How much did you know about the subject before you started?

Very little. And that was one of the interesting things about it. The more I looked into it, the more compelled I felt to make a film about it. I consider myself to be reasonably well-read and well-educated but I was amazed at how few of these facts I actually knew and how many were in the public domain. And the more I read, the more outraged I became about how clear the facts were and how conveniently it was all brushed under the carpet by the government.

How did you go about gathering the facts?

Some elements of the story I spoke to the intelligence services about but a lot of it was in the public domain, be it The Times, The Guardian, CNN and they were all substantiated, they all had a provenance. I did speak to some people from the intelligence community but the outrageous thing really is that most of the facts that are in the film are freely available and in the public domain.

Did you encounter any difficulties regarding the intelligence side of things when making the film?

There are some forged documents that were used to support the idea that Iraq was buying uranium from Niger. You can find and download those documents from the ‘net very easily, they’ve been in the public domain for years, and we had a copy of them in a briefcase when we were filming in Rome. At the airport they detained us because they thought they’d got real peddlers of international intelligence. And they were asking why we had papers marked ‘Confidential’ and if there were from the internet why there were no internet addresses on them. And yet these papers had been in the public domain for five years and the story about them had originated in Italy. What amazed me most was that if the police there where the documents were uncovered didn’t know about them and they seemed top secret, how much more extraordinary would they seem to the average man in the street?

So how did you escape the clutches of the police?

Well, it was an interesting experience being a room with ten Italian detectives asking me if I was in MI6. And I sort of regret not saying “I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you” but it didn’t seem like the right thing to say at the time. And lthough I knew we were doing nothing wrong, it was somewhat alarming. Whenever I tried to prove that we were just filmmakers, we looked more and more guilty. My explanation about the documents sounded fatuous. What I didn’t realise was that the art department, being conscientious, had also mocked up and put in the briefcase some secrecy and non-disclosure waiver forms and things with the British government emblem at the top, and Secret Intelligence Service, which is the real name for MI6.

So I said if you bring in the camera – because we had all the rushes in the camera bag – I can show you. They brought the camera bag in and the rushes were gone. No tapes. Turn out the director of photography, fearing we were going to have them taken from us, had hidden them all about his person. Meanwhile, the sound recordist had someone driving to the airport so he could collect that tapes and spirit them away. Eventually, I found one tape that that DOP had missed and started playing that. But of course, because it’s all surveillance footage, it’s shot from the back of a car, people walking down a street so it just got worse and worse. Finally we found a shot of the clapperboard and with the help from the guy from the British embassy, they let us go.

How was it working with only surveillance footage?

To a large extent the style of the shooting dictated the story. I knew that I wanted to make it look as though we shot entirely with CCTV and surveillance cameras so I deliberately wrote certain scenes that could be done that way. There was a concern that all this handheld footage would make the viewer nauseous so I made sure there was a mix of camera types, styles and qualities all of which hopefully enhances the authenticity.

Did you find that being restricted in that way made you more creative?

Yes, absolutely. I found out that meetings on aeroplanes were quite common as it’s hard to be overheard. But of course, we weren’t allowed to film on a plane so we had to do it guerrilla style. This meant that I wrote a scene in which no dialogue could be heard but in turn, this made it more authentic. So sometimes I was able to use the restrictions to enhance the suspense or the sense of paranoia.

What was the thinking behind the release strategy of the film?

I knew being low budget independent filmmakers we had absolutely no way of competing with the majors. We had to find the areas they’re not in, so we deliberately went for an edgy shooting style, a controversial story and different distribution strategy because without the hundreds of thousands of pounds on marketing, we had to build interest slowly. Our sales agents, Independent, had this great idea of inverting the conventional release strategy of cinema, DVD, TV then online. No one knows how the internet works, really, so we just set the process in motion and so far it seems to be working. It had its online premiere on dailymotion.com about a year ago and was there free for three days before they released it to 16 different countries, at which point it broke all their records for any film viewings. So that proved the interest was there.

Now, with the inquiry rotating back into the news, it’s clearly a subject that won’t go away. So if people do want to know what the facts were in a clear, linear form then wmd. will show them. We had to say initially that it was a fictional story based on real facts but a couple of things have changed recently which means that it’s easier now to be more truthful. So I can say now that’s it’s based on a true story because it basically is.