Ìý In the same week that director Michael Caton-Jones launched schlockfest Basic Instinct 2, he also released the "angry and earnest" drama Shooting Dogs. The Sharon Stone vehicle was considered a box office dud, opening at number six in the UK chart. The other film - probing western attitudes to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 - was much less talked about and it didn’t even break the Top Ten. That’s despite a searing performance by veteran actor John Hurt.
Ghosts Of The Past
No doubt the subject matter is off-putting to the average Saturday night moviegoer, but this DVD actually reflects the filmmaker’s optimism. In a 40 minute 'Making Of’ documentary, John Hurt sums it up as "a wake-up call to idealism", and producer David Belton (who covered the Rwandan genocide for ) stresses the importance of acknowledging the murky past to help secure a brighter future. In fact for Caton-Jones, the experience of making Hollywood films seems more dispiriting than working on Shooting Dogs. "I really wanted to come back to Europe," he says, " and make something I could get passionate about." That’s not to say the film wasn’t a lot of hard work, of course. Belton explains that trying to get anything done in Africa is "fantastically frustrating", but the benefits outweighed the problems, for example he employed local people to fill out the cast and used their eyewitness accounts to bolster the story.
Belton revisits the locations depicted in the film (and which played host to the real-life sequence of events) in the Research Trip featurette. On the way he also talks to a teacher at the Ecole Technique Officielle in Kigali where around 2,500 Tutsis were murdered. His recollections are vivid and, unsurprisingly, he has a cynical outlook regarding the UN and Africa’s place in the world order. "Some people", he says simply, "are more equal than others."
The Return To Rwanda
"I was encouraged by the ´óÏó´«Ã½ to go to South Africa to make the film," says Caton-Jones in his commentary, "but I didn’t feel it was the right thing to do." He goes on to explain that he didn’t want to "demean" the people still affected by the genocide by sidestepping the very place where it occurred. For the same reason he built bridges with the local community and sought their input to give the film greater veracity. There are also notes on the technical challenges of working in an atmosphere of "organised chaos" where crowds would gather around the set and watch as Caton-Jones got in a flap over another piece of missing equipment.
Belton and screenwriter David Wolstencroft offer an alternative commentary that deals with the underlying themes of the story. For instance, Wolstencroft explains that the characters played by Hugh Dancy and John Hurt "represent the two different ways that the West looks upon Africa," while Belton summarises the story as being "about the West’s failure of conscience".
In fact, the former journalist acknowledges his own 'failure of conscience’ in a series of candid production diaries accessible by watching the DVD on a PC. He recollects sitting in a bar with a colleague who wished that he had stayed in Rwanda to properly expose what happened there (instead of leaving the country). "At the time it seemed the right thing to do," says Belton, "but I realised, as I sat in the bar with Tom, how terribly guilty I felt."
It’s a difficult and demanding set of extras for this DVD, but it also provides a compelling insight into the emotional journey embarked upon by the filmmakers. More importantly, it encourages frank discussion about a dark chapter in human history that is otherwise too easily swept under the carpet.
EXTRA FEATURES
