Diana Neille is an award-winning journalist and filmmaker from Johannesburg, South Africa. Neille co-founded two media startups with the intention of fostering long-form investigative storytelling and documentary filmmaking at a time when journalism is facing unprecedented challenges globally.

“Influence” was co-directed by Richard Poplak. The film was scheduled to screen at the 2020 Hot Docs Canadian International Film Festival. A digital version of the fest has been organized due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “Influence” will screen in Hot Docs Festival Online, which will launch May 28 and is geo-blocked to Ontario, Canada. More information about the program and how to tune in can be found here.

W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.

DN: “Influence” is a profile of the morally slippery British spin doctor, Lord Timothy Bell. Born into a modest working-class family, Bell climbed his way to the heights of global power, first transforming former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher into the “Iron Lady,” then working for the successors of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, later branching out into France, Africa, Russia, the Middle East, and pretty much everywhere else.

In 1998, he co-founded the legendary PR firm Bell Pottinger, which quickly earned a reputation for representing even the most unsavory characters — regardless of the circumstances. “‘Go anywhere, do anything’ was very much the bumper sticker,” Bell says in the film. Bell Pottinger worked for dictators, despots, and arms dealers; they took contracts supporting crackdowns during the Arab Spring, and they were paid over $500 million by American taxpayers to spin the world’s largest-ever PR bullshit campaign in Iraq between the years 2004 and 2010.

You name the dodgy, democracy compromising political cover-up, Bell Pottinger would somehow be involved. In tracking the particulars of Bell’s extraordinary life, the film examines the politicization of modern communication over the last 40 years — the winding journey from advertising to algorithms, television to Twitter.

“Influence” examines how Bell and his associates shaped and co-opted the very institutions on which our governance systems are premised, quietly entrenching one of the most sophisticated — and successful — business ventures of recent times: the weaponization of democracy.

W&H: What drew you to this story?

DN: In 2017, my first media business, Chronicle, was two years old. We were producing long-form multimedia journalism about current affairs in South Africa alongside an up-and-coming news and analysis website called Daily Maverick, our parent company. At the time, a notorious crime family known as the Gupta brothers were constantly making headlines because of their shady relationship with our former president, Jacob Zuma. In May, a tranche of hundreds of thousands of leaked emails belonging to the brothers was leaked to the Daily Maverick’s editor, Branko Brkic; a spate of intensive reporting followed.

Bell Pottinger was exposed in the leaks as the company hired by the Guptas — for a small fortune — to spin this massive corruption story into something more palatable. Their ham-fisted tactic was to exploit the single most sensitive issue in South Africa — race relations — to distract from the systematic state capture they were involved in.

It worked: we went through a period of intense and nasty social upheaval. I did a bit of research and realized we were on a long list of countries to receive the Tim Bell and Bell Pottinger treatment, and I was enraged. I wanted to take the admirable, important, and ultimately award-winning local reporting of my colleagues further, and expose Bell Pottinger’s years of willful malfeasance to a global audience.

At the time, my co-director-to-be, Richard Poplak, was on the main “Guptaleaks” investigative team, and one of South Africa’s most well-known thinkers and political writers. We both realized pretty quickly that the story of Tim Bell and his company, Bell Pottinger, was a tangible and compelling way to show, rather than just tell, how the disinformation phenomenon has become one of the defining issues of our lifetime.

Once we realized the scope of the story and how starkly Tim Bell’s life and career explained the rise of the so-called Fake News era, we knew there was no turning back.

W&H: What do you want people to think about after they watch the film?

DN: Where does your information come from? Who is creating and disseminating the narrative you’re currently absorbing, and why? Does it make you feel angry? Fearful? Confused? Does it make you mistrustful of an issue or a group of people you don’t know all that much about? Are you concerned about the extremely partisan nature of your politics? The total lack of accountability to which your politicians are being held, and the total impunity with which they handle their affairs? You should be.

These systems have been designed to protect those in power by carefully managing their reputations while pushing false narratives, promoting lies, creating confusion, and sowing discord. Gaslighting is a product, one that Lord Tim Bell and his ilk designed — and their project has been a huge success.

How do you protect yourself? By being discerning, reading widely but critically, sharing only what is verifiable and useful to others, and not allowing your emotions to dictate how you respond to the news. If you do, they win.

W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?

DN: Our biggest challenge was having to prove ourselves constantly as first-time filmmakers, even though we had years of experience between us in an adjacent, but apparently not particularly respected field among filmmakers: journalism. I can’t remember how many times we were told that “journalists don’t make good films.”

It was enormously discouraging at first. Richard and I tell stories for a living, and we both have a background in filmmaking, but neither of us had ever directed a feature-length before. We tried to be upfront about that lack of experience from the outset. For my part, I’m not sure that was a good tactic — my age and gender made it difficult enough to get people to take me seriously.

A DOP early in the process simply would not acknowledge my presence, much less my direction. Interview subjects assumed I was the make-up lady. My confidence dipped on a regular basis and I’m not sure I would’ve ended up making the film I wanted to, had I not had a supportive and feisty co-director who believed in me and backed me and my ideas every step of the way. Now it’s all done I know that’s just how it goes: filmmaking is a privilege and a right of passage and it’s not meant to be easy.

