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 <strong>The</strong> 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 ‘<strong>The</strong> 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 <strong>The</strong> 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’. <strong>The</strong> 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. ‘<strong>The</strong>y 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. <strong>The</strong> 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, “<strong>The</strong> 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. <strong>The</strong> 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. <strong>The</strong> individual producers kept beavering away trying to find the elusive alchemical combination of money, stars, director and scriptwriter (not necessarily in that order),’ “<strong>The</strong> 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 <strong>The</strong> African Queen, which was made in 1951.” ‘<strong>The</strong> 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 <strong>The</strong> 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,’ ‘<strong>The</strong>re 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. <strong>The</strong> 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. <strong>The</strong> Last King of Scotland is currently showing at all major cinemas and the book is available from all good bookstores
thefounder Monday 29 January 2007 FEATURES 13
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