While conventional journalism, Winterbottom says, has so far been unable to do much more than show generic, "permissible" footage from Cuba, Road shows three distinct individuals, collectively known as the Tipton Three. Though there have "been hundreds who have been through Guantánamo, all of the news images have been of anonymous prisoners," officially deemed "bad people." This lack of specificity, he continues, "meant that even if you were shocked or worried about the fact that America had created this prison in order to order to avoid international law, you still assumed that these were important terrorists. But when you meet Ruhel or Asif, you see that they aren't at all."

If manipulation of language is common during wartime, the difference between experience and words can also be jarring. While making the film, Winterbottom discovered that in "trying to re-create a 'stress position,' you find that what sounds a bit uncomfortable but not really too bad," within minutes had actors "genuinely screaming to be let out of that position." The current language "hasn't only changed people's perceptions, but also it's changed the way [the administration] can behave." Kidnapping is illegal, but "because they call it 'extraordinary rendition,' it becomes something you can debate." Winterbottom remarks, "We're in a world where words can be used to mean the exact opposite of what's really there."

His own efforts to convey an exceedingly visceral, difficult experience on film involved a variety of means. He asked Ruhel, Asif and Shafiq to be interviewed for the film, despite their initial reluctance, to show the individuals who survived their two-year detention, and also 'so the re-creations could be staged as illustrations rather than dramatizations, where you had to shape the scenes and create characters. I wanted to avoid all that." At the same time, the news footage gave them a context. "For instance, in the middle of Kunduz, they don't really know what's going on outside. But it's quite handy for the audience to know what's going on, where we are in the war."

What Road can do that "normal journalism" cannot is convey "more of a sense of what Kabul or Camp Delta or the convoy is like. We were lucky to find places to re-create the prisons or other sites, so we could move from genuine archives—because there were cameras there—to re-creations. It gives you a more vivid sense of what the event was like," beyond what narration alone might do.

"In some ways," Winterbottom says, "the section that was hardest was Camp X-Ray, because they literally had to sit still and not know where they were or what was going on. It was a completely bizarre experience. And then, the extremes of temperature, the discomfort, the immobility, the boredom, the confusion: All those things were incredibly important to them, but very hard to capture on film, because there's a limit to how long you can show something, especially in this sort of film, where you've got a lot of story to tell, so you want to tell everything as economically as possible."

At the same time, a story that makes sense is not precisely what the prisoners experienced. And so you must find a balance. "You want to show, at least slightly, how disorienting and stressful it must have been, which has to do with an absence of framework." So a scene that shows bombing or traveling is "easier, because those events conform to ideas of what you can show in a film. Stories about people forced to sit for three or four hours a day on the ground, facing the same direction, those are harder to show in a traditional cinematic way." Especially, he adds, Camp Delta, where the primary pain was psychological: "They had a sense this was never going to end."