You shouldn’t take liberties. The Armenian genocide that plays out behind the love story in The Promise happened the way we depict it, no question. It was very widely reported in the American press at the time, though it was ignored or buried by historians after the end of the First World War.

English-language film-makers have tried — and failed — to address the genocide before. In the Thirties, MGM started work on its adaptation of Franz Werfel’s book, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh — his account of the last stand of a small group of Armenian resistance fighters and their subsequent rescue by the French navy — but the film company succumbed to pressure from the Turkish government to scrap the production.

Werfel’s book was banned in the Third Reich in 1934. Unsurprisingly perhaps, since a week before the invasion of Poland in 1939 Hitler was recorded as saying that the Poles should be exterminated because “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” History was about to repeat itself.

History repeated itself again during the shooting of The Promise, making it horribly relevant. Unspeakable things were happening in the Middle East, and thousands of people, were fleeing war and the brutal occupation of their homeland by Islamic fundamentalists.

Actually, this wasn’t just history being re-enacted — it was history unfolding in much the same place (during the genocide, the Turks said they were marching the Armenians towards desert camps, near Aleppo, but of course they never got there).

I filmed certain scenes that reflected what was going on around us because the similarities were so striking. One scene brings to mind the body of the Kurdish boy, Alan Kurdi, who was washed ashore in Turkey.

What drove the Turks to target the Armenians is what drives Isis to kill the Yazidi Kurds. But the Armenians at least had help from the Allied forces during wartime.

Today’s refugees face hatred. I wanted the film to spark an awareness in audiences that those refugees are no different from the Armenians, or the “huddled masses” that appear in the poem that’s engraved beneath the Statue of Liberty.

I was blessed with a tremendous cast who really got behind what we were trying to achieve: the male leads Oscar Isaac, Christian Bale; their love interest Charlotte Le Bon; Shohreh Aghdashloo, the American-Iranian actress; and Marwan Kenzari. And our cinematographer, Javie Aguirresarobe, framed their performances beautifully.

As told to Joseph Furey