He said he had been angry, very angry, for a long time, but that he had eventually reached a realisation. He quoted George Orwell's Animal Farm: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. Most of my cast and crew endured all this and tragically much more. Yet still they thought it important to recreate these scenes as faithfully and accurately as possible, so that we could "tell the world what happened there".I spent more than five months there; it was some of the most exhilarating, exasperating, humbling, life-affirming time I have spent on the planet.One night I was sitting around with an elderly Rwandan. We weren't being saintly, just practical; we had to integrate people into one unit for the duration. Of course it would be naive to think this solved every difference, but not wanting to lose the financial benefits of working on the film helped to keep any resentments at a distance.Words take on a different meaning to the people who've actually lived them Imagine that you're terrified Imagine that you think you are going to be killed Imagine you are watching your mother being macheted Imagine saying goodbye to your children before they die. Imagine watching UN soldiers save the dogs of white people but refuse to help Rwandese.

To that end, I made a policy decision early on that there would be no differentiation among employees by way of race, nationality, ethnicity or gender.The experienced would train the inexperienced; the local would look after the foreigner; Rwandese, German, Belgian, Ugandan, European, Tutsi, Hutu, even the English, were all just crew members. I may not know who they were, but others certainly would and this could cause any degree of tension.For all practical purposes a film set is not a democracy; at best, it's a benign dictatorship. We couldn't hire them all, of course, but, more worryingly, it was also likely that we'd be hiring people who had taken a part in the killings in 1994. A day's work as an extra paid US$16 (about £9), a vast sum, and there were often huge crowds every dawn as people looked for employment. Naturally, in a country as poor as Rwanda, this created a frenzied desire for jobs. In the meantime, though, Shooting Dogs could partially redress the persistent Western ignorance on the subject.A film creates a sizeable financial knock-on effect anywhere it's made, injecting money that normally wouldn't be there into the local economy.

They had to be allowed to tell their story.Now, I sincerely believe that the real films about what happened in Rwanda will only be made when the Rwandans can make them for and about themselves, but at the moment, that ability didn't exist. How could it not be made there? I decided that, however difficult, we had to film in Rwanda; we had to shoot at the ETO And we had to make the film with survivors of the genocide. Honestly.I knew there was no film-making infrastructure in Rwanda and that it could quite possibly be a very miserable experience all round - but, for fuck's sake, it was their story. I would often be asked: "Why did no one do anything to help? Did no one care?" Of course I had no answer except: "We didn't know," which sounded marginally less offensive than: "We didn't care." They then say: "You must tell the world what happened here, this must never happen again." The simplicity of expression and the lack of manipulation had a deep effect on me It became a key to how this story should be told Just tell it. There was nothing more to say because everyone understood.Realising that many of the shy smiles on display were a mask, to disguise some unutterable private devastation they were bound to carry around for ever, only increased this sense of melancholy and sadness.Talking to survivors (and almost the entire country is a survivor) there was often a complete lack of emotion in their stories, just an unaffected retelling - the unimaginable terror and suffering, the horrific loss, the emptiness and guilt of their survival all told in an open, unsensational way. It was as if by placing their experiences into one of those three phrases the whole emotional geography of their situation could be instantly understood. Life was innocent, or it was terrifying, or it was grief stricken.