Shooting Dogs - Hugh Dancy interview
Compiled by Jack Foley
HUGH Dancy talks about his role in Michael Caton-Jones’ Shooting Dogs, a film that looks at the Rwandan genocide. He recalls the horror of the event itself, as well as what it was like filming on location in Rwanda.
Q. Like Vietnam, the genocide in Rwanda has taken a while to reach Hollywood. Can you tell us about the experience of shooting on location of Rwanda?
A. That’s a huge question – I think that everybody involved would agree that whatever preconceptions we had were completely destroyed during the process of filming. I expected it to be day to day an extremely emotional experience and the reality was that day to day you’re doing a job, trying to get the film made working to deadlines – as were the Rwandans, as were the survivors of the genocide.
In terms of how it informed this film, I would say that we could never, ever have made this film without not only having been in the country but also the school because it permeates your awareness while you’re doing the job. I also think it adds a complete other layer to the movie when you watch it.
Q. Did you ever begin to feel a sense of guilt while filming?
A. Of course, there is a shared guilt. While I was there, it was more that when you heard people describe candidly their shared experiences there was an overwhelming sense that there was nothing appropriate you could say as a response.
There was also no appropriate emotional reaction because when somebody is telling you that they’ve lost 10, 20, 30, 60, 70 or 80 members of their family and they’re being very matter of fact about it because their neighbours probably had the same, you can’t sit there weeping and berating yourself. When I got back I found myself being very emotional about the time spent in Rwanda in a way that I hadn’t been able to or allowed myself to be when we were there.
Q. Did possible perpetrators come out and tell you their stories too?
A. No, because the whole process of justice there is still going on because it’s only 10 or 12 years ago so nobody is really holding their hand up and saying: “I wash myself in my sins.” Technically, they’d go to jail or worse if they did. But in terms of were there people involved from both sides of the equation? There were a lot of survivors from the genocide that you see at the end of the movie in the credits.
85% of the country is Hutu, as was the case before, and the reality is that statistically speaking it is inevitable that there would have been perpetrators in the genocide that would have been involved in the movie.
Q. Did people bend your ear about their experiences?
A. We were a kind of support network in that respect in that when you heard one person describing what they went through, my response as a Westerner is if that had happened to me, or if that had happened to every member of my extended family, I would drop dead from grief.
I don’t think you’d survive that experience and you begin to realise that the only reason that doesn’t happen is because of the universal experience there. People are very honest and open about what happened to them because they wanted to have their story told. It’s only, in my experience, when people got to the end of their litany of horrors their family had experienced and got on to the bigger, perhaps unanswerable questions as to why or how this had happened – which was ultimately a wall that you hit – that you began to see emotion in them and, in a sense, something which I imagine can never be laid to rest.
Q. Is your character, Joe, an everyman?
A. One thing that occurred to me while we were doing it, particularly in the beginning, is that Joe is not just an everyman but almost like a hero. Because at the beginning he’s young, carefree and happy and he looks like he could be a guy you could root for in a way and that, in a sense, is an everyman quality.
It was a very difficult movie to sell in terms of plotting because in terms of individual scenes, a lot of them are quite momentous but there’s no great big watershed moment in terms of character. It’s more about plotting a very slow gradation. I wanted to show the very fine line between innocent, naivety and denial.
Q. Was there any involvement from the militia in the making of this film?
A. I know that in the road block scene, where Joe and two journalists get stopped, the militia were played by professional actors that had come down from Uganda who were sourced and cast by a Rwandan woman who ran a theatre company. But the truth is I can’t answer for every single person and I wouldn’t be surprised if their were – if that balance worked both ways.
I’m not saying there were Hutu perpetrators of violence playing Tutsi survivors. But there’s obviously, like any movie, a call for extras and Rwanda is a very regimented country which was one of the reasons why there was such organisation behind the genocide.
I was also told was that this was highly paid extra work compared to what you normally receive in Rwanda and I think therefore it became community organised to prevent one person turning up and working every day on the movie and becoming a millionaire. I suspect that in that community there would have been some sort of viable controls on the situation.
Q. How much of the film is drama and how much is real?
A. The most remarkable thing is when they go to the UN soldiers who are leaving and beg them to kill them – but not the adults, the children. There were other things as well. For example, when the UN were leaving not only did they fire shots in the air to get people out of the way of the buses, but they also told the refugees in the school that hadn’t eaten that there was food at the other end, so people hotfooted it over and got out while they could from the buses. You can’t fit in all these terrible details but what you see in the actual movie is true to life.
Q. What was it like to work with John Hurt?
A. I’d never worked with him or met him before and I’m not joking, I was quite terrified. John arrived a few days into filming and I started working with him – I had three solid days of scenes inside dressing him to perform Mass, so we had a few days of just working together and my anxieties just evaporated the moment I arrived on set.
As far as tips, it would be pretty rare for an actor to sit down with another actor and say: “Right, here we go … ” But what I took from him was his complete commitment and his own anxieties about getting it right and his own perfectionism and immersing himself in what he was doing.
Q. When you made this had Hotel Rwanda been released?
A. No, I saw it after returning here and I think that the notion that they’re telling the same story is probably not correct in that not every Vietnam story is telling the same story.
There’s an infinity of stories all of which deserve to be told. We always knew that Hotel Rwanda was being made. In a way, the question is for Michael Caton-Jones and I think he would say that he wouldn’t have approached it if he didn’t feel there was a different style of movie that warranted being made. His approach was to use a documentary style – Ivan Strasburg, the cinematographer, this is very much his forte.
So with that in mind, I don’t think the question of Hotel Rwanda ever arose while making the movie.
Q. Were your characters specifically based on anyone real?
A. No they were an amalgam of characters. I know that John’s character was inspired by a priest in Rwanda that David Wolstencroft had met, but was by no means being portrayed by John. There would also have been a Catholic priest in charge of that school. There were hundreds of medical workers, journalists, teachers, aid workers in Rwanda who were in similar positions to Joe and obviously millions of people who attended the church.