BBC Four: It's hard to believe that a film about the Georgian electrical grid could be so entertaining...
PD: I always call it a "dramatic real-life thriller about corruption, assassination and street-rioting over electricity in the former Soviet Union".

BBC Four: Some of the scenes could be straight out of a farce...
PD: Exactly. There is no deeper human drama than seeing people get disconnected from their electricity. Only when you don't have electricity do you realise how important it is. It affects everything: your food rots, you can't use the elevators, there are accidents because the traffic lights aren't working and so on.

BBC Four: How did you end up making a film about such unlikely subject matter?
PD: Piers Lewis [power company AES manager] and I knew each other at university. He invited me to Tbilisi and I stayed for two weeks. While I was there he started pitching the movie to me - talking about the crazy stories and the epic transition from a post-Soviet economy to a capitalist economy.

I thought it was interesting but had no idea how I could get a story out of it; it was too unwieldy. I was very reluctant but Piers persisted and kept informing me about what was going on. I then sent over a camera and Valery Odikadze, who was working for Rustavi-2 television in Tbilisi, shot a lot of footage of AES pulling down illegal power lines. That was such interesting footage that I decided to go back and shoot. While I was there it was the first week of disconnections so I had some interesting visuals and once I'd cut that together I said, "Let's pursue this further".

BBC Four: Did you have much prior knowledge about the situation in Georgia?
PD: I was a total tourist to start. It was a very steep learning curve for me and I became sophisticated pretty fast. Then you do start to realise the broader implications. When I was first there, there were the first presidential elections and everyone was claiming that the power was on during the elections but as soon as they were over it would be cut off. When you start hearing those things you realise that electricity and political power are completely intertwined.

BBC Four: It's unusual to see such a balanced portrait of globalisation.
PD: When I first went I was aghast at what AES was doing. In my early cuts it was a really negative sentiment towards the Americans. I quizzed Piers on this at length and asked him why he was disconnecting all these people. He would patiently say, "Who's going to pay for it? We can't pay for it. If they don't pay for it now they are going to pay much more for it later because it's cheaper to sustain a system than it is to recreate it." So I started to understand the AES view on it and I tried to communicate it in the film.

A corporation's motives are always to make profits but I don't think that it was the only motivation for AES. They wanted to make it work no matter what because it was the underdog and for such a huge company, that wasn't such a huge expense to try.

BBC Four: Piers seems like an unusual character to be working for a massive corporation.
PD: Piers was very much invested in the project. He was a workaholic and completely obsessed with making this happen. I think the values of AES let him work within that corporate structure. The management style is very different - they had a very de-centralised philosophy that the boss doesn't make the decisions, it's the guy on the ground who does. Whether or not you ultimately believe that a corporation can sustain those values, the people within it are often attracted to and support that philosophy. That empowered Piers and it also allowed him to empower the Georgians.

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