Africa Shocks

"Ha!” exclaims Terry George jumping to his feet. “I used to work for Hot Ppress too.” I’ll bet he’s sorry to have left it all behind now that he’s flying off to the Oscars and such like with Hotel Rwanda. Today, however, the director has little time to divulge ancient office gossip. He does, after all, have a rather important work to promote.

During Hotel Rwanda, his brilliantly affecting drama set against the Rwandan genocide of 1994, there comes a moment which underscores just how important. When Nick Nolte’s UN Colonel summarises Western acquiescence rather neatly for the benefit of Don Cheadle’s hotel manager and audience alike, he despairingly declares – “You’re not even niggers. You’re Africans”.
It’s one of many unvarnished truths presented by the film, which successfully distills the slaughter of one million members of the Tutsi tribe by Hutu extremists into a gripping personal narrative, which marries the personal and the political, atrocity-docudrama and Shindlerised one-man-made-a-difference heroism.
“We had to knock on a lot of doors,” Terry George tells me. “The West doesn’t want to think about Africa. It’s generally ignored by the media, and even more so by Hollywood. We ignore, mistreat and abuse Africa. I felt it was an obligation, to take people inside a story that they likely know nothing about. Because there is a sense that African stories aren’t as important and the implication that African lives are worth less than dirt. That’s ultimately what enables such events to happen all over again in Sudan or the Congo or somewhere else.”
Rather appropriately, and unlike many other films of a similar nature, Hotel Rwanda places an actual Rwandan character at the centre of the story. “I could have made the movie faster had I taken another route,” explains Terry. “I had been asked to write and direct a film about General Dallaire (the UN operative who inspired Nick Nolte’s character). He’s considered a national hero in Canada. But a story of noble white failure in Africa just didn’t appeal to me. Especially not above Paul’s story.”
Paul Rusesabagina was the Rwandan manager of the four-star Hotel des Mille Collines in Kigali during 1994. A family man with military contacts and a near unending supply of whiskey for pay-offs and bribes, during that chaotic spring, he found himself calling on all his contacts in order to protect the 1,200 people taking refuge in his hotel from the atrocities outside. When Mr. George came across this tale of individual heroism from Philip Gourevitch’s harrowing book, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, he immediately saw a way of dramatising Rwanda’s bloody political crisis.
“I had been trying to do a script on Africa for a while when I came across the work of my co-writer, Keir Pearson, who was focusing on Paul. As a story, Paul’s tale has everything. It’s a political thriller, a romance between Paul and his wife, Tatiana, there’s real character development and a story of ordinary decent values triumphing over evil. It was very moving and I didn’t want to make a film that was too reliant on documentary. Then you’d only ever get those already interested in Rwanda. It was important that we found a personal drama so that this was a proper movie, not a political rant.”
In the film, Paul Rusesabagina, as essayed by Don Cheadle, makes for a charming, if occasionally fawning protagonist, a pragmatist with aspirations operating in a complex system of corruption and back-handers. Fundamentally, he’s just a good hotel manager with a sense of decency who somehow contrives to keep his head during apocalyptic scenes. No-one, not even Nick Nolte’s self-disgusted UN colonel, is more surprised than Paul when the agents of civilisation, including the UN, abandon Rwanda to the machete-wielding hordes, and Cheadle, in fine form for his Oscar-nominated turn, expertly captures the sense of deflation and ordinary heroism without a hint of showboating.
“Even when Keir and I were writing the script I had Don Cheadle in mind,” says Terry. “I loved his work in Traffic and Devil In A Blue Dress and he’s a fantastic guy – a talented actor, a talented singer and a total chameleon on film. He really inhabits the role. He kept in touch with Paul while researching and on set he studied Paul to make sure he got the French accent right.”
The rest of the cast fell neatly into place after Hotel Rwanda’s producer, Alex Ho, secured independent funding, and with it, a free hand for Terry to pick whomsoever he pleased. “I had seen Sophie (Okendo, here playing Paul Rusesabagina’s wife, Tatiana) in Dirty Pretty Things and was impressed. But once I met her I knew she was the one. Nick Nolte actually heard of the project and approached us asking to see the script and I had already worked with Joaquin Phoenix when I did a rewrite for Ladder 49. We became good friends on the set of that in Baltimore and he flew down to South Africa for us, which was a huge thing for him, because he hates flying.”
