Adam Curtis: I think there’s a very clear idea that we now live with a kind of ‘every day’ view of the world that’s made up of surface images. People move from one image to another, and they can’t see how everything fits together. This is a culture that tells you that everything is chaotic and random.

Dean Kissick: You’ve described how you use archive footage, montage and narration to create a sense of hidden patterns. How does that method help people to ‘escape’ this flattened public life?

AC: The archive allows you to build a narrative again — to show how institutions, individuals and technologies are connected across time. It is a way of making causality visible in a world that’s been sold the idea that causality no longer exists.

DK: Your films often wrestle with systems of power and with the ways expertise and emotion interact. Where does hope sit in that work?

AC: I don’t think hope is the right word. What I’m trying to do is to create a different form of attention. If you can slow people down and get them to see larger patterns, they might act differently.

(The interview continues with reflections on neoliberalism, data, social media, therapy culture and the stylistic choices behind Curtis’s films, exploring how storytelling can reframe modern anxieties and propose ways to think beyond the 21st-century condition.)