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Forest Whitaker Becomes The First King Of Hollywood - Page 2  E-mail
Written by Brad Balfour   
Wednesday, 28 February 2007 12:10
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Q: What are the most important things you learned about the culture and the man that most Americans don't understand?

FW: I think that most people see him as this sort of savage who had nothing to offer, but if you talk to Ugandans, they have a very mixed point of view on Idi Amin. One person can acknowledge, even say that he killed his cousin, and then on the other hand say, "I wouldn't be in this hotel, I wouldn't be in this chair, I wouldn't have this job if Idi Amin hadn't been here."

This was something I was trying to struggle and understand, something I didn't know. I didn't know the details. I didn't know what the behind-the-scenes issues were. I spoke to an East Indian man, he was a scholar actually, and he had amazingly positive things to say about Idi Amin--he was third-generation Ugandan--he thought he had helped the country immensely. So that was confusing to me too, because he did kick the Asians out of Uganda, he gave them like 90 days. But they did control like 80-90 percent of the economy.

When they were kicked out, the Ugandans had to scurry around and figure out how to run their businesses, and they were floundering for quite some time. But today, they are businessmen, and they really weren't before. So as he explained these things to me, and people explained things to me, like even theater. It was all run by the ex-patriats, so when he kicked the English out, he started a radio station and auditioned plays and then he took the plays and put them into theaters, and so Ugandan theater began to flourish. They have a lot of mixed feelings, at the same time knowing that hundreds of thousands of people were killed. 

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Whitaker as Idi Amin in his Scottish garb, surrounded by his closest advisers

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Whitaker making the rounds at the 79th Academy Awards Nominees Luncheon held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel

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James McAvoy in "The Last King of Scotland"

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The challenge of capturing Amin's forceful, charismatic personality has been recognized with a slew of awards

Q: And what about the way their society functions?

FW: For me Uganda exists inside the people. It's a very green, lush place, and as a result there's not a whole lot of old, ancient buildings, because of the climate itself. It destroys them. So you find it by going to people's homes, eating with them and listening to them. Watching them interact with their children, and the generosity that they have, trying to be friends and open their lives to you. For me that's what I got the most.

The fact that they took me around to so many places and they took so much care, it was really important to them that I understand as much as I could [about] the place and the people. I left there with a deep feeling of love. Other things I didn't know much about [were] the resistance army in the north, I didn't know a lot about Coney and the problems there, they've worked through more than other countries in Africa. The issue with AIDS, Unicef has done a program that's really helped it out. It's a budding economy of people who are striving. The Ugandans are really into education and trying to educate and move forward. I wish I could summarize it all perfectly.

Q: How did you feel about inserting a real person into an otherwise fictional story that centers around a white protagonist?

FW: The Idi Amin story is very complicated. He's a product of western intervention, he's a product of it because he was trained by the British as a soldier, they brought him to different places and advanced him in the country and even put him into the presidency, so it's very difficult to put him into this story without dealing with that. I think that Nicholas represents the west, the ravaging west that just comes in, as Idi Amin says, "Did you just come in here to screw and to take away? Is that what you came here for?"

I think Idi Amin's legacy, and the reason he lives in people's minds, because there are other people who have killed more people, there are others in Africa as well as western parts of the world, I think the fact that this man, this black man stood up and said, "British, get out, Israelis get out," is why people are so fascinated, and I think as a result it's important to take this character and move him in and understand what he was toying with. He was brought up in Africa, but he was embracing certain traits from the west, certain hedonistic features from the west, and it's a lot about this clash of cultures.

Q: There was a lot of criticism of films that came out of South Africa in the late '80s and early '90s that they were only through the point of view of white characters. Did you have any feeling about this?

FW: Obviously it's based on a book, but I think in this case the story is about foreign culture and the clash of culture and about cultures coming in and imposing their thoughts and their wills and what kind of monsters are created from that. In this case I think that Nicholas is not brought in as a hero. He's a very flawed character. And I think that what it does do is that you do go into the intimate side of Idi Amin.

There have been maybe three other movies made about Idi Amin, but I think in this case you actually get to go inside and listen to him, and Nicholas's character in some ways has to react to the world that he walks into. So in some respects it's not just about Nicholas's point of view, many times in the scenes it's about Idi Amin and what he's trying to accomplish and do and feeling, his own fears, his own paranoia, his own issues.