Worthington and co-producer Nelson Lau knew friends involved in the tragedy, which saw terrorists kill 166 people and injured more than 600 over a three-day siege in the city, primarily in the stately old hotel. He read through accounts of survivors and others who described the carnage, the heroism and sheer terror of the event.

“I wrote lots of drafts,” he said. “But they were not active and truthful. They were survivor stories. They felt wrong and off. It took me sleepless nights to figure that out. There are some great stories of heroism and resilience.

“But the truth is, it is an overwhelming tragedy,” he said. “Most of the stories are of pain and suffering. To leave the audience in a happy place, the audience will park the story afterwards.”

Rather, Worthington chose to look closer at the issues confronting both the families of survivors, and the world overall. The pain had to be acknowledged, the basic question of mankind’s ability to survive such differences, such abhorrence, had to be present.

“For those people, who realise those questions are still facing us . . . once I realised that, it had to be truthful.”

The film, One Less God, was shot over 63 days at the Carrington Hotel in Katoomba, and sets on the Central Coast and Sydney as well as in Kathmandu, Nepal. One Less God screened on Saturday night at the Real Film Festival at Tower Cinemas on King Street, Newcastle. 

The movie, which is rated 18+, won Best Film at the 2017 Byron Bay Film Festival and the Grand Jury Prize and Best Feature at the 2017 Dances with Films Festival in Los Angeles.

One Less God features an ensemble of mostly Australian actors, with the lead role of Sean, a backpacker stranded in the hotel, played by Joseph Mahler Taylor, an actor who also lives on the Central Coast.

The film is apolitical for the most part, with Worthington steering away from a blow-by-blow retelling of the sequence of events and government response and military action. Instead, Worthington drills down on individuals.

There is a grandfather and his granddaughter, played by SukhRaj Deepak and Mihika Rao, who have come to the city to visit the little girl’s mother, who is dying of cancer in a hospital. While we watch the grandfather comfort and console the girl at points in the movie, things come to a head near the end of the movie when a pair of gun-toting terrorists knock on their hotel room door.

With so many people involved, there are thousands of stories. Worthington admitted: “as a storyteller, you have to cherry-pick a few”.

“The story of protecting a child – it’s not just a physical reality, but a psychological reality, to rear our children and move our children forward,” he said.

Working on a limited budget, and not being able to access Mumbai during the making of the film, created its own set of obstacles.

“A big part of the challenge, was making it seem big,” Worthington said. “It’s a theatre of the mind.”

One major tool was the use of news footage of the terrorist attack, which makes it instantly feel real and fraught with danger.

While the film has flashback scenes elsewhere in Mumbai and India, the majority of the action takes place inside, which also gives it a feeling of timelessness (the hostage situation played out over three days). 

The action moves between two of the terrorists (there were 10 members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba group involved in the siege), and an ensemble of hotel guests, who through various circumstances, end up in a single hotel room, hiding for their lives. 

The terrorists in the film answer via mobile phone to a handler, who is far away from the scene of the siege. Played by Kabir Singh and Kieran Kumar,  the pair seem removed from their actions, just following orders, albeit reluctantly at times, to kill at will, and seek out Americans or Jews allegedly hiding in the hotel. 

Meanwhile, the hotel guests come from a variety of backgrounds – an elderly British woman who is wounded by gunfire, a Muslim sister and brother from Turkey separated from their mother elsewhere in the hotel, a foreign journalist who was just about to leave the country, a New Age couple (Nathan Kaye and Nicole Fantl) just married in India, an American minister who has come to India to find inner peace, and the Irish backpacker, Sean.

It is in this room full of people from different backgrounds that the film finds its universality. Each person has their own beliefs, their own set of circumstances. But how they relate to one another  becomes paramount.

The film, called House of War in other markets, runs for 133 minutes. It was released in Japan last week.  It has been sold into Korea, China, UK, USA and Australia. Made by New Realms Films, based on the Central Coast, it was financed without government assistance. One Less God will show in cinemas in India in November, exactly 10 years after the siege in Mumbai.