It was unclear how this particular screening for Miss Sloane would go. As in, would anybody turn up?

Miss Sloane is a film about a cutthroat Washington lobbyist (Jessica Chastain), whose talents are channelled into a political war over gun legislation. The screening in question, at UCLA Extension's Sneak Preview series, took place on Nov. 9. The previous night, Donald Trump had pulled off a stunning election win.

Under the circumstances, the film's director, John Madden, was prepared for a potentially feeble turnout, or at the very least, a subdued audience. But he walked into the postscreening Q&A to a buzzing Los Angeles crowd.

"I applauded them and thanked them profusely for even showing up at the cinema," says Madden, who is British. "Because, after Brexit, none of us felt like doing anything but just going to sleep or walking away from it or changing our environments in some way. But the American reaction is to go to the movies – at least in theory."

Awards season is kicking off, Miss Sloane is heading into wide release and Madden – whose previous films include the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love, Proof and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel – is on the promotional circuit as U.S. president-elect Trump prepares to move into the White House.

Last week, Madden was at the Whistler Film Festival, where he talked about the weirdness of having his Washington-set thriller hit theatres at a time when truth is stranger than fiction in American politics.

"It's quite impossible to deconstruct the film or to interpret the film without the context in which it now comes out," he says. "But it doesn't disappoint me, because it's not like, 'Oh, my God, we've been totally trumped here,' so to speak. We haven't."

In the film, the blue-chip firm where Chastain's character, Elizabeth Sloane, works is employed by a pro-gun lobby group (clearly modelled on the NRA) to fight proposed gun-control legislation. On the other side of the debate, a scrappy boutique firm has been hired by a gun-control advocacy group. Things get heated as the two factions go to war.

The film was shot earlier this year in Toronto and postproduction was completed just a few weeks ago; the fast-paced schedule necessitated by getting into the all-important awards race in this election year. As Madden puts it, he didn't want to get "way out of sync" with the actual political landscape. The expectation had been that gun control would be a major issue in the campaign, although that was not ultimately borne out.

"It was sort of hijacked into a series of ever-more outrageous pronouncements, misinformation, flat-out untruths, post-truths, everything imaginable," says Madden. "Which actually, of course, brought to the foreground the bizarre political circumstance, exaggerated into a form no screenwriter could ever have come up with. So our film looks sort of modest … by comparison."

In the film, men are in charge (in both government and the private sector) but it's the women who get things done and who are the most interesting players – not just the eponymous lobbyist, but other women at both firms. For a viewer in late 2016, it's difficult not to apply the context of Hillary Clinton's narrative to what's happening on screen.

"We were certainly not blind to the fact that its central character was a woman in a world not especially notable for the prominence of women in that situation," Madden says. "But it had nothing to do with the choices we made in the film because they were in place well before that the possibility of a glass ceiling being broken was on the horizon."

The timing of the film's release is either a blessing or a curse. People may be extremely interested in U.S. politics at the moment, or exhausted of it. Madden tries to manage this concern by stressing that Miss Sloane is a character study, not a boilerplate political drama.

But Trump is the white elephant in the theatre. There's a point in a crucial early speech, where Chastain's character, looking straight into the camera, utters the term "trump card." At that first postelection screening in L.A., Madden says the line got a very loud laugh. "It's almost like a joke that the audience is sharing with itself."