George Orwell wasn’t a prophet – he was a warning

With Orwell: 2+2=5, the award-winning filmmaker Raoul Peck told me he found one simple answer: let George Orwell write the film.

“The only things I personally wrote were the title cards at the beginning and end. Everything else is Orwell,” the veteran Haitian-American director tells me. “It’s his style, and it’s him. The whole idea of the film is to give the whole stage to Orwell. I’m just the messenger. 

“The film is without experts, without talking heads and scholars trying to translate whatever their angle is. That’s what I did with James Baldwin in I Am Not Your Negro. I give my subjects the whole room so that nobody can manipulate what they are saying.”

Given that Peck is not just a documentarian but a fiction film-maker, an intellectual, an activist, a writer, a novelist and the former minister of culture and communication in the Haitian government, I should probably do the same. So here is a record of our conversation

Q: What is the link for you between the American novelist James Baldwin and Orwell? 

A: “Both are incredible humanists. Both are Universalists. Both have travelled. Both have gone out of their way to meet the other, the alterity (the state of being different). 

“These are my own ethics and politics. What I didn’t know before immersing myself in Orwell’s work was that he would be that close to me. I met a sort of brother, a common soul. He writes perfectly about it himself. How, in order to understand a writer’s motivation, you have to go back to where he comes from. And the fact that Orwell was born in India weighed much heavier than I would have thought.”

Q: Having been born in India as Eric Blair, Orwell would attend Eton for some unhappy years before returning to the East as an Imperial policeman. How important was that?

A: “I think it was key, because when he goes back to Burma, what is now Myanmar, he’s a 19-year-old young man. Why would you volunteer to go there, unless you’re trying to find something that you miss; something you want to feel again, which was his one or two years there as a baby?  Because that kind of thing does mark you.

“His intimacy with his Indian nanny: it’s key. That’s why I use that photo [of them] twice in the film. I recognise that photo. When he goes back, it’s to find a reminiscence of his childhood. Then he realised that he was a functionary of the colonial regime, and he was honest enough to write about it; to realise that that’s not what he came for. We see how Kipling handled it totally differently. 

“So it was a real turning point for him. When he came back to London, Orwell knew that he had to change his life. He has to change his objectives and his ambitions.”

Q: I’ve always admired how Orwell was willing to put himself into situations; putting his body on the line, whether living as a tramp to find out about homelessness or going to fight in the Spanish civil war…

“Yes, at the end of the road, he paid a price for that, but it’s also the foundation of his work. The worst interpretation of Orwell is to see him as an intellectual sitting at his desk on his island, Jura, writing from his mind. No, he wrote from his belly, from his experience.

“Nineteen Eighty-Four is not some sort of prophecy. It’s a warning about what he went through. The story takes place in Britain. The original title of Nineteen Eighty-Four was The Last Man in Europe. So it’s a very clear warning. It was never anything about the future. It was about ‘don’t fuck it up now’. And we fucked it up.” 

Q: It feels like we also fucked up how we read Orwell. 

A: “I write fiction as well, so I put myself in the skin of Orwell. I realised what it meant for him as well. He died six months after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, so he’s not there anymore to do the spinning. So they did the spinning for him. 

“We were in the middle of the cold war. The enemy was the Soviet Union, and Stalinism and Sovietism and not even fascism, because fascism was already vanquished. That would determine the reading of Orwell for decades after that. 

“What I tried to do in the film, or what Orwell himself did, was place himself in a very wide universal stance against any type of deviance from democracy toward authoritarianism, totalitarianism, Stalinism, or fascism. That’s why it’s so obvious when we include Donald Trump in the film. He is president of the most so-called democratic country; and yet he matches every aspect of the authoritarian.”

Q: How did you first read Orwell?

A: “I did my secondary school in France. So Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four were part of the curriculum, even though, at the time, I did not go very deeply into it, because he was sold to me as a sort of dystopian science fiction writer, and I was not at all into that. 

“I was into the present. I was into the action. Whether in Haiti or in Congo, where I live, or whether even in Europe, through my encounter with racism.

“So my world was basically to find authors or films or books that are close to my fight; that would help me understand the world around me. Orwell was never presented to me like this. It was about some sort of future. I was concerned about my day-to-day survival.”

Q: And yet he is still regarded as this prophetic writer.

A: “Prophecy is not correct, because prophecy is about being a guru, or seeing the future. The movement is exactly the contrary. He went through those things in his very short life and saw how it functions; saw how it can be destroyed; saw every item they use to bring people or to bring societies to the kind of situation where you say 2+2=5.

“That’s what we are confronted with today. The press, politicians, institutions try to convince us that 2+2=5. Orwell calls for our common decency to come back. And as you said, as well, that we have to put our bodies in front of the beast.”

Q: Orwell had critics on the left and the right when he was writing

A: “He considered himself a democratic socialist, but that doesn’t mean he has to obey any dogma, and that’s why some people on the left attacked him in the 1940s. It was a time when it was asked of you to choose your camp. There was no middle line. 

“It goes beyond ideology. It’s a problem for any institution, any party. You have to obey orders, whether it’s wrong or right. Any institution can turn authoritarian.

“The church has had long periods of quasi-dictatorship and murders, whether it’s the Catholic, or the Muslim, or the Jewish church. His criteria was ‘don’t ask me to adapt to 2+2=5. As soon as you are going the wrong way, I will denounce that, regardless of your ideology.’”

Q: If Orwell was alive today, what would he make of the current situation we live in?

A: “First of all, he would say, immediately, ‘this is a genocide going on in Gaza’. By the way, his perspective helps us understand also what happened in Israel and Palestine and he would know how to differentiate between the Jewish people and the fascist government. There have been socialists in Israel leading the country like Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated and had nothing to do with Netanyahu.

“We have to be able to say 2+2=4. We have to be able to make a historical analysis. But they are doing the opposite. And that’s another tool. You erase history, or pretend that history started October 7, when Hamas killed innocent people. Orwell allows you to have an analysis that makes sense, but there are a lot of propagandists who prefer to start everything from October 7, even though the state of Israel has refused to accept all the UN resolutions for at least 60-70 years.”

Q: The propaganda war feels particularly Orwellian this time around. 

A: “Why would a democratic state forbid journalists to go on the ground (in Gaza)? The spokesman of the Israeli army says ‘we want to protect you’. These are war correspondents who have been in every single war, and you forbid them to go on the ground? 

“Orwell lived through that, while he was in Spain. He saw how the Spanish government and the UK government and the Russians told the story, but he was there so he could measure what propaganda is. All his essays about that are so clear and so applicable about everything that is happening now.”

Orwell:2+2=5 – is in UK and Irish cinemas from March 27