Despite this accomplished cast list, if there’s one character that dominates Terry George’s account of the Rwandan genocide, it’s the sinister disembodied voice of RTML, the state broadcaster which famously called on the Hutu majority to rise up and squash the Tutsi cockroaches every morning.
‘Yeah, I wanted RTML to be a character in its own right,” explains Terry. “I believe it really was the single biggest factor in the genocide. Without that station there would have been an escalating civil war around the country with reprisals on either side. As you say it was like a call to arms and a traffic warden directing the extremists toward their targets. But it was spewing the vilest, most dehumanising kind of propaganda and therefore was able to mobilise the Hutu in a deliberate attempt to wipe out an entire population. It was clearly an orchestrated genocide. That’s the reason why the UN and the West are so culpable.”
Such liability was made all the more morally reprehensible for Terry upon visiting Rwanda in preparation for the shoot. “I went there with Paul. He was our cultural navigator although it was his first time going back since 1994. We went to a genocide memorial site called Murambi in the south. In April of 1994, the local Hutu mayor encouraged the local Tutsi to flee to the Murambi technical college for protection. When he had amassed 40,000 people, the Interahamwe came in and slaughtered all but four people. They threw the bodies into mass graves and sprinkled them with limes. But for some chemical reason the limes mummified the bodies, and some of them are still displayed in the rooms they were killed in, with missing hands and limbs. The saddest thing for me though, was that the limes made their skin turn white, a colour that would have saved their lives.”
While these traumatic images prompted Terry to ‘promise to tell the story’, as a victim of post-colonial forces himself (serving prison time in Northern Ireland as a Republican), he was inevitably drawn to Rwanda’s colonial history, a dimension cleverly teased out within the script without recourse to dull exposition.
“We had to make clear the divisions between the Hutu and the Tutsis – how the distinction was exploited by the Belgians during their colonisation of the area, how the divisions were fostered by their colonial power, how that created an inequality and the legacy of barbarism they left behind. They were a vicious set of rulers, perhaps the worst in Africa. Roger Casement certainly thought so.”
One particularly chilling moment in Hotel Rwanda illustrates the continuing and largely laissez-faire influence of former European masters. Just as the Hutu have begun storming the eponymous hotel, Don Cheadle calls up Jean Reno, playing the head of the Miles Cillines hotel franchise back in Brussels. He makes one phone-call to France – which backed the Hutu rising – and the savage troops are withdrawn.
“That actually happened,” says Terry. “That was the extraordinary thing about writing and making this film. It was inherently dramatic, and the crazier, more outlandish moments you see are the most faithful to life. Paul’s son Roger, going next door and seeing his friends slaughtered. Paul almost being forced to kill his own family. Hutu workers taking over the suites in the hotel. Over a thousand people under siege and drinking from a swimming pool. The militia invading the road. The rocket launcher attack. It was nightmarish.”
Happily, George has managed to convey this horror in a manner that’s largely psychological. While one incredible scene sees Paul driving along a foggy path, only to discover that the road’s uneven surface is due to the hundreds of corpses now scattered there, Hotel Rwanda manages to capture the madness and brutality without too many machete close-ups. This approach, however, has drawn criticism from certain quarters. At the Toronto Film Festival last year, some decried the lack of explicit violence as artistic timidity and Terry was accused of handling the gut-wrenching story with ‘asbestos mitts’. Just how he was expected the dramatise the plight of all million casualties is quite another matter.
“Well, that’s it. But to make a film about the Rwandan genocide that would have depicted the actual physical violence with machetes would have been beyond a horror film. In movies you can only reveal events by looking at how an individual reacts and responds to those events, unless you want to beat people with politics for two hours. It was important to me that the film dealt with Paul’s family and the lives of the refugees at the hotel, as well as the political story about the militia and the rebels and the UN and the West. So it was a juggling act with these parallel, interweaving stories, but ultimately this is a psychological thriller and the story of one decent individual.”

Hotel Rwanda is on release.