Interview: Kevin Macdonald


The Last King of Scotland is Kevin Macdonald's first truly narrative feature film after the half-and-half docudrama Touching the Void and Academy Award-winning documentary One Day in September. Here, Macdonald discusses charting new ground as a director, juggling fact and fiction while adapting the award-winning novel The Last King of Scotland into an accurate, compelling depiction of Idi Amin's regime in 1970's Uganda.

The first thing I have to tell you about Last King of Scotland was that I was surprised at how entertaining it is given the subject matter.

(Laughs) Well, we tried to cross some boundaries in that respect and make a film that wasn't the usual image of Africa as being doom, gloom, and bloodlust, and make it a more complex character picture. I think also people don't expect necessarily a film about a dictator — and a bloodthirsty dictator at that — to be also quite touching and comic at times. But [Idi Amin] was a complex and multifaceted character, so I think we're reflecting the reality of what he was like. It was interesting in Uganda, actually — I was worried... We'd taken our portrait of Amin from a novel that the film's based on but also from reading history books and interviewing a few people who'd known him. But when you actually go to Uganda you're not sure; what are they going to think of this very complex, occasionally comic figure that we've painted? And they all immediately recognized him and I think one of the things that people said to us was, "Whatever you think is surreal in relation to Amin, well, the reality was even more surreal," because he was so extraordinary.

I guess people had forgotten the complexity, the humor, and the idiosyncrasies in light of what obviously is much more grave, which is the criminality surrounding him.

Yeah, absolutely, but I think what we were trying to do is create a human picture of this man and see him in the context of his time and of his upbringing in relation to the colonialism. One of the things that's fascinating in Uganda now is a lot of people still regard him as the greatest leader that Uganda ever had, which is extraordinary to hear people saying. And part of it is kind of how in Russia you get people saying how great Stalin was. But also there's an element that people felt he gave; he was proud to be African and he gave them pride in being Ugandan. He renamed all the schools and the rivers from British names to African names and that kind of Africanization is something that people really respected in light of the fact that he stood up to the colonial powers. So there was that side of him; plus, you've got to remember that his successors have not exactly been fabulous leaders themselves and haven't exactly had no blood on their hands. So I think in relation to what the other leaders have been like, one can see why some people even have an affection for him. Not the mass majority, but you do meet quite a lot of quite educated, sensitive people — and they were the kind of people that we were mixing with — who will suddenly tell you how great they thought Amin was.

Though it was a surprise, I'm sure it was also a comfort considering you were in Uganda trying to make this film and it's nice to have a general sense of support for the work that you're doing.

Yeah! It was a general sense of support; the mass majority of people do obviously have a view that he's a despicable abuser of human rights, a murderer or whatever. It's not necessarily a simplistic view of him; I mean, they have not only people who thought he was a great leader, but you have people who will tell you jokes about Amin and then suddenly say, "Ah, but of course, he killed my uncle." And it's sort of a way that he became a kind of mythic figure in Uganda, not necessarily existing in a reality that everything or everybody else exists in and the people in Uganda don't really know what's true and what's false about him. There were so many stories and so many myths built up around him, nobody really knows what's true.

That brings me to a point that I wanted to address given that your past work has for the most part been documentary. There's a compulsion, I think, put upon documentarians to be objective, to tell the truth, and to portray things as they really, truly are. You crossed that line with Touching the Void by mixing narrative and documentary and have definitely mixed things up again with Last King, which is an adaptation of a novel focusing on a fictional character to tell history. But then the legend that it all focuses on, as you just said, is so diluted and twisted he's almost fictional, too.

Yes — I think that the complexity of the relationship between fact and fiction is what interests me so much. And one of the things that really interested me about this story is that obviously Amin is real and the film is a pretty accurate portrayal of him, certainly one that a lot of people in Uganda recognize, yet he's in a largely fictional story. And that hasn't happened that much, I think. In novels it happens, like ones by Don DeLillo or E.L. Doctorow, where you have real historical figures existing side-by-side with fictional characters in a fictional plot. But in movies it's not something that has been done that much. That was one of the things that interested me, the chance to do that.

