Hello, everyone. You are listening to The Next Best Picture podcast, and today you are going to be listening to an interview conducted by Kristen Lopez with the writer and director of the film The Promise, Terry George, along with actress Angela Sarah Feion.

So, um, I got a lot of questions from people on Twitter that were very interested in how this

movie is going to try to kind of differentiate itself because the Ottoman lieutenant came out

recently, similar type of story.

Um, so I guess the first question that I have is how did you kind of want to differentiate

telling a story that most people would, I think, on the surface, say that they've seen before, even though they haven't?

Well, just to deal with the Ottoman lieutenant first, I mean, none of us really knew this was coming out until four weeks ago.

And then subsequently a journalist on the Daily Beast did an investigation

and it turns out it's connected with the Erdogan government and was basically the denialous

point of view told through a story that's so remarkably similar in storyline construction and look to ours.

So it seems to me it's almost a fake movie it's brought out here

ahead of time either to confuse people or present that argument.

Now for us, separately from that, which is we were never in competition. We created a movie that a film in the in the classic genre of the David Lean films

Javago, Ryan's daughter, Warren Beatties Reds, you know a great love story against the backdrop of a catastrophic event.

And our hope is that A, to entertain people,

which is the obligation of all filmmakers, I believe,

and B, to educate and hopefully encourage people

about the subject of genocide and refugees, which is so relevant today. So those were our objectives and

ultimately it's about how you universalize the story

and how many people you can draw into it.

But this was also about giving the Armenian people the feeling

that their story had been told in this great genre,

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