Rescuing a Piece of History

It is late afternoon and the sun has begun to plummet from the sky, draining all but a faint glow--and the little warmth that remained--from the day. A small gale is blowing in off the waters of the Mystic Seaport, luffing the sails of a two-masted clipper ship that has been tied up at the end of the dock. Up and down the quay, oil torches are lit and in the raw March twilight a group of black men begins to help put shackles on each other’s arms and legs.

These actors--most of them originally from Africa--are assembled on the deck of the clipper, which has been sailed up from Baltimore to serve as the Spanish slave ship La Amistad. Among the last to mount the swaying gangplank is Djimon Hounsou, the 33-year-old African actor who plays Joseph Cinque (pronounced sin-KAY), the leader of the uprising aboard the Amistad in 1839. Hounsou shuffles slowly along the dock, his limbs heavily garlanded with chains. This is the sound of America in the 19th century, an indelible echo of unforgivable sin.

Before filming of this scene for director Steven Spielberg’s “Amistad” can begin, an assistant director announces through a bullhorn that the African actors are to look “very scared” as they are brought ashore. This brings an immediate and impassioned rebuttal from producer Debbie Allen, whose unamplified voice thunders even more loudly than the bullhorn.

“You are not slaves!” Allen cries out repeatedly.

The point of this, she explains later, is to remind the African captives to remain defiant. “I wanted them to remember that even though they were captured once again,” she says, “they were still full of fight. And that they were not frightened.”

The seaport has been dressed to look like New Haven harbor, where in 1839 a group of Africans--chained and manacled together--was led off the ghost ship by the U.S. Navy, ending their odyssey into slavery, while just beginning a years-long odyssey through the U.S. judicial system.

Spielberg’s “Amistad,” which will be released by DreamWorks next month, is the story of the 53 African men who, with the help of former President John Quincy Adams, never actually did become slaves. (Adams is played by Anthony Hopkins, the estimable Englishman who seems to be slowly working his way through the canon of U.S. presidents, having already had his way with Richard Nixon.) As with all of Spielberg’s best movies, this is a story about someone who is trying desperately to get home.

On another day in Newport, R.I., a scene is shot in which the Africans, having debarked the Amistad, are marched through town to the New Haven jail, where they would spend more than a year waiting for their case to come to trial. Even in the old money precincts of Newport, where the blood is too blue to be easily stirred, the arrival of Spielberg’s company was an occasion worthy of sending the servants out for a look.

“The city looked basically the same as it did in 1840, so it was almost like you were there,” says Hounsou. “You walked through the streets and all you saw was white faces staring at you. They were just there out of curiosity, but it felt so real, so devastating. It was such a humiliating moment. And it is the closest I ever want to come to experiencing what it was like to be a slave.”

Growing up in the West African nation of Benin, Hounsou found America to be no less remote than it had been to the 53 captives whose fates are recounted in “Amistad”--a place of white faces staring at you from a movie screen. Djimon and his friends saved coupons from detergent packages so that one day a week they could go to the cinema after school and watch old cowboy movies starring Gary Cooper and John Wayne.

“The whole week, you would go through people’s garbage to collect the packages,” he recalls. “I had no idea those movies were coming from America. To me, they were all just white people. Some of the films were translated, some were not, and sometimes all you could understand was the gunshots.”

Hounsou left Africa at 13, not in chains certainly, but not entirely by his own choice either. Mustered off to live with his older brother Edmond in France, where his family believed he could get a better education, Hounsou couldn’t see where college was leading him and abruptly quit a year away from a degree.

“Everybody was quite mad at me that I had dropped out of school,” he says. “And because of that I was kicked out of the house by my brother.”

Wandering now, Hounsou left the provincial city of Lyon for Paris, where he knew no one, had no place to stay and lacked the papers that permitted foreigners to find work. He spent his days hanging out in the city squares near the Pompidou Center. “I didn’t have any money,” he says. “At night I would go to the buildings nearby, go through the garbage and try to find food. I would mostly find bread, and that was my dinner. I was sleeping on benches in the wintertime, and during the day I would go to the subways because they were warm.”

The subways, as it turned out, were warmer than the Parisians, who had little use for one more immigrant African--even one of such royal mien--on the streets.