Due to that element of quasi-fiction in terms of Amin and definite fiction in terms of Garrigan's character, were you even more worried about trying to portray history accurately in terms of the period dress and music and other details?

I think coming from a documentary background, I first of all definitely wanted to get all the details correct. Even if the story itself is fictional, I wanted it to feel as though this could have happened. And in some way, "it's the lie that tells the truth", as the clichι goes. I think there's many, many elements in our story which occurred in one form or another and the kind of characters we have, there were characters like that. It's inspired by truth, just in a more complex way than one would normally expect, which is why in front of the movie we didn't want to put "Inspired by true events." Although, in some sense it is — maybe it's as close to true events as a lot of Hollywood productions are that say, "Inspired by true events". It's inspired in a much more complex manner. So we put this sort of strange caption saying it contains both fact and fiction at the front to give people a sense that the relationship between this film and reality is slightly different than what they're used to.

But at the same time I wanted the feel of it as authentic as possible — I think that comes from my documentary background — and one of the first things I did when I got involved was kind of insist that we do it in Uganda. We went there on a research trip originally just to meet people who had known Amin and sort of get a feel for the place; the producers wanted to film it in South Africa. But when I saw South Africa and I saw Uganda, I realized Uganda's got its own unique flavor and own fantastic architecture, the people look so completely different from South Africans, and a number of other things... I wanted to capture that. All the locations in the film are the places where Amin did actually live or did actually hang out. The car that Garrigan drives is actually Amin's original limousine — we found it rotting in a garage somewhere. Some of the medals [Forest Whitaker] has on we found - somebody had them in a drawer. And, maybe foolishly, I think all this gives the film a kind of texture and a flavor that is unique and makes it feel less of a movie in a way. It grounds it in a reality even though that reality is so surreal.

So, yeah, I was keen to get those things as correct as possible. And it was great working with real Ugandans. We only took a very tiny crew out there — about 40 people from Europe — and the rest of the crew were all Ugandans whom we basically trained up to work in one capacity or another, you know, in the sound department or the camera department or whatever. They'd never worked in films before. It caused certain problems in the first few weeks, as you can imagine, but by the end of it they were fantastic and it gave it a sort of flavor, like Ugandans are also making the movie and they felt that it was theirs as much as it was ours. That also gave it a bit of a documentary feel because I was never quite sure what was going to happen — something was always going wrong and disasters occurring and one having to think on one's feet the whole time.

I would presume that you were given a fair amount of liberty, given that you could make decisions like insisting on shooting in Uganda and using untrained locals.

Well, the budget was very small for the film and it was kind of the only way to do it. It was much cheaper to film it in South Africa and we could have used a professional crew, but I think that would have had a deadening affect on the film, on the texture of it. But also I have to say that the documentarian in me enjoyed the uncertainty and the sense of a lot of amateurs working together in a way. (Laughs) It was the first time I was doing a film and it was the first time they were doing a film, so we all kind of got on well!

Does it help to have your brother [Andrew Macdonald, producer of Trainspotting and 28 Days Later] as a producer on the project and kind of be able to cajole that stuff into happening?

Well, he wasn't so directly involved; we made a decision that he would take a back seat in a way because he was my brother. I think that it was really about persuading the actual producers — since he was an executive producer — that it was a viable thing to do and was worth the trade-off of not having a professional crew and being more expensive, et cetera — that it was worth it to have the sense of authenticity in the film, to have people on set who were with Amin. The actor who played the health minister had met Amin and performed for him as a dancer; he was able to say, "That isn't what would happen...this is what would happen when somebody died in a corridor — they should be doing this." Or, "This is what they would've said." To have that is just so fantastic. It's those moments, those magical moments that happen on set in a very documentary sort of way that I love the most.