Q: How much of the story is based on true events and how much fiction did you add?
A: I guess I'm answering for the writer, Abi [Morgan]. The majority of it is all truthful. It's an amalgam of people. She did not want to highlight any specific person and say this is their story because she felt that was too insensitive. Also it allowed us to take a number of events happened to a number of people and draw them into one or two people so the viewers could get a sense of what had happened across the spectrum.
I think what the drama allowed us to do is much more than a documentary would allow us to do. It allowed us to condense the timeline. The biggest dramatic license in the piece is probably the fact that a lot of these journeys took a few more weeks than we suggest; and we kind of squeezed them down into five days.
Q: What effects do you think your film has had on disaster preparation in the region or you think that it will have?
A: It's interesting but still early for us to see its effects, but I know in [the UK] for instance, the Foreign Office just bought a second report on how it dealt with the disaster from [a British] point of view. I know many of the European countries are doing the same. I think there's going to be a lot of change from the European angle in terms of how it'll manage people and NGO's and the likes back on the ground.
I'm hoping it will bring up a whole bunch of questions. I don't think there are any outright answers in the drama. All we can do as filmmakers is to raise questions and allow people who are in a better position to try to answer them.
RSS