Andrew Douglas started his career as a professional photographer in the music and publishing industries. Since 1991 he has made commercials for clients including Adidas, Nike and Microsoft. Searching For the Wrong-Eyed Jesus is his first film.

BBC Four: How does an Englishman end up travelling around the South with Jim White?
Andrew Douglas: A friend gave me Jim's record, The Wrong-Eyed Jesus, for Christmas. In the sleeve, rather than the lyrics, there's a story he'd written. It was fascinating. The music was the starting point, it was so cinematic, but this story was really the motivation. So I called Jim and went down to visit him in Pensacola in North Florida where he lives. The plan was to develop a feature film script - fiction. But as we started to see Jim White's strange world I began to realise that what was in Jim's songs wasn't made up - it was reportage.

I began to think about a very different kind of film in which we see the world that generated that kind of music - increasingly Christ-haunted, with a church on every street corner. On a Saturday night you decide whether to go to the bar, then on Sunday you go and seek redemption in the church. So the project moved away from a fiction project into a documentary project.

BBC Four: Had you been to the South before?
AD: No. By the time I'd finished the film I'd been there four times, looking at different types of South.

The South of that film is very much a South of our own design. It's a South defined by musicians and storytellers we liked, and by the Bible Belt. We didn't care about Texas, we didn't go to Miami. Somebody at the Tribeca Festival in New York told me, "That's not an accurate portrait of the South" and I said,

Jim White: crackpot philosopher

"No, of course it isn't. I wasn't interested in golfers".

BBC Four: There's also no mention of black people or the Civil War...
AD: In my defence, I don't think it's a film that sets itself up to be an exhaustive portrait of the South. From that first paragraph onwards it sets out what it's going to do: it's going to explore a rather limited world. It's a film with a point of view and included in that point of view was that I didn't want the film to deal with the Civil War, and the segregation story is a whole other film. This is very much a film about the poor white South because I felt that was an under-explored subject.

BBC Four: How did you choose the locations?
AD: Even though we did travel to other places, we shot a lot in the one town - Ferriday, Louisiana - that gave us the so-called Stations of the Cross: the jailhouse, the honky-tonk, the church. A Southern town like Ferriday is very much the paradigm of the white South. They're all pretty much cookie cutter after that - some have snakes, some don't.

BBC Four: It's a documentary but it certainly doesn't feel like a traditional documentary. Were there any precedents that you had in mind while making it?
AD: Not really. Because I don't have a strict journalistic background it was not an activist journalistic subject. My intention wasn't to expose the Third World of Bush's America. But it kind of does - it shows exactly his constituency and it starts to illuminate his foreign policy, because when people in the South talk about The Rapture that is Bush's foreign policy.

It differs from most documentaries in that it started as a series of notions about exploring the music and storytelling in a place that had its own conflicts. Documentaries are usually polemics. This didn't really have that as its basis and I think that made it much more of a searching film. We had all these notions we wanted to explore but we didn't force ourselves to be disciplined in the way we explored them. It's a documentary in the sense that it's live speech, live music and live testimonial - it's people saying their own words. But it's people saying their own words very much in a context which was in pursuit of ideas.

BBC Four: It's also unusual in that a lot of what's in it, especially the music, is so obviously staged...
AD: I wanted a lot of music because the music we chose very much explored a storytelling tradition.

In my mind, with Jim White, Johnny Dowd and the writer Harry Crews, I wanted them to be all the same kind of testimony. I felt I had to find a solution for the music that wasn't like a pop video. I wanted the people to sing to me the same way they might talk to me or I might interview them.

Andrew behind the camera

So that was the guiding principle - how to make a song compelling in the world of MTV that was still very much live like an interview. Then if something presented itself on the day, like the clear construction of the girl singing in the beauty parlour, I wasn't scared of them.

BBC Four: How did you end up filming in the jail?
AD: We asked the mayor if it was possible. They just let us in and asked if we wanted a black cell or a white cell. It's a story about the poor white South so we took a white cell - it was already segregated. I introduced myself and the crew, and as much as I could I introduced the subject matter of the film. We wanted to know what's so small about the small town that landed them in there. Anybody who wanted to talk just talked.

Some of the prisoners were very, very articulate. There's one man who says very poignantly, "I don't know what happened, when you're a kid you just kind of dive in. When you get older you can't seem to go in the water so well". He's not really talking about jail; he's talking about life. It has a great kind of beauty and sadness to it, I think. Another guy really nails the main themes of the film, saying, "When you're young, you're either in the bars or you're in the church. There's no middle ground".

The interesting thing is that here are people who are poor, under-privileged and often ill-educated people who because they live in a culture that is so dense and saturated with Jesus, redemption and sin, have a kind of articulacy that the equivalent people back in England wouldn't have because they don't think about the world in such a consequential way. That's what makes a culture that on the surface looks rough and thin and under-privileged and bigoted, increasingly look rich and dense and textured to us. You could equally go to a Muslim nation in the Middle East and say that this addition of religion to a culture at such a consequential level makes for quite a substantial, rich, conflicted culture. All we do back home in our secular world is fight about football.

 Read an interview with Jim White

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