Interview: Forest Whitaker


From his debut at age 21 in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Forest Whitaker has continued to tackle roles both in front of and behind the camera for budgets large and small. His versatility earned him the best actor award at Cannes in 1988 for Clint Eastwood's Bird biopic about jazz icon Charlie Parker, while he has also directed box office hits like Waiting to Exhale. Currently, he's a regular on TV's award-winning series The Shield while as a producer for TV he earned an Emmy for Outstanding Made for Television Movie for 2003's Door to Door.

Whitaker — also a member of Film Independent's Board of Directors — has acted for an awe-inspiring array of directors, including Robert Altman, Bill Duke, David Fincher, Jim Jarmusch, Neil Jordan, Barry Levinson, Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, and Wayne Wang. In his off time, he's founded the multimedia company Spirit Dance, producing film, television, and music with offices both in the U.S. and U.K.

The opportunity to portray 70's African dictator Idi Amin proved an opportunity for Whitaker to tackle one of history's most bizarre, brutal legends while collaborating with yet another potent visionary: director Kevin Macdonald, whose work includes the Oscar-winning One Day in September and 2003's Touching the Void. The Last King of Scotland (its title taken from one of Amin's nicknames for himself — he was notably obsessed with Scottish culture due to having trained with Scots in the UK while a young man) is Macdonald's first full-on narrative feature while his background in documentary empowers the film with a striking immediacy.

An adaptation of Giles Foden's prize-winning 1998 novel, Last King of Scotland uses fictional protagonist Nicholas Garrigan — a young Scottish doctor seeking adventure whose field trip to Uganda coincides with Amin's rise to power — as the eyes and ears for a wider audience to explore history. James McAvoy is magnetic as Garrigan, but it is Whitaker who triumphs by bringing Amin to life with such utterly human complexity and charm one can't help but empathize with him. No one else could have pulled off such a feat. The film — anchored by Whitaker's performance — is a thoughtful, provocative demonstration of how good, bad, right, wrong, and everything in between are issues never simple enough to be boiled down to black or white.

Speaking during a break on the set in Mexico City, Whitaker shed light into why he took on The Last King of Scotland as well as his body of work as a whole.

You seem to be completely unafraid of taking roles that maybe a lot of people wouldn't necessarily touch. Did you think the role of Idi Amin was something a lot of other actors would have immediately said "No!" to?

I don't know... I've talked to a few people about the film over the past month or so and have gotten such a strong opinion about who and what he was, you know? I certainly recognize all the atrocities that he did, but it actually gave me an opportunity to research and try to find out about the complexities of this really complex man. So for me as an actor it wasn't a question; it was the opportunity to explore somebody I didn't know, who I didn't understand, as well as that I didn't know what place inside of myself that kind of emotion and thought process lived. That's really why I do what I do — I'm constantly trying to take roles that help me continue to grow. Certainly Idi Amin is really nothing like me, but I did find something of myself, so it helped me reveal more about myself and about the people and the history. I don't know what other actors would've thought about it; I just know for myself that it was an opportunity.

While you're thinking, "Is this role going to fit in my schedule?" do you take a further step back and think, "What repercussions might this have?" while also considering how it might broaden yourself craft-wise?

It's not just craft-wise; the conception for me is not about taking a chance or "How do I stretch as an actor?" I'm talking about, "How do I grow and stretch as a human being?" I started doing my work to try to find a connection between myself and other people — the spark that's inside of everybody that connects us to the universal. And so for me it's not just, "Oh, let me go see what I can do as an actor," it's, "Oh, what am I about to learn as Forest Whitaker the person? Is there a way I can understand this man?" Like in this film: I go to Africa for the first time, I've never been there; I've already been trying to explore my roots, so again I try to understand that.

To understand Idi Amin, you have to first understand what it's like to be African, not Idi Amin. So for a lot of the process, I'm trying to understand that and the people and myself and then I start to understand what it's like to be from the part of the country that he's from, what's it's like to be poor and from a part of that country. It slowly builds until finally I say, "Ok, where is Idi Amin? Let me understand Idi Amin."

And in the process I start to understand the continent where my ancestors came from in a different way than I ever would have. I was forced to try to allow the energy to enter me, to let it be a part of me, from the way I eat to the way I sit to the way I see. So that's what the journey is for me and when I veer from that is when I usually have the most frustrating times, you know — when I do something because people think that this is going to be some great thing for me to do: "It's gonna really move you forward." (Laughs) I find that the times that move me forward are those other times.

You've talked about the film from a very universal standpoint, which is where the novel comes from as well. It introduces us to a fictional character of Nicholas Garrigan who really could be anybody. And identifying with him as the reader, you're not necessarily a citizen of Uganda or of the continent, you're just this anybody — a fish out of water that lands smack in the middle of what's going on with Amin. That seems to be the great appeal of the story — the way that it's told, it could be any of us who was there at that time.

Exactly. I think that James's [McAvoy] character comes in and is like your eye, the world's eye. He's just a kid who's trying to go have some fun.

Right — like most of us. (Laughs)

Yeah! Kevin made a special film because I think it really deals with colonialism and and with humanity and what we can be pushed to. I think it actually shows how we can be corrupted by power and what lengths we'll go to because that's what happens with Idi and I think that's what happens with Garrigan.

