I want the audience to draw their own conclusions, to tie everything together. The more educated and experienced you are, the more you get out of the film, Peck tells TT.
He has previously made documentaries such as "I Am Not Your Negro" (about James Baldwin), "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found" (about the first black photographer in apartheid-era South Africa) and the TV series "Exterminate Every Bastard", based on Sven Lindqvist's book about the history of colonialism.
"Fake news"
The new film's title, "2+2=5", is both a passage in the book - a symbol of the Party's power and its view of objective truth - and a play on today's "fake news".
Peck has taken a journey through George Orwell's life, mixing documentary footage with clips from the various film adaptations of "1984" and new material from the places where the author lived and wrote, as well as locations around the world.
When Donald Trump was first elected president, "1984" unsurprisingly became a bestseller again.
I read Orwell as a child, but I wasn't drawn to him, because he was sold to me as a science fiction writer. And I've been dealing with reality my whole life. Then I was offered access to everything he had written, both the personal and the private. It was a gift I couldn't refuse.
“Reduced” Orwell
In the archive, Peck discovered a new Orwell.
He was a humanist, unlike how he was portrayed during the Cold War. They reduced his way of thinking. Now we could change that, we opened it up so that he almost became a third-world writer. What he wrote turned against all kinds of authority, whether it was right or left, whether it was in Europe or Timbuktu.
Peck says developments in the world are something he has feared and warned about in his films for many years. But he doesn't believe a film can change the world.
I've been making films for 45 years and I've lost faith that films can change anything. People can change. What I can do as an engaged citizen is show what's happening. The rest is up to you.
Facts: Raoul Peck
Age: 72.
Lives: New York and Haiti.
Occupation: Screenwriter and director.
Films: "The Man by the Shore", "Lumumba", "Sometimes in April", "The Young Karl Marx", "I Am Not Your Negro", "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found". The TV series "Exterminate Every Bastard".
Current: With "George Orwell: 2+2=5" which has a Swedish cinema premiere on 20 March.