“I was too shy to ask for help, too shy to beg,” Hounsou says. “The one time I did try to beg for money, it was because I needed one franc to make a phone call. The guy took all the change out of his pocket and looked at me. He had so much money, but he said, ‘I’d rather buy you a beer than give you a franc.’ I was so disappointed, so hurt.”

Dispossessed by his family, Hounsou remained homeless for a year, foraging for food and shelter.

“It never even occurred to me that I had a family,” he says. “There was no help that I could get from any of them. When your family tells you that you’re never going to be anything, that they’re very disappointed in you, you have no one to tell you it’s going to be OK. And so you doubt yourself, and you are always fearful about what’s going to happen to you. It was quite scary.”

His salvation arrived unbidden one day in the form of a man who told him his looks were interesting enough that a friend might want to photograph him, but whose intentions concerned Hounsou enough to throw away the phone number he was given and remain on the street. “I didn’t even have a franc to eat, so how could I call?” he says. “And I actually thought he was looking to have sex because people had come on to me before.”

His situation had grown more desperate by the time he saw the man again, and so Hounsou warily agreed to pose. That resulted in a contract with a modeling agency, though it did not immediately lift him out of Paris’s impeccably maintained gutter. Models from Europe and America were put up in the agency’s apartments, but Hounsou was encouraged to go on fending for himself.

“I would go on the street at nighttime,” Hounsou says. “Then first thing in the morning I’d go straight to the agency, and I’d be there waiting for them to open because it was the only warm shelter I had. I would sit in one of the waiting rooms and sleep. Sometimes I felt like they would send me on appointments because they wanted to get rid of me.”

It was not until Hounsou was brought before fashion designer Thierry Mugler--searching for a starkly different look as he prepared a new campaign--that his life really changed. He prepared for the meeting as he had done for a year, bathing himself by hand in one of the city’s many fountains. “They are cold as hell, those fountains,” Hounsou says, shivering slightly. “The first time I went to meet Thierry Mugler, I kind of smelled like a pig. He was excited about me, but I was so shy that whenever anybody showed some interest in me, I just started sweating. With the sweat and the dirt, it was bad. And then they asked me to take my clothes off.”

Mugler liked Hounsou’s look so much he brought him to America for a show in 1989, and he quickly became a favorite of photographer Herb Ritts. When he moved to Los Angeles a year later, he spoke almost no English, teaching himself by watching wildlife programs on the Discovery Channel. He also began to get work in music videos and TV commercials.

By the time Spielberg saw his audition tape late last year, Hounsou had been making the rounds as an actor for six years, waiting for his moment to arrive, supporting himself as a model while waiting for his ship to come in. Waiting for the Amistad.

And for months, “Amistad” had been waiting for him. Open-call auditions had been conducted in London, Paris and Sierre Leone, and the producers had even trolled the expatriate societies of Mende tribesmen in this country. But with only nine weeks left, filming on “Amistad” had to either begin or be called off so that Spielberg could be finished by the starting date set for the sprawling production of “Saving Private Ryan.”

Established stars such as Will Smith and Cuba Gooding Jr.--even pop singer Seal--had expressed interest in the role of Cinque, but none of them seemed to match the image Spielberg had in his mind’s eye. “And I really wouldn’t have made the film had I not found the right Cinque,” Spielberg says.

“The casting of Cinque is the heart of the movie,” affirms producer Colin Wilson. “Without that, it’s my opinion that there is no movie. It’s his story, and the movie is being told through his eyes and ears. Djimon had both a strength and an innocence, an inner vulnerability, that made him such a compelling character to watch. I think it’s fair to say you wouldn’t have had a movie without Djimon.”

“As difficult as it was, it was very simple the moment we saw him,” adds Debbie Allen, the producer who brought the story to Spielberg. “He was powerful, and beautiful, and gentle. I knew right away I was looking at Cinque. I do believe it’s not just by chance that we found him. After all, it’s a story about destiny. He was struggling to learn English and lose his accent when we found him, and I said, ‘Honey, put that English book down.’ ”

More than Hounsou’s acting skill, it was his powerful presence--a cloak of immense dignity and what Matthew McConaughey, who plays the Africans’ attorney, calls “a humble range of sincere feelings”--that convinced Spielberg he was looking at a star. “I saw a prince, and a common man, at a glance,” says Spielberg of his first meeting with the African actor.

