Stubborn faith in ‘Rwanda’ pays off

When I had a beer with Terry George this fall at the Toronto Film Festival, he had the bleary-eyed buoyancy of a man who’d just finished a marathon in a blinding snowstorm. His new film, “Hotel Rwanda,” which chronicles the staggering story of one man’s efforts to stanch the flow of blood during the country’s murderous 1994 civil war, had received such a warm reception that it ended up being given the festival’s People’s Choice award. It is continuing to win accolades, the latest coming Monday with three Golden Globe nominations, including a best actor in a drama nod for Don Cheadle’s performance as Paul Rusesabagina, the hotel manager who saved the lives of 1,200 Rwandan refugees.

Still, being an Irishman, George couldn’t help but dwell on the film’s darkest days, when it looked as if years of work would go down the drain because no one in Hollywood would make a movie about an African man’s heroic struggle against genocide, at least not unless Denzel Washington or Will Smith played the part. George had such stubborn faith in the film that he put up his own money to buy the rights to Rusesabagina’s story and to keep the film going when funds were scarce. In fact, the turning point occurred at the festival in Toronto a year earlier, when George and producer Alex Ho went looking for investors in a last gasp effort to save the movie. “It was our final chance,” George recalled. “If we didn’t get something going, I knew everything would fall apart.”

For those involved, “Hotel Rwanda” -- due out Dec. 22 -- was not just a labor of love but an act of atonement. In early 1999, Keir Pearson, a New York film editor, learned about Rusesabagina’s story from a friend who’d been living in Africa. Pearson was appalled to discover that Rusesabagina’s heroism came at a time when the rest of the world turned a blind eye to the bloody civil war between the Rwandan Hutu and Tutsi tribes. The United Nations commander in Rwanda asked for additional troops to help put an end to the killing. Instead, the U.N. pulled most of its troops out of the country -- and nearly a million people were slaughtered after the pullout.

Pearson, who shares screenplay credit with George, first met with Rusesabagina in Belgium, then went to Rwanda to interview massacre survivors. On his first day in the country, a cab driver took him to see a then-unfinished memorial to the victims. When Pearson went inside a nearby hut, he was nearly overwhelmed by the stench of death. “There were mounds of clothes, caked with dried blood and torn by the slash marks of machetes,” he says. “The next hut had hundreds of skulls and bones, all neatly stacked on top of each other -- some of them obviously the skulls of small children -- with gaping holes from the blows from machetes.”

Pearson recalls riding back to his hotel on a muggy afternoon early in his research and staring at clouds of blood red dust, “thinking the dirt itself had somehow been stained by what happened here.” It took Pearson two years to finish the script before he teamed up with George in 2002 on the project.

It isn’t hard to see why George, 52, had such a passionate identification with the story of a soft-spoken hotel manager who refused to avert his eyes when his country was consumed by barbaric terror. Growing up in Northern Ireland, the filmmaker was intimately involved with his own country’s ethnic strife. When he was 18, George was arrested by British solders who had identified his cousins as members of the Irish Republican Army. He spent three months in prison.

After his release, he joined the IRA’s political wing. In 1975, during a flare-up in sectarian violence, he was stopped by British soldiers while driving with a friend who had a cache of firearms. Sentenced to six years in prison, he served three before receiving an early release. When he got out, he married and had a child and tried to steer clear of trouble. But when an attempt was made on his life in 1980, he and his family left Northern Ireland, eventually arriving in the U.S. “I came to New York and worked illegally, just like everyone else,” George says proudly.

He turned to writing plays and screenplays, most based on events from his turbulent homeland, including “In the Name of the Father” and “The Boxer,” both collaborations with his friend, director Jim Sheridan. When he heard about Pearson’s Rwanda project, George felt an eerie kinship to the grim story line. “The similarities are scary,” he says. “In Northern Ireland, the Protestant population has been encouraged to believe that the Catholics would strip them of all the privileges the British had granted them, which is really no different from what the Hutus felt about the Tutsis. It creates a terrible fear and paranoia -- I know because I felt it myself growing up.”

After George reworked the script with Pearson, he took it to Beacon Pictures, which had a deal at Disney. But when both Washington and Smith passed on portraying Rusesabagina, studio interest evaporated. George did get the script to Don Cheadle, who agreed to do it. But despite his considerable talents, Cheadle was viewed by studio types as a supporting actor, not a bankable star.

George was the first to level with him. “Terry was refreshingly candid,” says Cheadle. “He said, ‘I’ve been trying to get this movie made for five years, but if you don’t make the money go, I’ll have to move on.’ Getting the movie made was more important than my getting the part.”

Producer Ho eventually cobbled together financial commitments from the South African government and a British firm that had access to funds through a tax incentive program. However, no one could provide any money until the end of 2003, which put George in a bind, because Cheadle had to leave in early March of this year to shoot “Ocean’s Twelve.”

If George had a U.S. distributor, it would help attract what’s known as gap financing, money that would allow him to push ahead with the film. By chance, George had drinks one night at Dan Tana’s with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Vice Chairman Chris McGurk, who’d made “Hart’s War,” a prisoner-of-war drama George had written.

Much to George’s amazement, McGurk said he loved the script, thought Cheadle was perfect for the part and agreed to distribute the film through MGM’s United Artists label.

Shortly afterward, Lions Gate agreed to handle international distribution. George finished casting the film, recruiting Sophie Okonedo (“Dirty Pretty Things”) to play Rusesabagina’s wife, along with Nick Nolte as a U.N. colonel and Joaquin Phoenix as a TV journalist. There was no time for rehearsals, not with George spending all his time in Johannesburg auditioning thousands of extras needed to play Hutu militia, hotel workers, refugees and white tourists. When the film’s financing was delayed, George and Ho kicked in their own money to keep pre-production going.

Finally, early this January, production began, with the money showing up on the first day of shooting after 97 documents, each requiring 12 signatures from various American, South African, British and Italian financial entities, were faxed across 10 time zones. As Cheadle recalls: “My agent called and said there’s no money in escrow, so if you go to work today, just know it’s for free.”

Shooting in South Africa was a perilous experience in itself. The country is still beset by dire economic disparities left over from the apartheid era. The filmmakers were put up in homes protected by guards and electric fences. “You felt you were in this beautiful prison,” Cheadle says. “It was scary. Almost every week there was a hijacking where someone would steal a BMW or an armored car full of money and kill anyone that got in their way.”

One day, a payroll truck loaded with money for the film’s extras was hijacked by four men armed with AK-47s. Another day, the extras, angry over not being fed properly, came armed with machetes and started a riot. “We had to call in the South African police a couple of times,” George says. “Once, Don went down himself to calm things down, along with the police.” He laughs. “Ah, just the usual events of filmmaking, isn’t it?”

Now that the film is earning critical accolades and awards attention, George hopes its story could, in a small way, serve as a cautionary tale against the global indifference that allowed Rwanda to descend into genocidal madness. George is screening the film this week at the State Department, hoping someone there might someday prevent history from repeating itself in another far-away spot on the map. “There’s no getting around the fact that everyone ignored what happened because it happened in Africa,” he says. “Nobody did anything until 2 million people fled to the Congo and created an enormous humanitarian disaster.”

Having experienced violence in his own life, George is surprisingly stoical about its impact. “If only the Rwandans had something worth fighting over, like oil or diamonds, someone might have intervened,” he says, draining his beer. “But they didn’t have anything of value except the value of a human life.”

The Big Picture appears on Tuesdays in Calendar.