Peter Kosminsky on his controversial Islamic State drama: 'We always knew it would shock people at first'
Over the past three decades in television, Peter Kosminsky has grown used to his dramas eliciting a certain reaction from certain corners of the media. Feather-ruffling is, in some respects, his thing.
In the 90s, he was among the first to tell a story based primarily around child abuse; in 2005 he gave us a film about the murky build up to the Iraq war long, before the Chilcot Inquiry was even considered; and in 2007 he examined the potential radicalisation of British Muslims at a time when most other writers and directors wouldn’t touch the subject. All of those programmes caused a stir, but all won Baftas too.
This week, the man once dubbed by this paper ‘Britain’s most controversial television director’ returned with arguably his most ambitious project yet. The State, which concludes tonight on Channel 4, takes viewers inside the Islamic State, following four radicalised Britons as they make the trip to Syria to fight for Isis and live among its ranks.
The State is, the 61-year-old says, “the first English language drama that has attempted to look at [that] phenomenon of young people from all over the Western world drawn to the Islamic State.
“There is a tendency to say, ‘this must be the definitive piece’, but it’s just the one I wanted to write; I was interested in this one specific thing – how did the resolution to travel survive the encounter with the reality of living there day after day?”
I watched the Twitter feed as episodes 1 and 2 went out. I suppose episode 1 could be characterised as ‘How dare they?’ Episode 2 was more like, ‘Oh, I see’
Peter Kosminsky
The timing could not have been more delicate: the miniseries has shown just days after Isis have claimed responsibility for yet another terrorist atrocity, this time the deadly attacks in Barcelona last week, in which 14 people died and more than 130 were injured. In the aftermath, there were calls for Channel 4 to delay The State, then there were furious reviews (or one, at least) that saw the first hour as a glorification of the jihadist group. There was never a doubt in Kosminsky’s mind that the news should see the drama delayed.
“ISIS want to disrupt our way of life. Our open, plural society is anathema to them. The greatest victory we can give them is to shutter our freedoms, bring in increasingly repressive legislation, curfew our lifestyle, change our TV transmission schedules,” he says. “One of the most moving things about the coverage of the Barcelona tragedy is the way the authorities were determined to get Las Ramblas open again as soon as possible, for life to at least appear to return to normal. Crowds representing all ethnicities and nationalities gathered in the boulevard in a show of tolerance and defiance. We should celebrate our freedoms, not give ISIS the satisfaction of curtailing them.”
He anticipated precisely the kind of backlash the first episode would receive: that The State presents joining Isis as a positive experience, creating entirely sympathetic characters of terrorists. It’s true that it looks like that. In it, the four leads – two young men who are childhood friends, one of whom had a brother who died fighting for Isis, a teenage girl and a doctor with a young child – arrived in Syria and delighted in the camaraderie and shared beliefs they find, enjoying pool parties and a sense of family. As the story unfolded in episodes two and three, though, the reality of life inside Islamic State becomes far from glamorous, turning the programme instead into a cautionary tale; forced marriage, beheadings, child exploitation and numerous other grizzly events are shown in unflinching detail.
You cannot militarily beat the Islamic State. Every conflict in my experience, be it the apartheid or the Troubles, has only been ended by sitting down and talking to the other side
Peter Kosminsky
“We always knew that episode 1 would shock,” he says. “We stuck very closely to what we learned in [the research] process. All spoke about the excitement on arrival in the Islamic State, the warmth of the welcome, the sense of ‘belonging’ after years of a feeling of alienation at home. I watched the Twitter feed as episodes 1 and 2 went out. I suppose episode 1 could be characterised as ‘How dare they?’ Episode 2 was more like, ‘Oh, I see.'
For Kosminsky, a drama like The State had to be made at some point.
“It is very hard to be objective about the Islamic State, it is a disgusting death cult,” he says, firmly. “Having said that, I have always believed that we cannot combat something unless we understand it first. It is very easy to follow this philosophy expounded by the Prime Minister about having ‘a little less understanding and a little more condemnation’. It makes you feel fantastic, that, but then what? You’re still faced with bombs on our streets and not the first idea why. You cannot militarily beat the Islamic State, and our generals admit that. Every conflict in my experience, be it the apartheid or the Troubles, has only been ended by sitting down and talking to the other side.”
The response of other earlier viewers suggests this device works. Previewing it in the Telegraph, Baroness Warsi, the former Foreign Office minister and first Muslim woman in the Cabinet, wrote that “at times, it may seem that Kosminsky is an apologist for the terrorists… but I ask viewers to bear with it. I assure you The State is no recruiting video.”
