"When the war started, we went to Faraya with my kids. On the 12th in the afternoon, we already had food, money, passports and petrol. My wife told me, ‘You know how to react very quickly to that kind of catastrophe.’ She didn’t grow up in Lebanon, so she saw in me a person who already has the fight in him, and I thought yes, I do know what it is to feel war. So I decided that I should do something, and I didn’t think of a documentary, because I knew that a documentary would only talk to the mind and would not make you feel.

"I knew that I needed to go further, make it stronger, give it a real [feel], because this is a war; this is not a joke. This was really people dying. I also felt a lot of hatred going into me and a lot of anger, and I needed to change all that energy into something creative, therefore positive. Even if it’s a drama, if it’s something tough, I needed to go and change it. I decided to go and do something creative, and at the same time I had an idea, which is a very similar idea to something that I wrote a long time ago that I hadn’t done. So it’s not that I’d written something – in the very beginning at least – very different from what I knew.

"I called the actors, and we started shooting and improvising scenes with what was going on. In the first scene, when she goes out of the port, it was a real Turkish boat, and they were real taxi people. I told the taxi people, ‘Don’t look at the cameras, but answer her exactly as you would answer her normally.’ She said she wanted to go to the South, and they said, ‘The South?!’ It wasn’t acting; it was being.

"And when it comes to the real people (the journalists and the refugees), you tell them, ‘We’re coming in with the camera. Don’t look at the camera. She’s an actress,’ and so on. But you don’t tell them what to say, and you let them react spontaneously…"

"It does say, ‘This is not my war.’ As a character, she [the character Zeina, played by actress Nada Abu Farhat] is not pro-‘this war’; therefore, she’s not pro-Hezbollah in a way. But he [the character Tony, played by George Khabbaz] is against his friends and against Israel. In a way, the film is not taking [sides]. Now, of course, it is obvious that Israel has destroyed a lot, it did a lot of damage, and it did kill [the character Zeina’s sister]… The criminal here is Israel; it’s obvious. But it’s not pinpointing Israel, and it’s not pinpointing Hezbollah. It’s just saying, ‘My character, my people, are looking for their kids.’ And there is one point where she says, ‘I’m looking for my child,’ and this is obviously saying, ‘I’m not pro X or Y. I’m just against war… I’m looking for my child.’

"Also, I feel that this film was necessary. We went out of this war very quickly, and suddenly we started fighting with each other. We did not see that we lived a huge [slap], and we were traumatized! Everyone is shouting at each other, and they don’t understand that that shout started with this trauma. It also started with the death of Hariri…

"The proof that this [film] is a necessity is that there was a girl who went to see it in Dubai, and she said, ‘I lost my grandmother during the war, not because of a bomb, but because she couldn’t get hold of her medicine because of the war.’ She cried a lot, and she said, ‘I was very, very angry when I heard about my grandmother. I didn’t want to go back to Lebanon. I was angry, and I saw your film, I cried a lot, and I decided I have to go back to Lebanon and pray for my grandmother.’

"For me, it’s like I showed her her wound, and I said now she can go back to her wound and try to heal it. In that sense, the film was a necessity… People tell me they went to the mirror. People tell me these kinds of things that make me feel that this film has to be seen. Not only is it a film, it’s a process inside us.

"So for me, it has to be shown, and sooner is better. Now a lot of people are afraid of seeing it because it’s called ‘Under the Bombs.’ When you see that title and you go for that film, half of the work of going into your memory is already done.

"You see, I don’t feel proud… Proud of what? Proud of being witness to those who died?… Some people were really reacting very tough to this film because it moved their emotions that they didn’t want to open, and they’re fighting back… You know, they’re fighting really hard and tough and being nasty… and I truly feel that some people are jealous! I don’t [care] whether I’m being known for this film. For me, the important thing is that this message goes through… I’ve made a lot of effort to show this film in the South. I’ve asked for it to be not allowed for those under 12. If I was commercially thinking, I’d say, ‘No, send everyone in.’ [But] I don’t think everyone should go in!"

How would you respond to criticism that you were exploiting the conflict to make your movie?     

"I really truly feel that this movie was created through me. I didn’t create it, I didn’t do it; I was a tool to do this film… At the end, this is a film for the victims. It’s not as if we’re hiding it; there is a message. And I don’t necessarily think that films have to have messages.

"But in this case, it was my reaction to the bombs, so people who feel like I’m abusing it and doing it for myself, they did not talk to me, they did not see me; they just reacted in a meaningful way… I took actors that you can relate to and feel with, so I’m talking more to your emotion. Critiques are more into this. They don’t let the emotion go, and I think the emotion is much stronger than the mind. The mind makes you understand, but the emotion makes you feel…"

What role do you think Lebanese cinema should play, and what role is playing now?

"For me, I’m more into the feelings than the thinking. We’ve lived through so many wars, and we’ve had so many tough experiences that necessarily it’s going to keep on giving us a lot of great films and great directors, because they have suffered, and they have a lot of things to say… It is tough for us to do films, but I feel at least one or two of these guys [Lebanese filmmakers] are going to bloom internationally. It already started.