African apocalypse

The 1994 Rwandan genocide saw 800,000 Tutsis murdered by the Hutu led regime. In the West, it was a great and terrible news story and not a whole lot else. The tragic lack of intervention by the UN or other interested parties was swiftly forgotten – a selective amnesia many filmmakers currently seem keen to reverse. Recent Rwanda related titles include the US TV drama Sometimes In April, the Canadian documentary Shake Hands With The Devil and, most memorably, Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda.

Now, British director Michael Caton-Jones has furthered the cause with Shooting Dogs, a powerful and horrific account of the slaughter and UN withdrawal.
While Mr. Caton-Jones has enjoyed a most eclectic career since his breakthrough film Scandal – he’s wielded the megaphone at Robert De Niro (City By The Sea, This Boy’s Life) twice, discovered a still snot-nosed Leonardo Di Caprio back in 1993 and has also presided over Hollywood gloss like The Jackal and Memphis Belle – he admits Shooting Dogs came as something like a career curveball.
“I was getting tired of the kind of films I was getting offered in Hollywood”, he tells me. “Spiritually and philosophically and politically I was not the same person as I was when I went there and I made a conscious decision I wanted to find something that I could get passionate about. I knew that was not probably not going to happen in the states and I would have to come back to Europe and look for something. I read this and was blown away. I felt completely ignorant of Rwanda and Africa and I got really angry with my own ignorance. Then I thought, well, I am quite smart and well read so if that is the case for me it is probably the case for other people. I felt if I made this that could make a difference, use my talents as a human being and a filmmaker to illuminate those terrible events. And that’s the key theme of the film. That one person can make a difference.”
That may well be the case, but Shooting Dogs most noteworthy achievement is recreating the sense of utter powerlessness among those unfortunate enough to witness the genocide. Like Hotel Rwanda, the film depicts real events from a school turned temporary Tutsi refuge. Unlike the Terry George film, however, Shooting Dogs is mediated through the guilty Western eyes of a priest (John Hurt) and a young English volunteer (Hugh Dancy) and does not provide a Schindler’s List style happy (relatively speaking) ending. Nor indeed, does Caton-Jones flinch in his portrayal of everyday machete attacks on the Tutsi population.
“It was a constant question every day - how much is too much?” recalls the director. “We were filming in the exact spot where a massacre took place with people who had survived. They had gone through unimaginable hell and you were aware that you were asking them to relive it. Some handled it better than others and some couldn’t handle it at all. There is obviously some horrific violence in the film but ultimately it’s a rewarding experience not a disturbing one.”
In a bizarre scheduling coincidence, Shooting Dogs will be released on the same day as Basic Instinct 2, making for a stupendously incongruous Michael Caton-Jones double bill.
“Well, you don’t get paid for making films like Shooting Dogs so when they offered me a bucket of money to do the Sharon Stone film I took it”, he explains. “After all those months in Rwanda I was ready for some sex. It was a weird movie to make. I was contractually obligated to deliver an R rated movie in the States so I was completely at the mercy of the censor. Now, they are not offended by sex but flesh, so there are all these elaborate rules. They can be banging hell out of each other on screen, but as long as you don’t see it clearly, you are allowed three thrusts and then a cut, or three bobs on a blow job.”
That doesn’t explain how he ended up casting Stan Collymore as one of Ms. Stone’s conquests.
“Oh, Stan was terrific”, cries Caton-Jones. “I knew of his past and I thought that would add a spark. He was looking for a career change so I gave him a go and his attitude and work ethic turned out to be great.”
Well, that’s more than poor Roy Evans ever got out of him.