'The Last King of Scotland' set visit

Dave Calhoun visits the Ugandan set of the LFF's opening night film.

Oct 12 2006

It's a two-hour drive along a congested road lined with banana plantations from Entebbe airport on the shore of Lake Victoria to Jinja, Uganda's second-largest town. It's here, near the source of the Nile, that Kevin Macdonald is four weeks into shooting 'The Last King of Scotland', his first fiction feature and an adaptation of Giles Foden's novel, which imagines a close and dangerous relationship between Nicholas Garrigan, a naïve young Scottish doctor, and Idi Amin, the Ugandan general who seized power in a military coup in 1971.

For eight years, Amin shocked and entertained the world with an uneasy mix of bullish rhetoric, ballsy self-promotion, terror and genocide. Anecdotes of Amin's larger-than-life presence on the international political scene have developed into a mythology. Take your pick. He's the former army general who favoured cannibalism. He's the ruler who sent Nixon a telegram addressing him as 'my dear brother' and wishing him a speedy recovery from the hiccup of Watergate. He's the despot who kept the heads of murdered victims in his fridge. He's the leader who ordered a weekly consignment of luxury goods to be flown from London to Kampala. He's the president who gave himself the full title of 'His Excellency President for Life Field Marshal Al Hadji Dr Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, King of Scotland, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular'. He's the boxer who was the heavyweight champion of Uganda. Such is the difficulty of separating fact from fiction that none – or all – of the above may be true.

'No one really knows Idi's history,' says Macdonald, the director of 2003 documentary 'Touching the Void', who has spent the past few weeks dashing back and forth from Kampala to Jinja, always shooting on location. He rejected the idea that he should film his movie in Kenya or South Africa, places with greater technical support that would make for a smoother ride for him and his team. Instead, he decided to film entirely in Uganda (bar four or five days in Scotland), with Ugandans and Kenyans making up two-thirds of the film's crew.

'There's no film industry here as such,' says Anthony Dod Mantle, the film's director of photography, who's used to privations – he's made three films with Lars von Trier. 'But there's the obvious beauty of placing this film here and seeing the real bulletholes in the real palace and knowing they were from that time, the 1970s. It's important to shoot here. Yes, we'd have had an easier time if we'd shot this in South Africa, but I don't think any of us would have felt right about it. We're not rolling in money – it's renegade, rebel filmmaking; Kevin's taken on a big mouthful, and we're doing the best we can. It's a loose style, it's rock 'n' roll lighting. We're working quickly, and it's got a life to it, I think – it's got buoyancy. It's a mixture of 35mm and 16mm, and I'm shooting some scenes instinctively on different formats.'

The word from the film's crew is that crowds have been reacting strangely to Forest Whitaker's performance as Amin. A few days earlier, Macdonald was filming in a hospital in Kampala and Whitaker walked on set dressed in his air force officer's uniform, with ample medals hanging from his chest. 'The reaction was incredible,' recalls one of the film's producers, Andrea Calderwood. 'People were chanting "Dada" and then this woman started to curse him. And Forest just strode through the crowd. It was also the first moment that we saw how the Ugandan reaction to Idi Amin is very ambiguous. Some were celebrating him. It was a good moment for Forest too, he was anxious about getting it right.'

Today, Macdonald and his crew have gathered in the grounds of a grand, white bungalow about 40 minutes' drive from Jinja. Peacocks stroll on the manicured lawn. The flowerbeds are immaculate. A gleaming 1970s Mercedes limo sits on the drive, a miniature Ugandan flag flies on its bonnet. The house belongs to the Asian owners of the nearby Mehta sugar plantation, and Amin himself grew up within this estate. Amin knew its owners, the Mehta family, well. The story runs that shortly before the coup in 1971, Amin advised Mr Mehta, then an MP, that he was planning a military takeover and asked whether the Asian businessman wanted to join him. Calderwood continues: 'Mr Mehta laughed and thought Amin was joking because he saw him as just a gentle giant, a good-natured guy. Later on, it became too dangerous for them and the family had to flee the country undercover.'

