GM FORECASTS RADICAL CHANGE - The Founder

2 FEATURES Monday 29 January 2007 thefounder
An interview with Giles Foden
By Lara Stavrinou
Giles Foden went from
being a superb novelist
to having his name up
on the big screen for a
possible Oscar winner. His book was
turned into the film The Last King of
Scotland, which has enjoyed much
success over the past few weeks. It
revolves around Nicholas Garrigan,
a Scottish doctor in Uganda and
his relationship with the Ugandan
dictator Idi Amin, who deemed
himself ‘The Last King of Scotland’.
An interview with Giles Foden not
only gives one an insight about the
process of turning the novel into a
film but also into Foden’s personal
thoughts and experiences.
Giles Foden’s personal history is
an interesting one and, to no doubt,
inspired the novel. He moved to Africa
at the age of 5 and lived in various
countries, including Uganda,
for the next 20 years. He explains
that travelling the country was very
exciting for him as a young boy and
that when it came to writing he was
‘trying to recreate those vivid experiences
on the page, including the
frightening ones, like seeing dead
bodies or towns on fire, and having
our jeep searched at gunpoint by
soldiers.’
He continues to say ‘I don’t know
if writing The Last King of Scotland
changed my feelings, really. It certainly
brought them into sharper relief,
and made me think hard about
the role of white Westerners in Africa.’
This role was something that he
portrayed in Nicholas Garrigan - a
character which some might call
weak. Foden clarifies that the character
‘is rather fearful, but greedy
for experience, and throws himself
enthusiastically into life and work at
a remote rural clinic. But the signs of
his blinkered nature and lack of inner
strength soon become plain…. I
don’t suppose he is any weaker than
all of us,’ he continues, ‘He suffers
from the kind of disengagement
that most of us practise when faced
with something we don’t want to
admit, even when the evidence for
it is right in front of our eyes. Some
people have said they don’t believe
that Garrigan wouldn’t have just
fled, when Amin’s chaotic atrocities
became apparent. But when I
interviewed four doctors who were
in Uganda at the time, the common
thread was that ‘life went on as normal’.
The character of Idi Amin, having
already earned Forest Whitaker
a Golden Globe for best actor, has,
of course, also been a topic of much
conversation. Foden’s vast knowledge
and interest in the man is the
only way to really understand how
he created the character. For one,
Foden doesn’t see Amin’s actions as
political. ‘They were visceral, a matter
of appetite,’ he explains, ‘more
guns, more money, more women.’
On a deeper level, ‘his lack of a father
figure lead him to worship his
original colonial officers, and when
Britain effectively abandoned him,
he struck out like a sulky child. He
was quite cunning in the way he
did this, and one of the disturbing
things about him was that many
of his overtly political statements
— like saying that there should be
more black people in the White
House, and that the US should have
a black Vice-President (at least!)
— were things which liberals agreed
with. Some supported him (as did
right-wing Western governments,
including America and Britain), but
eventually couldn’t square his antiracist,
anti-colonial rhetoric with
his awful actions. The damage those
actions caused — up to 800,000
deaths — mainly came in the civil
wars that followed Amin’s downfall,
but he and his thugs killed hundreds
of thousands and it was his greedy
schoolboy activities that broke the
infrastructure of Uganda and, emptying
its coffers, laid the ground for
another decade of misery. Thank
God, things are better now. When
I went back recently, I was amazed
how much more prosperous the
country was, and how much happier
people seemed.’
“When it came
to writing, I
was trying
to recreate
those vivid
experiences
on the page,
including the
frightening
ones, like seeing
dead bodies or
towns on fire,
and having our
jeep searched
at gunpoint by
soldiers.”
Amin’s obsession with the colonial
powers also explains the title of the
book and film. As Foden puts it, ‘Idi
Amin was fascinated by all things
Scottish. As a young soldier in the
colonial King’s African Rifles, he was
was put into a kilt, and marched behind
the bagpipes. As he said, “The
officers who promoted me to Major
were all Scottish. I have been with
them for a very long time and they
are a very brave people on the battlefield.”
All this had a significant effect
on the emergent megalomaniac, so
much so that he supported a clandestine
group of Scottish nationalist
terrorists. Called the Army of the
Provisional Government, they sent
letter- bombs out of Aberdeen, and
in a publicity coup managed to secure
from Amin a promise of sponsorship
at the United Nations,’
‘Amin was a supporter of Scottish
liberation for all of his eight-year regime,
even claiming that he would
take up the throne if need be. He
once sent the following telegram
to the Queen, with copies to Kurt
Waldheim, Brezhnez and Chairman
Mao: “Unless the Scots achieve
their independence peacefully, they
will take up arms and fight the English
until they regain their freedom.