For the most part it's a lesson that people who end up in power were just like anybody at one point in time. There are cases of royalty who don't necessarily have actual power whereas people that end up as presidents or heads of a fascist regime or often came from nowhere and could have been any of us if we had that drive. It's interesting to pick them apart and figure out how they are like us and then we start to recognize the similarities rather than the differences.

Yeah, that's part of the journey for me to understand. Because all I had to start with was this image that had been projected when I was a kid of this big, black guy...and his anger.

Yeah, having grown up in Los Angeles, it's a world away — how could this guy and this place and this time possibly have connected with you?

Of course. (Laughs) But it was a great journey – I learned so many things.

Speaking of learning, tell me about how your experience as a director has helped you learn more about being an actor. Being on the other side, what are the lessons you've learned about how to collaborate with your directors now?

I think acting really helps me as a director because the process of continually trying to learn character and understand them helps you communicate even better with the actors you're working with. I'm not quite sure how the directing helps me as an actor because sometimes
it makes me too amiable, you know? I'm too sociable and sometimes you just have to be absorbed in what you're doing; otherwise, you start to understand, "These are problems and this is what's going on," so I try desperately not to think about the directing process at all when I act. I don't really want to know what's going on. (Laughs) I try to avoid it; I leave it in the hands of people I trust. And I really trusted Kevin. I liked his first movies — they were great. So I guess the answer is I am aided as a director in acting but I'm not sure how I'm aided as an actor by directing.

Do you just prefer your directors to be kind of hands-off, leaving you doing what you're doing while they're doing their job?

No, no — I love working with a director and the acting process. I just don't want to...the technical aspects of filmmaking and things like that, as you think about it more it enters your consciousness, how they're making it, and I don't think that's what doing a great role is about. It means you have to lose yourself in the character; you have to lose yourself in a creative world, and that world has to be alive and real and the other stuff needs to disappear. As an actor in my early career — and hopefully now still — I do live in a reality of the world that I'm playing as a character and I don't wanna be thinking about lights... I want to know, "What's the director needing me to do?" When we talk about the scene, I love that! And every time I work with the actors, I love working the scene with the actors...all that kind of stuff I love. The other stuff erases the fantasy, the imagination.

Many people reading this who work in independent film often have to make do with no budget while also crossing roles; people are directors and producers and writers and
occasionally actors in their own projects. They're working with not as much space as they'd like — not as much separation between, as you said, the technical and the more imaginative part of things. So what kind of advice might you have for these filmmakers in terms of trying to get their stories across while balancing so many different elements due to low or no budget?

Over the last year and a half I've done all independent films except for the one I'm working on right now, so... I think that people have to pay attention really — always — to story and the script and simplify to the core of the story. I don't always see the lack of money unless we're talking about a couple hundred thousand dollars — which people do make movies for. (Laughs)

Oh, sure, or much less.

Yeah! It tones it, though. Maybe you don't get bells and whistles, which are not always about telling the story. At times I've found that you're pushed into situations that allow you to have to be more creative. And if you can avoid it being something that doesn't allow you to tell your story, it could be something — if its possible — that enhances and creates a different voice...because I think people really have to think about what it is they're working with. They're telling the story, they're making the film, and then they have to say, "Well, what medium am I working in? Am I really going to be able to tell this story?"

And I don't want to say, "You gotta just make it happen no matter what," but I think certain stories require certain things and others don't. Others are simpler and deal more with the immediate and with the characters. And I think you have to recognize that.

I've been thinking about directing a digital film for a very low budget and I have to say that I did choose a subject, which in the end I think is an interesting one, but I chose an idea that was specifically designed for me to shoot it on digital. The story idea that came to my mind led me to think, "Oh, I should just do it on digital," because I knew that it would enhance my story. Now, I understand that the technical aspects of digital film are moving forward and that we can do just about anything, but I think that in my case digital was what I was looking for. Maybe that was from the older school because now the progression of digital is moving so far forward that you can make a film look pretty much the way you would like. Originally my thing was that
if I have five hundred thousand dollars and I know that this story is about the digital medium because it deals with cameras, then I'm gonna let it live in that. And I'm gonna decide, like I decided with my DP, saying "I don't want a crew. We'll shoot this here in Japan. I just want four people, I just want four cameras, I just want this amount of sound people. I don't want a lot of others..."

First of all, I want to feel free. And even though there are constrictions, but it's not always necessarily true that a person making an independent film is free. I've been in a lot of independent films and sometimes I feel the director strangled more than I've been when directing my studio movies. They're being overwhelmed by the people around and the opinions they're giving, by the veracity of their opinions, you know what I mean? I've also been in situations with Jim Jarmusch and others like him, or first-time directors who are truly just telling their story, and people are just there to support it and it's truly from an independent vision, which to me is an independent film because you can't define it to mean by numbers now. You can't define it by money... It's really interesting to me — somebody can give you fifty thousand dollars, or if you use somebody else's credit cards, they're sitting around telling you what to do.

Exactly — they're like, "Put my daughter in your movie."

Yeah, and she isn't even an actor! (Laughs)

So it comes down to story and working with what you've got. You've got to work with your means and then it's more true to the story that way.

It is. And I've found you can make some really amazing films. I've seen them and luckily I've been happy to be a small part of some of them.