“Every movie demands something different,” Foster explains, when we start to dissect her performance. “And maybe that’s why I’ve never tried to play real characters, because sometimes I feel like I can’t change the things that I need to change, in order for the movie to work. And very often biopics are like, the person was born, did something, met famous people and they died, which to me, it’s not good screenplay,” she says.

From the outset, Foster says, she did not want to simply mimic Hollander. “Even though I might look like her, or may even physically move like her, I didn’t want it to all be about physical mannerisms, I wanted to make sure that the character was able to change in ways that serve the movie,” Foster says.

“I wanted to see the change that came over Nancy, who she was when she met Mohamedou, walked into that cell and how she changed over time.”

For Hollander, there was a certain peculiarity about watching someone play her. Amplifying this was the fact that she knew Foster personally and, later in our conversation, admits to having been “terrified” by Foster’s most famous film performance, that of FBI agent Clarice Starling in Jonathan Demme’s psychological horror film The Silence of the Lambs. The admission makes both women laugh.

“Jodie did warn me that it would not be an impersonation,” Hollander says. “And it was, and it wasn’t. A lot of the words that came out of her mouth were my words, and it was fun to see her say things that I really say and said, or wrote. But there are some things she does in the movie that I don’t think I would do, or I wouldn’t do quite like she did them.”

Drily offering to set the record straight, Hollander says she is nicer in real life than she might seem in The Mauritanian. “And I think that eight years of jujitsu taught me not to be as confrontational as I used to be, and to let the government’s power kill itself. But Jodie is playing me 15 years ago. I don’t think I’m quite as curt as she is. Although most of my friends and colleagues say she’s got me to a tee.”

Much of the power of the narrative of The Mauritanian lies in its adherence to fact. Even military prosecutor Lt Colonel Stuart Couch (Benedict Cumberbatch), who might have been bent into a courtroom villain for the purpose of the film, turns unexpectedly into one of the story’s heroes. It is rare to see such narrative honesty at a time when many contemporary historical dramas, such as The Crown, often smudge the line of accuracy to amplify the drama.

“That’s where [director] Kevin Macdonald comes in,” says Foster. “He’s a great documentarian, somebody who really, really cares about the facts and spends a lot of time researching. His voice is grounded in facts but he has a real understanding of cinema too. And sometimes the real story is full of many more contradictions than you would come up with if we were to just make a movie out of thin air.”

Early in the film’s development, Hollander and Macdonald worked closely. “I gave them transcripts, I gave them little details in the movie, and I gave them all of the legal detail I could,” Hollander says. Hollander also shared with Macdonald and screenwriters M.B. Traven, Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani her experiences with Salahi; they reproduced them faithfully in the film.

“They are conversations we really had, on and off, over the years,” Hollander says. In one, she simply puts her hands on Salahi’s and they sit in silence. In another, she is perturbed when he reveals to her that he has stopped praying. “When he said, it’s hard to have faith here, that troubled me a great deal, because I knew that meant he was depressed and there was not much I could do about it, ” Hollander says.

“There were times when I couldn’t really give him hope, except the hope that I would never leave, that we would always be there, that we would keep coming for however many years it took and that he had to hope that he would get out,” Hollander adds.

The film also explores the thin legal line that navigates the right and the wrong of the law, particularly when it comes up against the intense emotion that such high-profile cases can provoke. “Everyone has a right to a defence but doesn’t it bother you working for someone like this?” is an accusation shot at Hollander in one scene. She shoots back: “I’m not just defending him, I’m defending the rule of law.”

“What Jodie says in the film, and I’m so glad that got into the film, is, I’m defending the rule of law,” Hollander says. “And that’s true. We have to have rules. As a criminal defence lawyer, as Jodie often says, I have lost a lot of cases. But I also think that I have won more than my share, because I think I’m just dogged, and I dig in and figure out how to win cases that some people think can’t be won.”

Guantanamo Bay, which sits on the southeastern tip of Cuba, becomes a key element in the story-telling. “They built this place out of the reach of the courts for a reason,” Hollander says in the film.

Hollander is hesitant to blame Guantanamo itself, but rather those who “created Guantanamo and who worked there and who encouraged those women to sexually abuse prisoners,” she says. “And I’m sure they hated doing it, but they did it, because they were good soldiers. I would not say it’s Guantanamo, but it’s Bush, it’s Rumsfeld. It’s the people who set it up and said ‘we’re outside the law, do whatever you want to these prisoners’.”

Though Hollander and Clarice Starling both stepped up to face the apparent monster in the room, the comparison between the two roles makes Foster uneasy. “The Silence of the Lambs analogy, I don’t really think it fits,” she says firmly. The monsters in the room here, she says, are the systems that are put in place to oppress people.

“Nancy’s job is to challenge the system, and the system needs to be challenged,” Foster says. “But Guantanamo in itself is just a bunch of buildings, on the beautiful seaside. It’s the people that invested them, that used fear and terror to control him.”

Though the story deals with events between 2002 and 2010 — Salahi was granted his freedom by a US judge in 2010, though he would not actually be released from Guantanamo for another six years — the themes of the film talk very much to contemporary America.

“America has never been the ideal that we think of it as,” says Hollander. “It started with ethnic cleansing and the genocide of Native Americans. And then there were the slaves, and then every minority that came into this country initially was crushed. It was started by white, land-owning Protestant men. And when it says, all men are created equal, that’s really what they meant.

“Now we want to broaden that so that it means everyone,” Hollander adds. “That’s not what the founders ... meant, but that’s what we have progressed to at this time, except we don’t always do it. Are the millions of people who voted for Trump all insurrectionists? Of course not. Most of them aren’t. But we need to find a way to get through to these people. And frankly, I don’t know how you do that.”

But both Hollander and Foster are certain on one point: closing the prison at Guantanamo is a start.

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“It’s more of a symbol than anything else, it’s a symbol of lawlessness and throwing away the Constitution and throwing away democracy,” Foster says. “Right now there are 40 or so people there, being guarded by thousands of military personnel. [Some] are in the same situation as Mohamedou, where they’ve never been charged. They should have been let go. The US government just hasn’t even been able to figure out where they need to go.”

As for America itself, Foster describes herself as a romantic. “I still believe that the government that we have, or the foundations of the government that we have, is meant to grow and change and get better, that America is a potential that it has never reached,” she says. “And I hope that we can get better.”

The Mauritanian streams on Amazon Prime Video from March 24.