How was Hounsou, so recently rescued from the squalor of the street, able to play this prince among men? After steering through his own turbulent middle passage, who better than Djimon to play Joseph Cinque?

“Some people naturally have something,” he begins, “and because of it, they don’t have to go to acting class to be able to tell a story, they understand what it’s about.” He pauses for a moment, the bones in his back rearranging themselves until he is sitting perfectly upright. “It is who I am,” he says. “I think you must have a natural elegance about yourself. It doesn’t really have to do with whether you are homeless or not.

“My life, whatever I went through, doesn’t come anywhere close to the pain that they suffered on the Amistad,” Hounsou adds. “If I used what I had gone through in Paris, I would be limiting myself to my own emotions. And Einstein said that imagination is better than knowledge.”

Knowledge of the Amistad story itself was almost nonexistent in this country--not least of all among the filmmakers--when Allen started her campaign to get a movie produced in 1984. Her pitch was based on the book “Black Mutiny,” for which she had optioned the rights from author William Owens for $250, against $500 if a film was made. “He was just so happy that somebody wanted to do something,” Allen explains.

Less happy was author Barbara Chase-Riboud, who last month filed a $10-million copyright-infringement suit against DreamWorks, claiming the movie had used her 1989 historical novel, “Echo of Lions.” Both DreamWorks attorney Bert Fields and Allen have suggested that Chase-Riboud, who is African American, should be happy a picture about the incident is being released at all, and Allen insists flatly she has never read the book.

“I know how hard I worked to get this movie made,” Allen says. “If somebody else had done it, I’m sure part of me would have been disappointed. But I’m sure there would be a bigger part of me that would be so glad this story is finally being told.”

Spielberg wouldn’t agree to proceed with the film until David Franzoni’s original script was rewritten by Steve Zaillian, author of the screenplay for “Schindler’s List.” Zaillian’s script was, by all accounts, such a knockout that it became possible to consider casting an unknown in the lead role.

“It’s as if all the stars kind of fell into alignment,” says Colin Wilson, “literally.” Hopkins, Morgan Freeman and McConaughey all signed on to the project in a matter of weeks. (Zaillian’s reward for this was a recent Writers Guild arbitration hearing, at which sole credit for the screenplay was awarded to Franzoni.)

“The movie, and what it’s about, is much bigger than all the players, including Spielberg,” says production designer Rick Carter. “I think he knew that. You’ll see, he doesn’t even pick up the camera and move it. It’s just panning and tilting, and he’s recording it like an historical document.”

For all his vast cinematic canvases, Spielberg had never made a movie set before or after the 20th century. His only frame of reference for the historical epoch of the events of the film came from paintings.

“I shot it completely differently than my other movies,” he says. “I did not want the camera to fly, as I customarily have it do, through the scenes. I wanted the camera to lock off, then tilt and pan, but not crane, not dolly, not track. I didn’t want to bring modern times--which I would equate with long, slick dolly shots--into the 19th century.”

If “Schindler’s List” was a kind of memorial to the bravery and suffering of his Jewish forebears, “Amistad” is Spielberg’s legacy film to his two adopted African American children, Theo and Mikaela. “I felt very strongly that this is a story they should know about,” he says. “And my other children should know about it, too. It was a very emotional story to tell. My hair started standing up on the back of my neck during the first week of shooting, and it got a little tired of standing by the end of it.”

Emotions ran so high during the rendering of the Supreme Court decision (by retired Justice Harry Blackmun, in a cameo) that on one take, Spielberg had to admonish Hounsou, “No tears yet.” He and Hopkins were similarly overcome during the scene in which Cinque and Adams meet for the first time in the former president’s study.

“Just looking at Anthony Hopkins during that scene was so moving that I had to try to keep myself from crying,” Hounsou says. “And he was having a hard time too. At some point he finally couldn’t hold it anymore, and he just started dripping.”

Evidently there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

“That was such a powerful moment for me,” recalls Allen, “to see Djimon walk through that door, shackled, heavily guarded, but tall and strong. And John Quincy Adams very softly says, ‘Unshackle him.’ I knew that we were making a movie, but for that moment it was so real for me, so emotional. It was as if I was looking at my great-great-grandfather, and here was a man that I knew was going to help him.”

She has begun to weep gently, and cannot continue. In the silence, it is not entirely clear whether the man she is referring to is Adams, or Spielberg. Perhaps it is both.