Monster's ball

From the moment we first see Idi Dada Amin (played with tremendous force by Forest Whitaker) passionately address the Ugandan crowds that swept him to power in 1972, we’re enthralled yet terrified.

In director Kevin Macdonald’s The Last King Of Scotland, a gruesome, white knuckle thriller based on the novel by Giles Foden, this real-life dictator bonds with the fictional Nick Garrigan (James McAvoy), an idealistic but callow Scottish doctor who serves Amin as personal physician and adviser. Their camaraderie almost resembles a whirlwind romance. They meet by chance. Amin seduces the young Scot with a high-life only a corrupt African dictator could afford. And then the Health Minister goes missing along with hundreds of thousands of others.
Whitaker’s fine central performance, a most flamboyant and monstrous display, not only allows you to believe you are watching a late despot who charmed the public as a pan-African champion while reputedly eating the innards of his Archbishop – it also makes you understand that brutality was part of the charisma. As a buddy film this is quite like watching the playground bully taking somebody under his wing as a mascot.
Two days after seeing The Last King Of Scotland, I’m in London to meet the director and I still find myself ducking for cover when I spy Forest Whitaker down the hallway. This is, of course, a bit of a turn-up, having previously only thought the actor a big, cuddly vegetarian from Texas. Even Kevin Macdonald admits he had similar misgivings about casting such a nice chap in the role.
“I wanted an African actor,” says Kevin. “But we looked around and didn’t find anyone suitable so we tried auditions in LA. When Forest came up I thought, well, he’s very good at what he does but I don’t think he can do this. He knew what I was thinking too. He said, ‘I know you don’t think I can do rage but I have anger inside me.’ And he went away and prepared a scene and just blew me away. He was so uncannily accurate. He had the humour and it felt like watching a great master of PR which, of course, Amin was.”
Casting James McAvoy was a much easier decision, and Macdonald is equally effusive about Scotland’s Brightest Young Thing. “There isn’t anybody else under 30 that is anywhere close to him,” says Macdonald. “He’s got the hardest part. He’s got to try and retain the audience’s interest and empathy, even though he’s a selfish guy behaving in a way that’s morally reprehensible. I think that’s a really difficult thing to do, but he has the charm to carry it off.”
Macdonald and the film’s producers decided early on that the film would be made in Uganda. But it was a reasonably risky gambit in a country with no infrastructure for filming that required a meeting with the Ugandan President Museveni (himself no stranger to the idea of “disappearing” people).
“Everyone thought we were a bit crazy coming to Uganda to film, but I felt it was the only way,” says the director. “Uganda has a very unique feel, with its great modernist architecture from the ‘50s and the ‘60s, which you see in the film when we’re in the Parliament building and the Mulago Hospital. I wanted to capture that. It’s a more realistic image of Africa. And once we arrived in Uganda, we were surrounded by history. Almost everyone we met had been deeply affected by the time of Idi Amin in some way. Being where it all happened made a massive difference.”
Did he see any evidence, I wonder, of the current regime’s alleged human rights abuses?
“Well, there are undoubtedly human rights abuses going on,” says Macdonald. “That was one of things I found quite disturbing about making the film there. You arrive and find incredibly friendly people in an incredibly welcoming country and the government giving you all the help you want. It immediately strikes you as a peaceful place. There’s no crime really to speak of. And then you start to hear things and you think maybe not everything is as it seems. In a way it’s a bit like the situation Garrigan finds himself in. You’re there to make a film. You don’t want to hear about negative things that are going on. You do feel morally compromised.”
Friendly and articulate, at 39, Macdonald is widely recognised as one of the most exciting filmmakers around. Having honed his craft making documentary profiles of film idols such as Donald Cammell and Errol Morris, the Scot won an Academy Award in 2000 for One Day In September>, his darkly thrilling documentary portrait of the Munich Olympic games. Touching The Void, an epic tale of survival set in the Peruvian Andes and Macdonald’s theatrical follow-up, was also honoured receiving an Alexander Korda award at the 2004 BAFTAs. As the grandson of the legendary Emeric Pressburger, this was particularly pleasing. It was Korda who had given Pressburger his first job when he had arrived in England in 1935.
I’m surprised then when Kevin, who has written the Faber guide to his famous ancestor, admits that he was at university before he sat down to his first viewing of The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp.
“That one really got me,” he says. “I was aware of what he did but growing up were a big reading household rather than a film one. I was going to Film Soc in college before I saw any of his films. With A Matter Of Life And Death and The Red Shoes, I remember thinking, ‘Wow, these old films are really lovely’. But with Blimp I could see all the little details about himself and my mother and our family. It was an amazing moment.”