It wasn’t
really a script. I came across a play by Michael Ashton that grew later into the film.
My response for it was that it was an extraordinary subject. This
conflict between the Archbishop and Blomfeld can be seen as conflict
between two characters but also it can be seen as making up as one
character. We both have aspects of both those men in us. That became
fascinating to me. While I was thinking about this subject, I was
watching a CNN program and it was coming from a small village in
Rwanda, a rural village. There was a Rwandan farmer, a very poor woman
sitting in her hut being interviewed. The interviewer said this is
Mrs. X and she lost four members of her family - her children and her
husband in the Tutsi Hutu genocide. And then the
interviewer panicked a little bit and the camera pans across to a young
man sitting on the other side of the hut. This young man who comes to
tea every Friday is the man who killed her family. And the
interviewer turns back, the blonde CNN interviewer with the total
white face, and says to the Rwandan woman. ''How did you do
this? How could you do that?'' Then the woman said something
profound. It gripped me to the television. In a simple way, she
said, ''I love my daughter, my children more than my life. I love my
husband as much as my life. Am I to turn that love into hate? Am I to
turn their memory, their loving memory into acts of hate. No. I
use that love for them to give to him. (She pointed at the young
man. )... So he could see what he has taken away. He can see what he
has lacked. And he can learn their love... through forgiveness. That
is how I honored them. '' I was really startled by this because
I thought… just in the tone of the American interviewer, this was
so interesting that it was difficult for her to come to terms with.
But I was thinking this is also innate. This ability to have
compassion and forgiveness is probably innate in human beings.
And certainly, science would tell us that it exists in higher
primates.
What was the biggest attraction for you in making the film?
The biggest
attraction of making this film was its challenge. This was going to
be a notoriously difficult film to make. For it to really work, we would
probably have to film in a maximum security prison, because we couldn’t
afford to build one, that is for sure. Even if we could, it wouldn’t
be real. It would
probably mean working with real prisoners - either in the prison or
ex-convicts who then probably have to go back into prison. It
would have to be shot in South Africa. I would need to find two
amazing actors who be capable of playing these two characters. All of
those challenges are so undoubtedly attractive because with a
challenge like that one wants to try to achieve to rise to the
occasion.
Also, the
subject matter is extraordinarily attractive. Because I think of all
the periods in human history, although there are many, this is
one in which forgiveness needs to be discussed and thought about.
Particularly at a time when America and in particular, many parts of
Europe, are beginning to become, I would say, addicted to demonizing
others as a way of living. And that is dangerous and at root,
inhuman. Although humans are capable of doing it.
Eric Bana and Forest Whitaker are sensational in the film. What was it like working with them on the movie? What do you think they brought to the movie?
First of
all, I agree. They are both sensational actors. I think they brought
honesty. They brought total commitment to the characters. They
brought a kind of intelligence - emotional intelligence and
commitment. And I think many actors would find it difficult to bring.
Forest as a
character is a remarkable man. He has a great inner gentleness. Also,
he is not just an actor, he has a foundation to deal with conflict
resolution. He is engaged socially. And that engagement obviously
enables him to connect to the real Tutu and the Tutu that he is
constructing.
Eric has an
extraordinarily ability to be both kind of a domineering male but
also fragile. And that particularly combination is really quite
interesting. Not easily achieved but he has the ability to do that.
And then putting the two of them together, they began to create a
chemistry that comes alive really on the screen in a way that was
really quite remarkable. That was a wonderful thing to work with.
It was like working with the finest paints. It was like cooking the
finest dish - one just had to get the right ingredients to get the
proportion and it was going to cook itself.
You have gotten some incredible performances from actors over the years. In general, what is your process with your actors?
It's
my own process that I kind of developed over the years. It is based
on the following premise really, and that is that as human beings, we
are made up of our memories. We use memories both to work where we
are, where we were and where we might be. In other words, let’s say
you are going to do an interview with somebody. All the past
interviews you have had quickly play in your head and will bring
a certain response in you about how you are going to handle the
interview. It comes whether you are going to be a little nervous about
it, whether you are going to take it easy or no matter what it might be,
and that almost applies to everything in life. Whatever situation,
really. Somewhere deep inside you, a very quick comparison happens
with all the other times you have been in similar kinds of
situations, and that brings the way you behave. It seems to me where
I work, I don’t really give actors psychological notes, but I do
work with memories. I work with family experiences. I work with
dreams. I work with storytelling. I use all kinds of different
techniques which are designed to take the actor, without telling him
or her exactly where they are going, into a place when they are
reacting with other actors and where there will be emotional triggers that
will take them by surprise. In other words, they won’t always know
exactly what they are going to do in the scene but they trust that
something living will happen because they are creating a living
person inside of them. That is my job as well as to create a very
real world for them - physically in terms of the sets and where
we are shooting, etc.
 | |
| THE SCARLET LETTER |
Well, I
think those two things are the most crucial part of being a human
being. And I think one can never have enough of those stories because
that happens to one’s everyday life. I am sure everybody reading this will have all kinds of instances in their
life where they find the need to forgive someone or need to be
forgiven. It's just the way that life is. The exercise of
forgiveness and the ability to ask for forgiveness is a remarkable
human attribute, actually. It is a way in, very often to understanding
a human being. It is the understanding of history, which is alive. People
think history is dead. It isn’t. We are living the results of
history in an alive way all the time, even though we are not really conscious
of it. Our children will live with the results of the history we are making now, and they won't quite realize it either.
