In an interview on Film Directing

Your next book is also related to one of your films, The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.

I have been trying to get various different documentaries made. One was about my parents who were political exiles from Argentina. They had been in prison in the 1970s. But I couldn’t get any money to fund it. Then I met a man who had been an interrogator at Abu Ghraib and he wanted to go back to Iraq and apologise to some of the people he had interrogated, and I couldn’t get any money for that either!

Then Michael Winterbottom, (who I had co-directed The Road to Guantanamo with) approached me out of the blue to say that he had been approached by Naomi Klein and the producers. And they had asked him to make a film about her book The Shock Doctrine and he wanted to collaborate with me again. I was in the middle of working on a TV programme. But I grabbed hold of a copy of the book and read it over the course of a few nights.

I really loved it, and what was so fantastic for me was that all my attempts to look at the subject had all been very subjective and ground-level views, telling a story through my parent’s eyes, etc. But what Naomi does with her book is to try and describe how big events like Iraq happen; why do Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib exist?

It starts off with the theory that moments of crisis have been utilised by the right wing in the US and other countries to manipulate people into following their agenda. And that leads all the way up to the economic crisis that we have at the moment.