With the film of his novel about Idi Amin's brutal regime released next week, in this extract Giles Foden describes visiting the crew in Uganda and the challenge of bringing a tyrant to life
The Guardian, Saturday January 6, 2007
…Idi Amin Dada was a man who attracted stories like a street lamp attracts termite flies. Yet I never envisaged it, back then, as a story on screen. I'm still rather surprised it has happened at all. As I write, Kevin Macdonald's film of the book has been out in United States for several months. One US review has described Forest Whitaker (who plays Amin) as "toggling between media-savvy jester and stone-cold killer". Just so.
The film also opened the London Film Festival. That was a strangely public experience for one such as myself, who spends most of his time sitting alone at a desk. From a balcony above Leicester Square, with the paparazzi gathered below, my wife and I watched Whitaker, James McAvoy (who plays Garrigan), Gillian Anderson and the other stars below as they came up the red carpet below. And then the real show began.
People have started asking me how I feel about it all. Mainly I reply: "lucky". Not so much in an individual sense, more as a generalised struggle against the indeterminate world. The whole business of film-making is a tug of war between the human will (writers, producers, directors) and external contingent processes (tax, "attachment of talent", exchange rates). It does seem like luck that anything at all gets made. And were it done, the chances of it being done well are almost off the scale…
…My agent sent out the novel. There were few takers. In the end, it was a company called Cowboy Films which optioned the rights, in 1998. Soon after, I was told FilmFour was willing to put some development money behind a script. I didn't hear anything from the film-makers for a while after that. The next I heard Joe Penhall was writing the script. He had written a couple of plays by then, and seemed to have a good grasp of the story. He delivered a first draft. It began with Amin in a boxing ring in the Ugandan night, surrounded by brutish British soldiers (they used to hit him on the head with a hammer to urge him on).
But we then entered a long period in which the film seemed to stall. There wasn't enough money. They might be fashionable now but no one was really interested in films about Africa back then, especially not ones with a "passive" hero, as my Doctor Garrigan was proving to be. It's no good telling film people, as I did, that the greatest drama ever (Hamlet) has a passive hero: there is nothing they dislike more.
In April 2000 I received a call from Penhall asking if I minded that a new play of his tangentially featured Idi Amin. I said I didn't see why I should. Joe's play blue/orange opened at the National Theatre a few days later. The stage was configured to resemble a boxing ring. The main character, Christopher, was a psychiatric patient who thought Idi Amin was his father. And the play dealt with issues of post- colonialism and hierarchical discourses. Amin's media promiscuity had struck again: he was, to employ a phrase of Sir Frank Kermode's, "endlessly patient of interested interpretation".
A few years later, just as it finally looked as if the film were actually going to happen - real disaster struck. In 2002 the Channel Four board voted effectively to dismantle FilmFour as an independent studio. In the wake of this imbroglio Joe Penhall somehow fell or was pushed off the plank. So it went on. Somehow, over the next two years the project was pulled from the mire. Director Kevin Macdonald and scriptwriter Peter Morgan came on board. It was during this period, too, that Amin himself died in exile in Saudi Arabia. This sounds significant, but its only real consequence was to relieve the film-makers from the possibility of libel.
Not long after Amin's death I read the new script, which introduced two major changes to the plot. I won't go into them now, as they would spoil watching the film. I wish I had thought of them. Morgan also solved the "problem" of Garrigan's passivity by turning him from a self-absorbed son of the manse into a kind of African Bay City Roller, up for kicks in the bundu [bush]. It was a role which James McAvoy was born to play. He lives in the next road to me in London, but we didn't meet properly until August 2005, when I found myself winding through Kampala in the middle of that rainstorm.
As the rain eased, I reflected on how amazing it was the producers had managed to persuade the money men to let them film here, given the financial risk if it all went wrong. Apart from some sequences of Mississippi Masala, the last major film to have been made in Uganda was The African Queen (1956) and that was no cake-walk.
…Whitaker, I soon realised, did not fraternise with the rest of the cast and crew. It was not arrogance or standoffishness (I'd met him before in London and that was not his style), but simply the need for rest, line-learning, and following "the method". He had gone completely into character: learning some Swahili, sitting under a mango tree chatting with Amin's brother, eating Ugandan food with his fingers. He even apparently spoke to his mum using his Amin voice on the phone. As Kerry Washington (who plays Amin's wife) said, "It's scary because he's Idi all the time."
Whitaker plays the role for real, alongside a mainly white production team. Mentioning Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King in interviews, he exploits Amin's status as a black power icon and someone with whom Ugandans have an ambiguous relationship. They in their turn sometimes took him at face value. During a scene at Mulago hospital, people started chanting "Dada" in approbation when he appeared - and then one woman began to curse him loudly. At another point, after successive takes, a passer-by asked why Idi was giving the same speech so many times.
The effect of the massively built Whitaker strolling onto the set was electric. His normal shyness was gone: he now exuded charisma. As he began to take questions from the journalists (some of them actual newshounds from Uganda's New Vision paper), I really saw why he had been chosen for the part. None of this would have worked without Whitaker. Equally, his swagger wouldn't have worked without the delicately judged flaws McAvoy elicited from Garrigan…
It was a strange feeling, seeing one's "characters" come to life like this: I felt oddly detached from it all. It wasn't that I felt they were being taken away from me, more a sense of relief that I didn't have to deal with them any more, that at last someone else was taking on the challenge of character development. I suppose it was a bit like a troublesome relative you have nonetheless cared for finally dying. The most satisfying thing was seeing minor characters, like health minister Wasswa - played superbly by Uganda's greatest actor, Stephen Rwangyezi - take on a verve they didn't have in the novel.
