When Universal secured access to George Orwell’s estate and approached prolific US filmmaker Alex Gibney about potentially making a documentary, Gibney immediately suggested fellow director Raoul Peck would be the “best person for this job.”
“That’s how Raoul came to the table,” producer George Chignell explains what led to the Haitian director making his fiery new feature doc Orwell: 2+2=5 (an Oscar contender that premiered in Cannes and will be released in the UK by Altitude in March – following its launch earlier this autumn in the US by Neon).
Chignell has worked on several earlier films for Universal, and had been shown the Orwell project at an earlier stage. “That’s a film that really needs to be made,” was her immediate response.
Months later, once Peck was aboard and the financing was arranged, the film came back to Chignell who joined the project as a producer, alongside Gibney.
This was a challenging project on many different levels. It was using huge amounts of archive. The filmmakers were shooting in some far-flung locations, including Jura, the remote Hebridean island where Orwell wrote his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four late in the 1940s.
“With Raoul, he knew exactly what he wanted,” Chignell says of the archival material which includes everything from pictures of the young Orwell at Eton (when he was still known as Eric Blair), or his time as a colonial British police officer in Burma, to US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez skewering Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook’s fact-checking policies – or lack of them.
As for shooting on Jura, that episode sounds like an outward-bound mission. “It’s incredibly beautiful…if you like remote, which I do! I could see that if you wanted to write a seminal piece of work, that would be a fantastic place to do it.”
Chignell and her team had to get Peck onto the island by boat. “When you see that Jura footage in the film, all those hurdles were worth managing. We had a brilliant shooting team up there. But we also shot in Burma, America, London…” she points out.
Orwell is a quintessentially English writer whose most famous pieces of journalism, for example his wartime essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn,’ reflect on ‘Englishness’ in all its particularities and contradictions. Chignell, though, was the only British person on the production team.
“For me, he [Orwell] was part of our literary heritage…part of the school curriculum. His writings were such a long time ago and they were part of British culture – but they still seem incredibly relevant today.”
Peck uses Orwell’s work, and Nineteen Eighty-Four in particular, to look at the growth of authoritarianism today, everywhere from Trump’s America to Putin’s Russian, from Myanmar to Viktor Orban’s Hungary.
“For me, it was a gift to work with a director like him,” Chignell says of Peck. She also talks of the filmmaker’s desire to bring Orwell back into public consciousness, “because he is such a British icon,” and to make him “feel relevant to a whole new generation…although he is well known, he is often misquoted. It [the documentary] was a real opportunity to put his work back out there.”
The Orwell Society and The Orwell Foundation, two of the main organisations looking after the author’s legacy, were very supportive of the film.
Chignell praises the “fantastic job” Neon did in releasing the film in the US in early October. It ran in cinemas for several weeks and saw box office returns of over $350,000 – a very strong haul in the difficult current climate for theatrical docs.
“It’s one of the few films I’ve ever produced that, at the point of its main festival, had sold every major territory,” she notes of the deals closed by Goodfellas on the documentary even in advance of its Cannes premiere. “That’s a testament to the actual quality of the film Raoul has made – and to the relevance of it.”
The film includes footage of different screen dramatisations of Nineteen Eighty-Four – the Michael Radford movie starring John Hurt as Winston Smith and Richard Burton as the torturer O’Brien, the 1956 version with Edmond O’Brien as Winston, and the Rudolph Cartier TV adaptation among them. All these stand up remarkably well. So, of course, does Orwell’s analysis of double-speak and the way language and the media are themselves corrupted under authoritarian governments.
“One of the biggest challenges we face in the media is how we define ‘truth.’ That aligns with the whole debate around AI. I think the social media propaganda does make positioning of truth a really important element of what we as filmmakers should be focusing on,” the producer reflects on questions that apply as much to documentary makers as anybody else.
Chignell was also the producer on 2073 (2024), Asif Kapadia’s sci-fi docudrama that addresses many of the same questions around democracy, fascism and human rights that are addressed in the Orwell film. “People struggle to find truth now in the way the media is presenting news…that is the biggest challenge for us in the documentary space, presenting truth so that people can trust us.”
The filmmakers have been trying hard to screen the documentary on university campuses and to engage with a younger demographic that way. “We’ve had some very successful screenings at university campuses in America which have been fascinating…and now we are going to do the same thing in the UK,” Chignell says. ‘It’s really important to connect with that generation. The message of the film is collective action, and that’s the generation of people that really need to be standing up and taking collective action.”
One aim is to get the younger student generation to watch the film together in cinemas if at all possible. Peck made the documentary for the big screen, not for viewers to scroll through on phones and social media accounts.
Chignell marvels at the resourcefulness and work ethic of her fellow producer, Gibney. She has also worked on some of his previous films including Boom! Boom! The World vs Boris Becker and Citizen K.
“Alex runs Jigsaw Productions. They’re a brilliant outfit, based in New York. They have a fantastic team over there…and, yes, he is incredibly prolific. He’s obsessed,” she says of the ever-busy US producer and director who seems as comfortable tackling sports stories as telling tales about the darkest political depravity and corruption. “A lot of his subjects are about power – holding power to account and how power is used.”
Gibney got behind the Orwell doc in his usual irrepressible way. So did actor Damian Lewis, who we hear as the narrator. “Apart from the fact that Damian is a brilliant actor, he had an association with Orwell before,” Chignell notes of the Billions and Homeland star. There is a statue of Orwell outside Broadcasting House in London. If you press a button on it, out pipes Orwell’s voice – at least as performed by Lewis. Like Orwell, he’s an Old Etonian. “He has his own history he brought to the project,” she underlines the links between Lewis and Orwell.
