The film isn’t just more Bush-bashing. That’s too easy, it’s everywhere. Bush is shallow, callow and clueless. I don’t feel sad for him. But I wanted to move beyond the caricature, the malapropisms, and capture the essence of the man. I had to park my own politics at the door.

I’m very much on the left. If Bush ever came on the TV I had to turn it off. Don’t be misled by the film’s trailer. This isn’t a comedy. It is bittersweet, satirical, naturalistic. Josh Brolin plays Bush without irony.

To me it seems the three triangulation points of Bush’s life are God, his father and the Iraq war. Evangelical Christianity, he believes, saved him from drink and failure. His father succeeded in everything he had failed at: he was an oilman, athlete, leader. It’s very oedipal.

He once told a reporter that he wished his father had lost against Michael Dukakis so he, Bush Jr, could disappear from the public eye and be out of his shadow. He also said he didn’t ask his father for advice about the war, but that he appealed to a “higher father”. He says it was God’s calling that he should run for office. He does things for what he believes are the right reasons, but believes only he can be right.

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Being around Oliver Stone is like breathing the air of a different planet. He once said that he “partied like a madman in the face of death”. He works as hard as he lives. He works from total intuition. He shot a dream sequence in which Bush was flying over Baghdad, surrounded by belly dancers, on a magic carpet. He dropped that but his vision is brave and unique – there’s no better director to tell Bush’s story.

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