At the other end of the garden, Whitaker wanders out from another, smaller bungalow to fetch a cup of tea. At 6'2", he matches Amin's imposing stature and he's adopted the president's swagger. He's in military uniform, a pistol on his belt, and is mumbling away at his lines, an African accent clear under his breath. He jokes in Swahili to the crew and later when he sits down to talk about the film he stays in character throughout. He frowns at the mention of the outrageous tales that persist about Amin and says that he determined to start his research from scratch. He learnt Swahili at home in Los Angeles and came to Uganda several weeks before filming began in order to travel around the country, meet people and talk to relatives, friends and former colleagues of Amin.

'My point of view on him was as a black figure who everyone has painted as a bad man and so I have to take all that with a pinch of salt,' explains Whitaker, whose Ugandan accent persists in conversation. 'Whenever a black leader says something that the Western world doesn't want to hear, then they paint him as a bad person and put him in jail, like Muhammad Ali, or kill him, like Martin Luther King. I'm not saying that Idi Amin was like this kind of figure, I'm just saying that you can't take stories at face value. I need to know it myself. And so I read all the books. I spoke to people. I watched films. He wasn't just some simple buffoon. If he was, he wouldn't have been able to run this country for so long. He wouldn't have been able to organise a coup. His approaches were questionable, but his intent at times was correct.'

Such sympathy may jar with anyone who knows – or indeed experienced – how Idi Amin and his government were responsible for an estimated 300,000 deaths during his eight-year rule; that he expelled Uganda's Asian population in 1972, giving them only weeks to leave the country under the terms of his 'economic war'; or that his rule was so often based on fear and threat. But Whitaker's approach is that of any intelligent actor: he's attempting to develop a rounded view of the man, which is hard when so much hearsay, gossip and caricature persists.

The makers of 'The Last King of Scotland' are quick to stress that their film is not a biopic and certainly not an attempt to compress the eight-year government of Amin into two hours. What the film does, like Giles Foden's novel before it, is sketch a portrait of a dictator through the pattern of his relationship with Nicholas Garrigan, the young Scottish doctor who travels to Uganda, newly graduated from a Scottish university, and is hired as Amin's personal physician after a chance encounter. Garrigan didn't exist, but Foden invented him to represent fact: he's a composite of several Europeans who admired and were close to Amin, such as Bob Astles, an aviation boss from Kent who served in Amin's government, and a whole host of journalists who found him charming, intriguing and, above all, good copy for readers back home.

'I only knew the tabloid version of Amin,' says James McAvoy, who plays Garrigan. 'The script plays on that image, because Amin played the media so well. The media loved it, and that's why he was let off the hook for so long. The reading public didn't go, "Oh my God, what a horrific character." They went [assumes a voice of fascinated glee], "Oh my God! What a horrific character!"

'Even here in Uganda, you hear stories about how General Amin was a funny guy, did some mad things – ho ho ho! – and by the way he killed my mother and my father. It's a weird two-sided thing. Some people will say, of course, that he was a complete tyrant and an evil man, and some people will say that he was the best thing to happen to Uganda. The more common consensus seems to be: what a fucking weird, amazing figure who was also terribly evil.'

Garrigan stands as a symbol of the world's ambiguous relationship with Amin. He first finds Amin to be a fun, charming and eccentric patron and only discovers the real truth about his boss when he angers him and finds his life in danger. Their relationship holds a mirror to the greater truth: at the same time as Amin was forcibly expelling Asians from his country or 'disappearing' politicians and members of opposing tribes, the media continued to indulge his comic, headline-grabbing ways, such as his claim to be the rightful heir to the throne of Scotland, which gives the book and film its title. The film also hints that the British government was aware of Amin's behaviour and even passively sanctioned his rule; Simon McBurney gives a compelling performance as a foreign office stooge who lingers suspiciously in the background. Importantly, the film reminds us that Amin was a product of UK rule: he served in the British army when Uganda was a British protectorate until 1962 and the entire context of Amin's rule was decolonisation. His values – however skewed and murderous – were shaped by the experience of imperialism and the desire to celebrate Uganda in the wake of its independence.

