that I had less Trump. I didn’t want to make a film about him. Otherwise, we could have done hours and hours of stupidities and absurdities.
But by the same token, the film is coming out at a time when everyone who watches it will be hyperaware of the way that this playbook is being used by the United States right now.
Absolutely. The weird coincidence of this moment is that we are totally in it. You can basically quote the whole film and have an immediate correspondence with what is happening: the destruction of words, the switching of words’ meaning, you know, like the slogan “war is peace.” You’re talking of peace, but you are making war.
In the film, Orwell talks about the death of objective truth, which fits in this age of social media and AI.
Yeah. One of the definitions I like to quote is that the degradation of language is the condition for the degradation of democracy. Once you know the world doesn’t mean the same thing for everybody, the world of truth and facts doesn’t exist. Or at least they are opinions. Those are the precise tools that every authoritarian regime uses. The attack on the media is always, let’s attack one so that we create fear in all the others.
Something else that Orwell says in the film is that if there is hope, it is in the proles, the proletariat.
He doesn’t say that’s what happens, but that’s what needs to happen. It’s a way of turning to you to say, “Hey, I explained everything to you. Now I can’t do the job for you.” He says it is all of us, the masses who never had the occasion to say anything. If you come together and decide to do something, there is hope.
In Q&As, people in the audience ask me that question all the time: “So, what next?” I say, “Well, next will be whatever you decide.” Because neutrality or the absence of reaction is also a political position, and you’re usually coming from a position of privilege if you can say that. If you’re not going to be among the first to be hit, you can say, “Well, I’m waiting to see.” But others have already paid the price.