In the end, the challenges benefited us by stretching us and our resilience, pushing us to take every last detail doubly seriously. “Everything is your responsibility,” our beloved sound technician Daniel Hewett once told us after a hard day of setbacks and grumbling. He was right. We learned an unbelievable amount from the adversity: we called it “paying school fees.” I’m grateful to have had the education, but I’m also rather glad this phase of my career is behind me!

W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made.

DN: Our documentary is very much an independent film, with as complicated a financing structure as it gets. “Influence” is a co-production between Canada and South Africa, and one with a larger-than-usual budget for a documentary, because of all the international travel required. So our producers Bob Moore at EyeSteelFilm in Montreal and Neil Brandt at Storyscope in Johannesburg had their work cut out for them, particularly with us being unknown directors.

We started by getting seed funding — or “first money” — from our friends at Gatehouse Commercials in Cape Town to shoot a two-minute teaser, interviewing local commentators, and trying to convey the global scope of the story with archive from YouTube. That demo got us into Hot Docs Forum, a fantastic platform for filmmakers to pitch their projects to some of the top commissioning editors around the world. There, we were extremely fortunate to become one of two films supported by the inaugural Hot Docs Partners fund and, after miraculously securing an interview with our main character, Lord Tim Bell, were able to fly to London and shoot with him for five days.

Off the back of that interview, which proved to would-be investors that we had the access needed to make a compelling film, we were able to raise the rest of the money. It came from a combination of grants from the South African and Canadian governments and local film funding bodies, as well as licensing deals with broadcasters: ARTE France, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and eTV.

I should also note that Daily Maverick backed us through the process, so that I didn’t have to eat cat food while waiting for my fees to kick in.

W&H: What inspired you to become a filmmaker?

DN: I had a very conservative upbringing in a sheltered and homogeneous community that served up a solid diet of classical music, bland food, innocent hobbies, and church until — it pains me to say — well into my 20s. It didn’t occur to me that I could be a person who made movies even when I got a scholarship to study journalism and documentary film in New York.

Crafting stories combining moving images, sound, and music consumed me. It was also the right format to suit my love of long-form journalism. But my training prepared me to be what’s known as a “backpack journalist”: a one-man-band. So it took me several more years working across multiple media — and dabbling unsuccessfully in a bit of musical theater — to really comprehend that you didn’t have to be born in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard to make films.

I jumped headfirst into “Influence” understanding the mechanics and the steps of filmmaking, having made several shorts, but if I’m honest it was only halfway through the process that I realized I was making a movie — and if I could make this movie, I could make others. That’s where the inspiration really kicked in: figuring out it was possible.

W&H: What advice do you have for other female directors?

DN: As a first-time filmmaker, I wouldn’t presume to offer advice to anyone, but perhaps I can touch on what I believe has worked for me so far in my career. I decided early on that working collaboratively would be more efficient, realistic, and rewarding than trying to go it alone. I chose my closest collaborator based on shared values, quirks, and work ethic, but also experience. What’s the use of any of it if you’re not constantly trying to improve, learning from someone who knows more than you do?

It also really helps to have someone backing you and your ideas, no matter what. Filmmaking is hard and all-consuming. It makes an immeasurable difference to share in the work, the uncertainty, the setbacks, the adventures, and the incredible satisfaction that come from doing this job. There is nothing more rewarding than reveling in the eventual wins with someone who knows exactly what it took to get there.

W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.

DN: It’s impossible to name just one, but I’d start with my favorite film of the year, “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” by Céline Sciamma, which I found to be an extraordinary portrayal of the battle between the will for independence and the desire to belong to someone. It is the most compelling period piece I’ve watched in some time, yet it feels totally contemporary. It’s a masterpiece.

I must also mention the directors and producers Betsy West and Julie Cohen, who are driving the success of female filmmakers in the documentary space, with works like “RBG.” Betsy is a professor at my alma mater and she gave me my first internship at her company, Storyville Films. It was the first time I interacted with a woman fully engaged in the industrial process of filmmaking, and Betsy was and is a consummate professional in every sense of the word. She’s a force.

Here at home, I’m very much looking forward to the upcoming films “Milisuthando” by Milisuthando Bongela and “Flatland” by Jenna Bass. These women are two of the most exciting filmmakers in South Africa at the moment, with big, badass futures ahead of them.

Lastly, I simply love “Booksmart” by Olivia Wilde. It’s joyous, poignant, and hilarious, and creates nostalgia for my own unchequered youth!

W&H: How are you adjusting to life during the COVID-19 pandemic? Are you keeping creative, and if so, how?

DN: I am in the extremely fortunate position to have financial stability during this time — a situation I’m all too aware is unusual during these most extraordinary of times. For that reason, I am trying to pack as much work into these days and weeks as I can, both on getting “Influence” out to a locked-down world and figuring out how to produce our new project, a three-part, globetrotting investigative series, during a pandemic with an uncertain end date.

But I’m also doing quite a bit of reporting on some pressing South African current affairs, and hopefully launching a new podcast in the next couple of weeks — très original, I know.

Lastly, I’m chipping away at a screenplay I’ve had in mind for quite some time now that I’m determined to get made.