'Amin's portrayal in this film is about how the West viewed him, and Britain certainly,' offers McAvoy. 'And for the first half of his rule we did think: Oh, he's all right, he might be a bit harsh, but then this is Africa, you've got to be harsh in Africa. Which is so patronising. And it let him off the hook for so long. I spoke to one journalist, the person I based my character on the most, and he said: "The press failed in Uganda, because we didn't report it properly. We were selling papers. Instead of saying: 'This man is a monster and we have to stop it.'" '

Whitaker agrees: 'Idi Amin was very good with journalists. Jon Snow talked to me about when he was here and how charming Idi was and how he was easily won over by him.'

Until now, some of the best film evidence of Amin came from Barbet Schroeder's 1974 documentary 'General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait'. In this film, Amin talks of his plans to invade Israel. He explains his plan for all black Americans to speak Swahili and he says that he wants to send three tonnes of fresh food to help Britain through its 'economic crisis'. In reply, Schroeder explains how Amin has expelled 80,000 Asians, suggests that 'thousands' of people have been killed under his rule and recounts how the Minister of Foreign Affairs was found floating in the Nile just weeks after we watch him being attacked by Amin at a cabinet meeting. When the film was released, Amin ordered Schroeder to make cuts and made him comply by rounding up French citizens in Kampala and threatening to harm them.

Over lunch in a makeshift catering tent, Macdonald explains that he and Peter Morgan, one of the film's writers, were keen to craft a reaction to pointed portraits such as Schroeder's and namechecks 'Downfall', the film about the last days of Hitler, as a model. He didn't want to deny any of the horrific elements of Amin's rule, but neither did he want to ignore the fact that much of Amin's image and reputation were distorted by his portrayal in the media. The character of Garrigan was crucial to this.

'What I said to Peter right away was that I wanted it to be a Faust story, I wanted it to be a story about somebody who through their own character flaws, their vanity, their ambition, their youth or whatever, gets sucked into a world about which they're in denial or don't have any knowledge of. And when they find out, they find it very difficult to get out. I think the picture of Idi in the script is far closer to reality than received opinion of this man. In a funny way, as well as being a Faust story, it's also a tragedy about a man who starts off great and with idealistic goals and is brought low by his own character flaws.'

Perhaps the biggest event of Amin's rule was the raid by Israeli commandos on Entebbe airport, a moment that, as featured in 'The Last King of Scotland', marks Garrigan's painful awakening to the reality of Amin's Uganda. In the early hours of July 4 1976, three planeloads of Israeli commandos landed and rescued 100 hostages, most of them Israelis, who were being held by seven hijackers, a mixture of Palestinian activists and German terrorists. The raid was the last act in a six-day crisis that began when a hijacked Air France plane, en route from Paris to Israel, landed at Entebbe. Amin gave the hijackers his full support: he spoke in defence of their demand that Israel should release Palestinian prisoners and even armed them with more weapons. Amin survived the crisis but was weakened by it: two years later he suffered an invasion from Tanzania. He fled to Saudi Arabia, where he lived until his death in 2003.

The finished film certainly doesn't let Amin off lightly, but the filmmakers' desire to avoid caricature and not to aportion easy blame pays dividends. It's an intoxicating portrait, ambiguous and fluid. Amin, as portrayed by Whitaker, emerges as both volatile and vulnerable, tender and mad. The film refuses to indulge in the comic titbits that kept Amin in the headlines, instead throwing them back at journalists in an impressive scene in which Amin heads a press conference. There are hints, too, of dark machinations on the part of the British foreign service. Most of all, it's a film of impressive performances from McAvoy and, especially, Whitaker.

'We thought about finding an unknown African actor who looked like Idi Amin,' Calderwood says. 'But I always felt very strongly that we needed a very experienced screen actor to do it. It's a very tricky part to pull off. Idi's such a mercurial character, with so many shifts in tone. I thought that was more important than someone who just happened to be 6'6". We met a lot of African-American actors and we really had our pick, but Forest immediately got inside Idi's head and I remember shivers going down my spine when he said he understood why Idi would want to torture Garrigan. There was something really spooky about that. And I thought: That's what you want, not someone who wants to caricature the guy and turn him into a comedic monster.'

'The Last King of Scotland' opens the London Film Festival on Wed 18 and will be released next year.

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