Think you know the Julian Assange story? Think again

First, a confession: I did not want to make a film about Julian Assange. I had already made several about the demise of American democracy under the crushing weight of American capitalism, imperialism, racism, and militarism. I had dreams of becoming a painter, learning the zen of trying to perfect a single picture rather than the neurotic work of trying to perfect the 129,600 individual frames that constitute a 90-minute film. I had dreams of living in Italy, far from the hectic pace of New York, London, and LA.

But then something happened. It was one of those rare moments when a plain brown envelope shows up on your doorstep. Secret, never-before-seen evidence was leaked to me about the Assange case, particularly about the lengths to which the United States had gone to destroy Assange and his organisation, WikiLeaks. It was harrowing stuff.

Part of why I didn’t want to make a film about Julian Assange may be for the same reason you may wonder whether you want to watch a film about Julian Assange. Haven’t we already heard everything there is to say about this man who has been called everything from an anarchist to a rapist to a Putin-sympathiser to an election-rigger to a reckless releaser of classified information, with no concern for the safety of the individuals exposed? I thought so. But – spoiler alert – it turns out I didn’t know anything. The movie won the prestigious L’Oeil d’Or at Cannes this year, and I was also awarded a Golden Globe for it. But I really did get here kicking and screaming.

The deeper we dug, the shakier and more suspicious these stories became, sounding hauntingly like the work of the very Pentagon Task Force we discovered had been set up in 2010 to destroy Assange and his organisation.

Like many people, I had thought Mr. Assange had been accused of rape by two women in Stockholm in 2010. Rather, we learned that the women have never called what they experienced rape and at the time only asked police to compel Mr. Assange to take an HIV-test after they’d had consensual sex with him and found him reluctant to get tested.

In fact, it was a prosecutor – and not the women – who made the accusation in an illegal leak to a tabloid, the first of many acts of prosecutorial malpractice by Swedish authorities that undermined any real inquiry into the matter and did an immense disservice to both Mr. Assange and the two women.

I had also been led to believe that Assange and WikiLeaks had recklessly released 251,000 U.S. unredacted diplomatic cables, exposing countless identified individuals to possible (or even real) harm. This, too, turned out to be untrue. On camera, we gained the confession of the person who actually did publish the unredacted Diplomatic Cables. “We did it,” declared John Young of Cryptome.org proudly, “not WikiLeaks.”

As it turns out, the tranche of unredacted diplomatic cables was protected by a password that WikiLeaks had shared only with The New York Times and a handful of other news organisations, until an investigations editor at The Guardian, in an act of astounding carelessness, published the actual password to the highly-sensitive file in a tell-all book about his time working with WikiLeaks. Young saw the password in the book, plugged it in “and it worked,” he laughed. “We were surprised.”

As our research probed deeper into all these events, adding further startling discoveries to the film, we were warned of the risk of intervention from U.S. and UK authorities, where Assange’s legal destiny still hung in the balance. So we moved our whole filmmaking operation to Berlin, to benefit from its strong protections for journalists and truth-seekers. We insulated our offices from outside surveillance, sweeping our facilities weekly, airgapping our editing and information-storage systems from the internet, and communicating only on the most byzantine, encrypted communication platforms. It was all a royal cloak-and-dagger-pain-in-the-ass, but it worked, keeping us secure from outside mischief, as far as we know.

Our film ultimately became less about Assange as a person, and more a harrowing glimpse at the lengths to which the most powerful government in history has gone to destroy him and, by extension, the public access to information his organization sought to safeguard. In the end, when British police stormed the Ecuadorian Embassy a block from Harrod’s to arrest Assange, they were invited in by Ecuadorian authorities, the result of a quid pro quo with the U.S. government in which, in exchange for expelling Assange from the Embassy, America would secure for Ecuador a $6.5 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund.

At countless points in our investigation, we felt we had entered a real-life spy thriller, and our task was simply to let the story tell itself. And there again, events beyond our control would write an ending we could never have dreamt of. Credit for that, I suppose, belongs to Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, President Xi Jinping, Benjamin Netanyahu, and a widening cast of political actors helping to usher in a revived form of military-corporate authoritarianism. For it is they who have made the whole Assange story a cautionary tale about today. For what was Assange other than a canary in the coalmine that has exploded into the smouldering rubble in which we now live? What was WikiLeaks other than an early example of today’s all-too-common technique of shooting the messenger, burying journalists and their sources who express truths inconvenient to those in power?

I’ve been told by viewers that the film changes minds, often reversing what they thought they knew, and making them realise how much curated Kool-Aid they drank over the years. I hope it does this, but I’m also aware that time and tide are doing a lot of the work, presenting us daily with a real-life dystopia all around us that makes each of us have to question our preconceptions and look again at how we got here.

The Six Billion Dollar Man: Julian Assange and the Price of Truth is in UK and Irish cinemas from 19 December and US theatres now. thesixbilliondollarman.com