Darfur

• This time, with his clear depiction of massacre, director Uwe Boll is no joke.

  Published on: January 29, 2010

   

  By Steve Burgess

  

  Scene from 'Darfur': This is no videogame

  On World Human Rights Day, Dec. 10, a special movie screening was held at the ScotiaBank Theatre on Burrard Street in Vancouver. The movie was Darfur, a dramatic depiction of atrocities perpetrated against Sudanese villagers by the Janjaweed militias. A polished-looking crowd turned out to dine on Ethiopian food and watch the film, which co-stars Titanic's Billy Zane and a pair of Terminator alumni, Edward Furlong and Kristanna Loken. A representative of Amnesty International spoke, as did an aide to Senator Mobina Jaffer. The director was in attendance to introduce the film and answer questions.

  That director is Uwe Boll.

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• Uwe Boll Talks With MovieSet From Cannes About New Movie 'Darfur'

  Published on: May 19, 2009

  MovieSet's Cannes09 coverage continues with an interview with Uwe Boll. He was kind enough to sit down with us at the Cannes International Film Festival and talk about his new movie 'Darfur'.

  Set against the genocide in Darfur, six Western journalists visit a small peaceful village and find its people overshadowed by fear. Hearing that the state sponsored Janjaweed militia is heading to the village, the journalists are faced with a difficult decision - leave and report the atrocities to the world, or risk their own lives and stay in the hope of averting a certain slaughter.

  Check it out!

   

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• MovieSet Exclusive Interview: Uwe Boll talks 'Darfur'

  Published on: April 30, 2009

  Interview with Director Uwe Boll at his office in Germany via telephone by Eric Fell and Shaun Stewart

  Eric: It's a pleasure to speak with you Dr. Boll.

  UB: No problem.

  Eric: My first question is what are some of the films that have influenced you as a filmmaker?

  UB: I saw thousands and thousands of movies and of course the movies that make you want to start making movies were classical movies like John Ford's, William Wyler's, El Dorado, westerns, Orson Welles' Citizen Kane but big movies as well like Ben-Hur. Those made me think I'd like to work in the business, I'd like to do something like this.

  Eric: How old were you when you first decided you wanted to make movies?

  UB: I was ten when I told my mother I wanted to make movies. I started filming them with Super-8mm, later with video and Betamax and made my short films and documentaries. Later on I had a phase between sixteen and twenty years old where I wrote about twenty scripts; of course they never got made but there was a time when I would sit in my room and type scripts on my typewriter. This was before the computer came.

  Shaun: As a ten year old filmmaker, do you remember what your first project was?

  UB: Yeah, the first Super 8mm movie I made was with Big Jim Adventure puppets in the forest. It was a stop motion movie and (by the end) I burned everyone to the ground (laughs). I had from the beginning grown up with American movies and wanted to do more genre or action or horror. This was in my blood rather than relationship dramas or something.

  Eric: Somewhere in my parent's house is a video of me burning my G.I. Joes.

  UB: In my neighborhood you either had Big Jim figurines or Action Team, Action Team was also out. I was a Big Jim fan which was the male version of a Barbie doll that came with weapons for a jungle expedition or a North Pole thing. I had tons of things and was happy to burn it down. Later I had battleships and airplanes you build out of plastic and I glued that all together and normally put....fireworks inside and blew those up.

  Shaun: So your next movie is Darfur, can you tell us a little about that?

  UB: We all saw Hotel Rwanda and it shocked us all and everybody after the Rwanda massacre said this should never happen again. And the same in Yugoslavia and now we have the same situation in Sudan and we close our eyes again and you think, "what's going on with us?" I'm normally not pro-military intervention but the reality is this is not a civil war, this is a massacre. If you know people are getting raped and children are getting hacked to pieces on a daily basis...NATO should have no other choice to protect (these people). I think we should go in there with helicopter patrols and stop the genocide. A movie like this can definitely create awareness for that.

  The documentaries about Darfur like the Devil Came on Horseback or Darfur Now are great but nobody shows the massacres. With a feature film you can do that, you can show the rape, you see what they do with babies and so on. I think it will be hard and shocking but everything we show in the movie happens every single day there. I don't think we can close our eyes, we have to say we can stop that. From this point of view it's kind of a genre movie with a realistic approach behind it.
  

  Eric: How differently are you approaching this from your previous work?