Many of the Scottish people already
consider me king of the Scots. I am
the first man to ask the British Government
to end their oppression of
Scotland. If the Scots want me to be
their king, I will.”’
‘Appropriately enough,’ Foden
continues, ‘Burns Night (January
25), 1971, was Amin’s first night in
power. For Amin, support for an
independent Scotland was a way
of dramatising his ambivalent relationship
with Britain. He could
attack the Government as “British”
but still write letters to the Queen
— or “Mrs Queen”, as he called her
— telling her that he loved her, as
she was Scottish as well as British.
Confused? So was he. As he put it,
“I don’t know. What is to be done
about Britain? I am the greatest
politician in the world, I have shaken
the British so much I deserve a
degree in philosophy. But… when
members of the same family quarrel
they are always ready to forgive
and forget. I have many Irish, Scottish
and Welsh friends also. I like
the Scots best because they are the
best fighters in Britain and do not
practise discrimination. The English
are the most hopeless. I really don’t
understand why Scotland does not
decide to become independent and
leave the English to suffer.”’
‘It was in the idea of Idi Amin as
a parodic figure of Scottish nationalism
that my own novel was born.’
Foden concludes when analysing
Amin’s relationship to the Scotish.
Finally, when asked about the
film’s development from the original
novel he explains that the development
‘was very slow. All contracts
and arguments. It took nearly
ten years. The individual producers
kept beavering away trying to find
the elusive alchemical combination
of money, stars, director and
scriptwriter (not necessarily in that
order),’
“The film was
going to be made
in South Africa,
not Uganda.
Wrong colours!
It has actually
made all the
difference that
the palette of it
is Ugandan, not
South African.
Apart from
some scenes
of Mississippi
Massala, Last
King was the
first major movie
to be shot in
Uganda since The
African Queen,
which was made
in 1951.”
‘The film was going to be made in
South Africa, not Uganda. Wrong
colours! It has actually made all
the difference that the palette of
it is Ugandan, not South African.
Apart from some scenes of Mississippi
Masala, Last King was the first
major movie to be shot in Uganda
since The African Queen, which
was made in 1951.’
He adds ‘It was exciting, when it
finally happened, to visit the set and
see one’s characters being brought
to life. It gave me a boyish thrill to
drive to the set every day in a fleet of
cars marked LKOS.’
When it comes to what he though
of the film itself and how successful
it was, he, ever so humbly, comments
‘It was a hard film to make,
on a low-budget. Someone called
it rebel, renegade film-making.
Somehow or other principal screenwriter
Peter Morgan, director Kevin
Macdonald, Whitaker and McEvoy
managed to get all the mad sublimity
of Amin and his regime into the
story, along with psychological pathos
and a fair degree of historical
verisimilitude.
Cinematographer Anthony Dod
Mantle, working quickly with a
mixture of 16mm and 35mm film,
filming in Uganda itself, is the unsung
hero,’
‘There is an honest depiction of
the violence done to ordinary Ugandans
in the film, but it’s still hard to
convey history on celluloid without
creating a sense of spectacle. As
Amin says to Garrigan at the climax
of the film, looking into his eyes:
“Did you think this was all a game?
Mm? ‘I will go to Africa and play the
white man with the natives’? We are
not a game, Nicholas. We are real.
This room is real.”’
Having met the stars of the film,
Foden was also able to comment on
them; ‘Forest Whitaker kept himself
apart from the rest of the cast and
crew. The reason simply the need
for rest, line learning, following “the
method”. He had gone completely
into character, learning some Swahili,
spending time with Amin’s relatives,
eating Ugandan food with his
fingers. He even apparently spoke to
his mum using his “Amin” voice on
the phone. He terrified former BBC
Africa specialist Anna Borzello (a
woman who eats real-life Congolese
bandits for breakfast) by doing the
same thing during an interview.’
Luckily, it was not only Whitaker
that took a deep interest in portraying
the film and its characters as
realistically as possible. Following
in Foden’s knowledgeable and passionate
footsteps, the film gives an
honest portrayal that might just live
up to the book.
The Last King of Scotland
is currently showing at all
major cinemas and the
book is available from all
good bookstores