After you’ve seen “Hotel Rwanda,” you will probably never forget the main character, Paul Rusesabagina. He is a real person, a hotel manager (played by Don Cheadle in the film) who got caught in the massacres in Rwanda in 1994 and for days sheltered more than 1,200 people in his hotel until help could come.
Rusesabagina now lives in Belgium. His story came to the attention of Irish director Terry George, whose work has often had a political slant. The two men came to the area recently and I interviewed them in a hotel suite. They made an interesting pair: George speaking in a sometimes passionate, sometimes sardonic Irish brogue, Rusesabagina more formal, delivering his thoughts with a lilting African accent.
Q: How difficult was it to make a film about a real person, in such a terrible situation?
Terry George: You feel a responsibility, because you’re telling a true story. … This story was so important, it hadn’t got out to the western world. Very few people knew the intricacies of it. And I felt this sort of enormous responsibility to get it right. I wanted Paul’s advice, I wanted him to keep us on the straight and narrow.
It’s not a good idea if you’re doing a film about someone who’s around to get their story and then say, “See you in a year’s time.” I wanted that if we got it wrong, Paul would be there to say “No, fix it.” And that’s what we did, basically.
Q: Paul, what was your involvement with the movie?
Paul Rusesabagina: Well, I followed the movie from the day I met Terry. … For five days I told him the story and they went ahead and drafted the script, and then we talked about it again. And when they started filming in Johannesburg, I was there, and also during the second half (of filming) I was there for two weeks. … I saw the first screening in Rome, with Terry and Don (Cheadle), when Don was in Rome doing “Ocean’s Twelve.” Then I saw it at the Toronto International Film Festival, with an audience of about 1500 people, and that made a difference.
When I saw the ovation, it was touching, it was emotional.
TG: There wasn’t much that I had to embellish or invent. I needed to emphasize the sense that Paul was alone in all this, he had no allies whatsoever. Basically it was on his own wits. There might have been little bits you were getting from people outside, food and stuff like that –
PR: But I was paying them, using them to provide me the food at the hotel.
TG: But you were totally on your own, other than that.
PR: I didn’t have any person to work with. The most important employees at the hotel were occupying the best rooms at the hotel – some of them were spying, others were just betraying. … I was just alone, and I preferred not to work with other people.
Q: Is this the film you originally envisioned?
TG: Yeah, it is. Those five days spent talking to Paul, I got a perspective on it – like there was decisions I made very early on, that the camera would remain on Paul, it would be from the perspective of Paul totally, and that the politics would have to be way in the background, that I’d never had sit-down politics or people on the phone discussing the situation. (The politics) would have to be organic and come out of Paul’s story. All those things worked.
The big problem is just that we never really got a break with the weather, and moving all those extras, so we kept having to re-write, or dump scenes. And that’s where Don Cheadle was fantastic, and Sophie (Okonedo), because you could throw ‘em any curveball and they’d swing at it. They had enormous capacity to just go with the flow.
Q: Do you think you will live in Rwanda again, Paul?
PR: What is lacking in Rwanda is a lasting peace. When the problems of the region are solved, peace will come to Rwanda and I will be the first one to go there. I love Rwanda. That is my own home.
TG: The whole great lakes region of Africa is very unstable.
PR: Yes, solving the problems of Rwanda is not enough. Solving the problems of the whole region is the solution.
Q: Paul, with the fame this movie will bring you, have you considered going into politics in Rwanda?
PR: Politically? I do not know. I used to tell my wife that when I’d be about 50 years (old) I’d go into politics. And now I am a little bit more than 50 years … (maybe) I’ll go into politics in America.
TG: You are in politics. This is politics! This is the most ruthless politics of all – the Academy Awards politics is cutthroat.
PR: I am not yet convinced to enter politics in Rwanda to date.
TG: I think Paul should go back and get them to let him run a nice big Ritz-Carlton Hotel. You would be the star hotelier.
PR: So that I resume my career. That would be much better.
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