Films of yours such as THE KILLING FIELDS, THE MISSION and CITY OF JOY have dealt with such complex issues. What do you feel is unique about the power of cinema to deliver complex stories to audiences?
Well I
think, movies can take you into a situation where you wouldn’t normally
go, and in a way where it plays with your mind and your emotions and make you feel, but at the same time, think. This is how cinema can
do remarkably well. Theater can do it too because it is a performance
art. Music certainly can do it. The wonderful thing about film is that film
is music and theater and visuals all combined in a really
extraordinary way. It creates a very, very potent reality. Film is the most powerful way to dream both drama and
visuals and music. It fuses all of those things together in a quite
remarkable way.
 |
| THE MISSION |
Well the
image is really important because the image is what you are seeing and is
in a sense, creating a reality in your mind. As you visualize
something, you are asking yourself whether you can make it seem real to yourself. By the magic of
cinema, images are visualizing what it is about the places you want
to see. The lens, the color, the dynamic inside the shot will tell
you a huge amount in the blink of an eye. In fact,
all of this is combined with the sound of music, so you can never think of visuals
just on their own. The visuals are enhanced enormously by
individual sounds or also by music. In fact, it is an interesting
test to turn the sound or music off and then look at some famous film
images and see how naked pictures are without their soul. The
soul of the image is the sound and music and images together. So you could say
the visuals provide the body, and music provides the soul and sound.
Do you feel visuals can achieve a special kind of emotional truth?
I think so.
Absolutely. I think the movement and the point of view of
the camera can convey something extraordinary because the height of
the camera is very, very important. I like to use a lower camera than
usual because I like people to watch a movie a little bit of the
position of a child looking up to the parents, so it has that kind of wonder that a child has when they are looking up to
something. We talk about looking up to something meaning something we
are in respect of. So yes, absolutely. The thing that people forget
sometimes it is not only the power of the image itself. It is also
the movement of camera that is very important. Is it getting closer?
Is it going away? Is it circling? Does it stop? How close is it? How
high? How low? All these things are part of the interior in
envisioning of what goes inside the audience. The camera
puts people into different places. Being put in a different place
makes you feel different.
 |
| THE KILLING FIELDS |
I don’t
think it can carry all the weight in a movie. What the score can do is encapsulate in feeling what the movie is about. It
makes you think of Lara’s Theme in DOCTOR ZHIVAGO. It has a kind of loneliness and sort of human pain in
it, and it expresses something about love that is being destroyed which
is what happened with the Soviet Revolution, and with so many other revolutions, like the French Revolution before it.
Music,
if you like, carries emotions from one scene into another, often across
the depth. This is why I say that music is like soul to that extent.
It doesn’t really carry the theme so much as massage the
theme, and remind people of it. It does it subtly and emotionally
in conjunction with the images which may be in contrast. Therefore, it makes the two things work together. Music is
incredibly important and powerful.
Your films are also notable for their vivid location work. What do you feel filming on location has added to your work?
Well, it
comes back to the visuals if you like. Location is made up of so many
things. It is made up of the light. It is made up of the
architecture. It is made up of the vegetation. It is made of the way
those things go together. A particular street will carry a particular
atmosphere. The light in a particular street, depending on whether it
is in Southeast Asia or in the Arctic, will feel very, very different.
The light itself behaves different. If there is more moisture in
the air, the light softens. If the air is drier, the light gets
harder. If there is snow, it gets more reflective and a little whiter,
cooler. In that sense, location and light are affecting what
you feel. Also, openness. The difference between the kind of shelter
that you take under a tree or the kind of danger you get in the
jungle, are all expressed through the way the location shows you how the space is organized, whether it
is organized by plants or buildings or the lack of them. All those
things bring depth and feeling. Also to the actors, they can do
extraordinary things. If the actor is in the studio, he has to work
doubly hard to believe he is in a real place. Then say he is in the
operating table here in the studio, where we only have two walls - the actor
has to kind of deliberately not remember he is in the studio. If he is in a real hospital where the cameras and
all kinds of things are inside it, and he has the actual smell, the actual sounds, and the
sense that he is in a real place, it gives the actor a sense of
reality that helps him build his character.
Very much so,
because we are so dedicated to reason. What we begin to realize
mostly is that we actually rationalize and then use reason to justify
what we irrationally did. Reason is a wonderful tool too, though. Because
actually, most stories, are the application of reason to
irrationality. In other words, what we think of as story form, narrative form, is actually reason’s attempt to find coherence in things that otherwise appear to be incoherent. The question of whether
things are really coherent or incoherent is what we can be talking
about forever. Certainly, in terms of our lives, trying to live a coherent life
is probably almost impossible, although it is also very difficult to
admit, because we like to feel that we are more rational than we are.
It's almost 35 years since your brilliant debut with THE KILLING FIELDS. What advice would you give to the Roland Joffe about to make that film?
I would say,
don’t lose faith. Don’t expect that everything that you do will
work out. Love the process. Love the process more than anything else.
Love the process more than the approval.
What other projects do you have coming up?
I have a number of projects coming up, but I can’t really talk about them too much. One is set in
America. One set in Sicily. One set in India. They are keeping me
more occupied than I have the right to be. I am excited by all three of them.
THE FORGIVEN is out now in select theaters and will be released in more theaters, on VOD and Digital HD on March 16th.
Interview by Paul Rowlands. Copyright © Paul Rowlands, 2018. All rights reserved.
THE FORGIVEN is out now in select theaters and will be released in more theaters, on VOD and Digital HD on March 16th.
Interview by Paul Rowlands. Copyright © Paul Rowlands, 2018. All rights reserved.
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