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Tell me about the ''fatwa-proof research'' that you did for 'Four Lions''.
That's an unfortunate non-quote that's being spread around. It's attributed to my producer, but I'm pretty sure it's a journalistic product. I did do a lot of research. I wanted to make sure the scenarios in the film came from a real place. I met lots of Muslims who had nothing to do with anything radical whatsoever, which gave me a fair sense of how the landscape lay in Britain, and all the differences between the different village communities that ended up in different mill towns. That puts into sharp relief what happens in these tiny radical pockets. Making this film [had] nothing to do with attacking the Koran or casting aspersions about the Prophet or anything like that. 99.99% of the people I met shared those precious things but weren't remotely interested in blowing up anyone.
I was impressed that the film also didn't offer up a list of grievances -- some obligatory, politically correct scene where we see all the horrible things that the West has done in Muslim countries, or something like that.
There are works of fiction which seek to explain jihadi terrorists as the militant wing of Amnesty International. I don't buy that. I wanted to avoid it for dramatic reasons as well. I didn't want some scene where Omar was confronted with terrible footage from an Afghani school that had been blown up by a drone or something. In a way, that would be too specific. We know that this sort of thing happens, of course. I thought with all the characters you could basically pick up why each of them would be involved with this and to categorize them. The "Black Widows" [Chechen female suicide bombers in Russia] were very different than some lads in Surrey planning to blow up a nightclub, for example. And it's not fair to pretend they're the same.
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