  UB: I think there are two sides of the movies I did. With Heart of America I dealt with school violence in a very realistic way, with Postal I did an (over-the-top) comedy, with Seed I think I did a very brutal, bitter horror movie and then of course I did action genre, horror genre, video game movies like Alone in the Dark, Bloodrayne, In the Name of the King, House of the Dead, Far Cry and at the same time I did other movies. With Stoic last year I stepped in my own footsteps with the Heart of America movie because in Stoic I showed what happened in a German jail and we almost never leave the jail cell in the movie. It's realistic, everything that happened in Stoic happened in (real life). So it's not the first movie I've done in that style. Tunnel Rats, the Vietnam war movie I did was also shot (with only) a treatment and the actors had to develop their own characters, all the dialogue was improv. With Darfur I think it makes it realistic if it's method acting and the actors have to create their own characters.

  In Darfur, it was very hard for Billy Zane, Kristanna Loken and Edward Furlong in the beginning because they played against real Sudanese refugees. The Sudanese were Sudanese people, the Arabs were Arabs and they're talking Arabic so they had to use translators in the movie. This would happen in reality as well, (as a journalist) you would visit the towns and of course you would have a translator. I think the movie comes across super realistic and documentary style and especially then where the interview people and they answer what really happened to them. When Kristanna Loken is interviewed and plays a journalist and she answers she was raped and had her family murdered it's true. So it's not made up by her then you have something different than a normal movie. The American actors on set in Africa were very... shocked, they were really overwhelmed by this. And in a way they grow as actors during the process of shooting the movie I think they really grew up and recognize this is a very special movie.

  Eric: It must have been very intense for those actors.

  UB: Yes, they came in as a more intellectual or cynical person. They came in like "OK, we'll make the movie, maybe it'll be good" and they come from LA from their normal life to Africa. Now they're going on set and they have to get the feeling for it and after two days they realize they cannot deliver something mediocre you know. Let's face it they play in a lot of great movies, but tons of cheap movies and they were not sure how to approach that thing. I think they have the talent to be great actors but it also got lost in a lot of B-movies they did and now they came to set and they saw that we built it out of... exactly how it would be with real bricks made out of dirt in the ground so nothing was fake and the real Sudanese people were sitting in that town and they got robbed and killed and family members died and they walked like a thousand kilometers through the desert to get away from there. After day two or three I think the actors were very impressed, they really pulled out their lost talents for good acting. They really got into it emotionally. I think it was a very positive thing.

  Shaun: When is Darfur coming out?

  UB: We will try to show it in Toronto for the first time in September and then we go from there. I think it's definitely a very strong movie. I hope Boll-haters don't (bash-it) up front that with this movie. They should forget I made the movie they should think about, "Wouldn't it be positive this movie gets a big audience?"

  Eric: Thank you so much for your time Dr. Boll. I'm looking forward to seeing how this movie turns out. It sounds like a very different movie from what I've seen.

  UB: Absolutely. It was a risk to go into this film, but I was convinced you cannot have a written script. You have to play your part as a journalist and see what (happens). When you're approaching the city, how will you react to it? It's so easy to write a hero story and they say their lines, but I said to everybody, "Look if you were in that town and you had no weapons and you are there with two African union soldiers and now there are like forty Arab guys with AK-47s coming and they tell you, you go away or we shoot you but you now if you go away women get raped or children get burned alive. You know that, but what would you really do? You know it's so easy to write that you're a hero and you'll stay and fight. If you were really in that situation and you know you're only one of the other bad people because whatever you do you will not be victorious. You don't go away, you can't kill forty people with AK-47s so the question is how far will you take it. How many times will you push information away until you say OK, if I walk away from here my life is senseless so it's better to just die and to try at least to stop these guys?" This is a question I wanted every single actor to ask themselves on the spot and I can see in the rough cut we have that the intensity of the scenes (ring) true.

  I think this is a very good thing to have a movie like this, that it's not acting. We had a guy who is very arrogant, David O'Hara (Wanted, The Departed, Braveheart) I told him "You think the black people they all kill each other" and you play it with this approach, this is your character. "Massacres are everywhere who gives a f***" basically. But then in the moment of the approach, I told a Sudanese woman to give him her baby and to actually confront him, "Please help me take this baby out of here."

  In this moment he changed because you cannot have the distance anymore. Now the Arab guy comes with an axe to hack it into pieces and you have to say where is your arrogance now. What makes you alive? I think in this moment I was very clever because the actors really had to react to it, so I surprised the actors with stuff like this. You get scenes going in a totally different direction, but a very interesting and intense direction. Let's see if when it's finished but I think it's a very unique movie.

  Shaun: It sounds like a very unique film and I look forward to seeing it.

  UB: OK. Thank you.

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