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HBO:
What attracted you to this project?
Alex Holmes:
Well, my background is in anthropology. And
I was trying to understand what was going on
in Iraq after Saddam was removed. Of course
you can't understand a situation like that
without delving into the history to see what
gave rise to it; not just what gave rise to it in
terms of the invasion by the U.S.-led coalition,
but also how the country had managed to
descend so quickly into chaos. And what I
discovered when I started looking into the
history was that Saddam had created this
hold over the country that was astonishing.
He did it by mapping his family relations over
the political system that was in place. And as
an anthropologist I found that fascinating, the
mixture between family and politics. It was
reminiscent of a gangster set-up, where the
bonds of loyalty were both political and
familial.
Dramatizing Saddam gave us the opportunity
to get underneath the skin of the man and
inside his head, a place very difficult to get to
unless you actually had an interview with the
man himself. Now obviously this is my re-
imagining of Saddam. But I was interested in
trying to understand the psychology of the
man, what made him so powerful, so
charismatic and so terrorizing.
HBO:
You did a great deal of research into Saddam
and his life. What did that reveal?
Alex Holmes:
The first thing I realized when I started
reading accounts of Saddam was that
everybody had some kind of a personal, if not
political agenda. My agenda was to look the
character of the man and understand how he
had propelled the world into this terrible
situation it found itself in. I realized very
quickly that the way Saddam had been
written about over the years had changed.
And it's fascinating because in a way the
books themselves are a record of the changing
attitude of the world towards Saddam.
If you go back to biographies of Saddam that
were written in the '80s, they're much more
respectful; they're trying to understand what
this man's vision is. Whereas if you look at
the more recent biographies, they revise the
very same events and the very same history in
order to uncover a man who is corrupt, who is
dangerous, who is fundamentally bad. So I
realized that everybody had a point of view,
and it was our job to take all of those views
and to find the truth within them.
HBO:
How did you balance historical accuracy with
creating a compelling, fictionalized drama?
Alex Holmes:
The challenge was to make a film that was
engaging and would draw people in so that
they would stay for the entire journey. If we
showed an appalling monster from the first
frame then people wouldn't understand what
it was that we felt we could add to people's
comprehension of Saddam. We had to get
that balance right and our aim was to try and
be honest about its being a version of events,
but a reliable version. We didn't put anything
in it we knew not to be true. Rather we looked
at what the actual events could tell us, and
how we could use them to elucidate his
character.
HBO:
There have been many ruthless dictators
throughout history. What is it that
distinguishes Saddam from the others?
Alex Holmes:
Saddam was similar to other dictators. He
was, in fact, a student of them. He was
obsessed by Stalin and the way he had
managed to wrestle the Soviet Union under
his control, and drag it from the 19th century
into the 20th century. I think in a way that
was one of the inspirations for Saddam's
vision; he admired Stalin's ruthlessness. And
one of the things I wanted to achieve was to
actually draw those parallels, to make this not
just about Saddam but about the nature of
dictatorship, about the nature of fear, and the
use of terror as a political weapon.
We meet him at the height of his powers, and
then four television hours later there he's
being pulled out of a hole in the ground, a
man left completely alone in the world. That's
the story we wanted to tell - of this colossal
fall, a fall brought about by historical forces,
but also by Saddam's own flaws. And we
wanted to tell the story over time in order to
get that sense of tragedy.
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