That will serve as some relief to Kosminsky, who employed a team of mostly Muslim academics for 18 months to thoroughly research everything to do with the topic. As a result, every event and reaction in the programme is based on a real testimony or report.
“To faithfully replicate that research you have to show the joy and delight these people felt when they arrived,” he says. “Then you unpick it with their disillusionment. Viewers will be left with a very misleading impression if they stop. Take the character of Shakira [the young British doctor and single mother in the series], she was born and brought up in Britain, living in London, intelligent, educated. So how does intellectual conviction that she accepts the teachings of the role of women in Islam interact with the daily attitude she receives from men in Syria, where she is patronised, trivialised, with her horizons shuttered down at every turn? Well, the conviction that formed outside the Islamic State doesn’t survive immersion in the Islamic State. I was less interested in the process of radicalisation. I could imagine a drama spending the first hour getting people to the border and really telling us nothing we didn’t know already.”
In preparation, Kosminsky started immersing himself in his team’s research clippings (A3-sized Lever Arch files full of articles and anonymous statements from former jihadists) while directing Wolf Hall, his multi award-winning BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s historical novels, in late 2014. It was, he says, “Tudor England in the daytime and Islamic State in the evening”.
Injustice is probably is the driver for the films I've mad. It has given me a compass
Peter Kosminsky
As the series entered development, up to filming in southern Spain (which doubled for Syria), the news cycle kept informing and amplifying his research. The story of the three Bethnal Green schoolgirls caught on CCTV leaving for Syria in February 2015, for instance, was unnervingly similar to what Kosminsky had already written.
“Those girls disappeared into the black hole that is the Islamic State. So what can we do? We can take our drama camera and do what no documentary camera can at the moment, which is to use our research to draw back the curtain and reveal what was happening in the darkness.”
Small and bespectacled, Kosminsky is mole-like in appearance and perfectly mannered in conversation, choosing his words wisely. He sees The State as the third part of a trilogy for Channel 4, after The Government Inspector, which saw Sir Mark Rylance play government weapons inspector Dr David Kelly in the tumultuous months before the Iraq war, and Britz, the 2007 drama about a radicalised British Muslim, played by a young Riz Ahmed.
“It was those same issues, but in the context of the world today, and that was the basis on which I sold it,” he says. “All three are about the now – what it feels like to be a British Muslim now.”
Kosminsky, who now lives in Wiltshire with his wife, Helen (they have two grown-up daughters) was born in London the 50s to refugee parents, and has spoken of his status as a second-generation immigrant informing his work. His father’s family had fled the pograms in Poland, while his mother was born in Vienna, only to be evacuated to Britain at the age of eight. She arrived at Victoria station alone, speaking no English and with a label around her neck. A wealthy family then took her in, beginning her new life in safety.
It was at school where he first began questioning authority. If teachers did something he didn’t agree with, he would say so.
“I have always been a bit of a pain in the arse, ever since childhood. I would tell teachers when I thought something was unfair. Sometimes you have to learn to button your lip, [because] it's a failing if you become pompous and sanctimonious about it. I struggle with that, but it probably is the driver for the films I've mad. Not everybody is happy with the about them, I know, but that sense of injustice has given me a compass.”
As a child of refugees, he says he tried to “dig in to society and become more British than the British” – which meant going to Oxford and working at the BBC. Joining the latter as a management trainee in the 80s, he swiftly received two firings, one of which was thanks to suggesting a news segment on the ‘luxury’ tampon tax. “I cannot describe the bile and derision dropped on my head from BBC men running for that,” he remembers. Eventually they gave him some directorial work to get him out the way, and that turned out to be a wise decision.
It hasn’t all been gritty, speak-truth-to-power dramas since, of course. He launched Ralph Fiennes’ career with Wuthering Heights in 1993, for instance, once planned a film about Prince Harry (shelved when Kensington Palace wouldn't get on board) and says he, Mark Rylance and Damien Lewis are ready to film the supposedly mammoth sequel to Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies “as soon as Hilary Mantel has finished it – we’re getting it in manuscript form.”
After The State and any fuss it causes dies down, a long holiday to “sit and vegetate” is planned. It has been the hardest project he has ever undertaken.
“No question I’ve had to view and read some material I really wish I hadn’t, and I’ve never had a more difficult challenge than getting people to care about these people,” he says. “But one of drama’s strengths is that if you do it right, when the characters’ minds are changed, the viewers’ can be too. Your defences are down in fiction. That’s why this medium is so very dangerous.”
The State concludes tonight on Channel 4 at 9pm
