Shooting Rwanda

Q: How receptive was the Rwandan government to the idea of your filming in the country?

A: At the beginning, they were very suspicious but the source of the suspicion was very bizarre. The novel on which the film is based had been badly received by some Rwandans here in Montreal. Many believed there was too much emphasis on sexuality. They like to see themselves as prudish but it’s paradoxical because they used rape so much as [a weapon] during the genocide.

So a lot of people from the Montreal community made phone calls to their friends, family, to the people they know in the government, saying: "It’s a porn film with a genocide background." For weeks [after arriving in Rwanda] everyone was quite suspicious. Our equipment was blocked at the airport. But luckily I had two meetings with the minister of culture out there – he’s a very brilliant man – and we had discussions about our two cultures and about the dangers of censorship. Then suddenly and surprisingly, at a party given by the Canada Council two weeks before shooting, he announced that he was totally supportive and considered [the film] important. All the resistance was unblocked and everything was fine.

Q: Did it have any kind of psychic effect on local citizens to see this history re-enacted?

Filmmaker Robert Favreau. (Equinoxe Films)

A: Part of the deal you make with the Rwandan government [when shooting a film] is that two or three psychologists will be on set. They were helpful more in terms of prevention than in terms of care. Rwanda is an oral culture and the media don’t exist – there’s one TV channel, few newspapers. Almost everything is learned by mouth, by rumours. So suppose you are filming a roadblock [with Hutu militants stopping and harassing people], if [local people] are coming home at the end of the day, they don’t see a film, they see a roadblock and they think the genocide is coming back for real. So we sent the psychologists out two or three days before an outside shoot to inform everybody of what would happen, what the film was for, why it was so important for the film that things look real. Those citizens would explain to their neighbours, and after two days, everyone would know and be prepared.

Q: What was your own emotional state?

A: It’s strange. I felt the strongest emotions on my first trip in 2002. We were only [eight] years after the genocide and there were two shocks that I felt at that moment. The first one was a positive one, a surprising one, because after [eight] years, people were there talking, laughing, dancing, working, making children. Life had totally returned. It came back. But you get to know people a little more, they begin to open up about what they lived through at that time. I visited a lot of locations where the massacres happened. In some churches there were still piles of clothes and I was able to smell the odour of the bodies that had been in those clothes. It was overwhelming.

But when I came back three years later to make the film, I knew and intuited that my crew would feel the same thing. So the second thing is, in some sort of way it was important to me not to be affected too much. In some way I became – well, not cold, but I established some distance because I needed to make things happen.

Q: It’s so odd for a historical film to have so many living witnesses right on set. How would they advise you?

A: I began to look to the [Rwandans on the] crew to know if what I was filming was real for them or un-credible. They were my guides. Sometimes I would be setting up a location and they would just begin to smile between themselves. So I would go to them and say: "Why are you laughing?" They would say: "It wasn’t like that, monsieur."

For instance, when [the Picard character] goes to the house of a rapist after the genocide, we very carefully prepared a house that was not rich but not poor, either, with furniture, etc. The Rwandans told us: "But everything here was destroyed. When the Hutus left the country suddenly, they took all they were able to take and all the people remaining in the country just took and destroyed everything." So we had to destroy the set to make it realistic. Those kinds of corrections were very important. They inspired us.

Q: When you were telling Rwandans that this film was important, what did you say?

A: It’s more that they told me why the film was important. In Rwanda, women are very beautiful, very poor, and being seduced or seducing a 40- or 50-year-old man who comes from Germany or France or Belgium or the U.S. and marrying him to make a better life – that’s the real deal; that happens. So you can understand that a lot of Rwandans are very aggressive and angry about losing their women, their future, to foreigners. It’s a real issue and people in Rwanda told me I had to include that aspect of the story: a 40-year-old white man seducing a young Rwandan woman.

Then, of course, they said it’s important that films about Rwanda be made because if ever something like that happens again, we hope that people will react and stop it, contrary to what you did in 1994. The other reaction was this love story inside the genocide is a necessary insider story: it’s personal, it’s not just testimony. And then, and this surprised me, many Rwandans told me to keep the rape sequence because while other films about Rwanda have been made, this is the first one that shows what happened to a quarter million women. Women are still dying because the Hutus decided that women had to suffer more than men, so through rape and group rape, they gave them AIDS. Many women who survived will be suffering for many years before dying.

Q: Films like The Last King of Scotland and Blood Diamond, and your film, are all stories about Africa told from the perspective of a white man. Obviously, that leaves you open to some criticism: Why not tell a story about Africa from an African’s perspective?

A: Oh, it’s a real criticism. But even with two Oscars, did Hotel Rwanda [a film told from an African perspective] succeed in bringing a lot of people to the theatre? No, it was a very modest success. Maybe when it’s a story between African people, people from Western countries just don’t look, right or wrong. I was very suspicious about myself, and exactly this question. It’s why I looked so much to the Rwandans to know if the film was biased from a western point of view. I don’t pretend that I have been totally successful about that, but I can only say that I was very suspicious about my motivation and paid a lot of attention to that.

Q: Does the nomination juggernaut mean anything to you?

A: You make this kind of film hoping it will be seen by a lot of people. We wanted to do what the novel did and open people’s eyes. They were closed in 1994. The west didn’t react. We didn’t make any statement and move to help those people. The Jutra and Genie nominations will help a lot in that maybe the film will be seen more. Maybe its presence will be stronger now and people will get the DVD.

Q: You were nominated as a best director in 2000 for Orphan Muses. What do you remember about that night?

I don’t remember that night too well. Orphan Muses had good critical [notices], but the public wasn’t there. I went to Toronto without any hope that I would get the prize but it was a good party. I met a lot of fun people and that was it. This time it will be different. I’m not dreaming of all the big prizes but I’m hoping we will get a few. That would benefit the film, and Rwanda.