What It's Like to Make a Show About the Islamic State | The State

We carried out about 18 months of research for the state National Geographic drama. We had a team of researchers based in Britain working internationally. There's a huge amount of material on social media. There's a huge amount of video material posted by the Islamic State. They are scarily proficient, and everything we've done in the drama stands on the shoulders of that research.

Although the characters are kind of composites of a number of real people, everything you see in the drama actually takes place; it grows out of the research that we've carried out. So, although it goes under the banner of a fictional drama, because the characters are fictional, every event you see depicted within it really took place. I think we've always felt that in an ideal world, the show would be an entity, an antidote to simplistic thought so people could, as I said, try to have a different understanding, a deeper understanding of what might motivate young people to travel to Syria.

I think part of the problem is there's a very unsophisticated view of the kind of guys from this country and elsewhere in the world who traveled to Syria. Around about 2014-2015, there's a tendency to just say, "Well, they're clearly all insane, joining some kind of death cult." In the drama, we show that people go out for all different types of reasons, and it's not as simple as people might think; it's a far more complex situation.

Hopefully, the drama gets inside in a way that documentaries can't. Drama is always engaged with these difficult forces within society, and the state is just another example of that kind of attempt. The Islamic State has been responsible for a number of appalling atrocities. I don't think we do a service to the families of those who've suffered or to those who've been caught up in their bombing outrages and survived with horrific injuries by simply suggesting that the people involved in this organization are insane.

It's our job as dramatists to hold a mirror up to society and to treat these sometimes extremely difficult subjects that are of current importance. I suppose our objective here in trying to examine this event, which needs to be happening in our world at the moment, is to try to take a more nuanced view of it, to get a little bit beyond the depiction of these people as insane or psychotic. Because how are we ever going to combat it if we don't properly understand it?