Interview with Eric Laurent on the film THE WORLD ACCORDING TO BUSH

Quite frankly, no. I thought that the subject – the ambiguities and the secrets of the Bush family – was too sensitive and touchy and I couldn’t imagine a producer running the risk of making a documentary of it. The first book was published before the launch of the military intervention in Iraq and remember how, despite public opinion taking a stand against this intervention, there was nonetheless a sort of consensus around the justification for it because of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. What seemed dangerous to me was the attitude of the Bush administration that developed a number of points that turned out to be totally false concerning the so-called threat posed by the weapons of mass destruction.

But I didn’t feel that my investigation could become the object of a documentary and a TV and film adaptation. I was won over by the determination of Jean-François Lepetit who, from early February 2003, started working on the adaptation at a time when the book had only just been published and before it became a success translated into 21 languages.

How did you work with William Karel? Did you know him before this project ?

I knew William Karel, I had seen his documentaries and notably his series on the CIA as well as part of the series broadcast on Arte on Les Hommes de  la Maison Blanche. I felt that we had a similar approach: a desire to stick closely to the facts and not to be content with the official truth. I think – and this is the mainspring of all my investigations – that behind each official truth there is a hidden reality and that is what I wanted to reveal in relation to Bush and his totally atypical administration.

We are facing a totally new phenomenon in the world of politics: for the first time, an administration made up of men from the ultra-fanatic Christian right and neo-conservatives have taken over control of American foreign policy and are now in the process of redefining international relations.

We have entered a totally new period of deep instability and uncertainty in which international law has been denied and ignored. Moreover, the decision to carry out a pre-emptive intervention creates chaos and the law of the jungle and makes relations between countries much more unpredictable and dangerous: tomorrow, in the name of this principle, Pakistan could attack India or North Korea could launch missiles against Japan.

It’s also worth pointing out that we are confronted with an unprecedented and extraordinary succession of official lies. A man like John Dean who was Nixon’s legal adviser and the first to have launched the Watergate Affair by admitting to a congressional committee of inquiry that Nixon was tapping phones at the White House, feels that "if the American system is healthy, in the long run the American President should be summoned before Congress and subjected to impeachment", in other words, threatened with a process of destitution because the manipulation of the facts and the cynicism with which they have been stated are so serious. They have led a country and, indirectly, the rest of the world into a war that we now realize was totally unjustified.

What differences are there between writing a book and working on a film? How did you go about working with William Karel ?

I worked alone on the books but work on a film is a collective undertaking throughout which Jean-François Lepetit and Agnès Vicariot played a crucial role. And there, indeed, a certain number of obstacles arise: there are people who can agree to talk to you before you write your book but who refuse to talk to the camera, probably because the contents of the book bothered them. Other witnesses who had agreed to talk to me during my investigation were afraid to appear on camera. We had to deal with a whole new series of different parameters. But I think William Karel managed it all very well.