Actor John Hurt talks about filming a tragedy in Beyond the Gates
Beyond the Gates, a movie about the 1994 genocide of more than 800,000 Rwandans, didn’t just recreate a tragedy on film – it revisited one, literally. The film was made in Rwanda in the exact same location where the events depicted in the film took place, a school where U.N. troops let 2,500 people be killed.
British actor John Hurt (Midnight Express, The Elephant Man, V for Vendetta) plays Father Christopher, the schoolmaster who shelters refugees of the violence between the Tutsis and Hutus. In a phone interview with North by Northwestern, Hurt talked about making a movie in the same place a mass murder occurred.
NBN: What was it like filming in Rwanda?
Hurt: Obviously it isn’t a country that’s equipped for filming, and it doesn’t have the infrastructure and so on, but the experience was something beyond filming in a sense. Making the film was, for many reasons, extremely exciting, but I don’t want to make it sound as though it was an excitement that was borne out of pure enjoyment. It was an extraordinary experience, absolutely 100 percent worth doing it in Rwanda. You were dealing with people who were the survivors of the holocaust; in fact anybody over the age of 10 was a survivor of that holocaust. There was nobody uninvolved in that entire country, which is a hard thing to think about. They either lost, or they had to do with the losing of.
NBN: How did the survivors’ presence help you act?
Hurt: I don’t think them being there helped anyone to act, particularly, but it was kind of beyond acting in a strange way, because you’re dealing with something that’s such a vast and difficult area of human behavior. To be in that kind of cauldron, with the people who are getting on with their survival, was of spectacular importance and I don’t know how to describe it quite. You would not have gotten that feeling, or that spirit, or that understanding of what they were, anywhere else.
Director Michael Caton-Jones and his cast took care to make Beyond the Gates respectful of its subject, but along the way created a movie that doesn’t pack the emotional weight that it should. John Hurt, playing protective priest Father Christopher, and Hugh Dancy, playing a young, idealistic teacher, both give impeccable performances. The problem is that the movie is shot from their point of view, inside the gates of a U.N.-fortified school. The viewer learns about the genocide in increments, and the first half of the movie slogs along without much sense of the horrors outside.
The filmmakers probably wanted to slowly reveal the enormity of the tragedy until the final scenes of inhumanity are nearly unbearable. But that’s not how it works on screen. Once the unflinching images of murder are shown, they’re affecting on an intellectual level rather than on an emotional one, since the viewer hasn’t been made to identify very closely with the Rwandan victims. More appalling then anything in the script are the statistics provided: nearly a million dead overall, nearly 3,000 left to die by the U.N.
In one scene, a BBC journalist confesses that she was more affected by the genocide in Bosnia than by the one in Rwanda, because the Bosnian victims looked like her. “Over here,” she says, “they’re just dead Africans.” By telling the story from the white characters’ point of view, Beyond the Gates does too little to combat the journalists’ perception.
– Spencer Kornhaber
NBN: What attracted you to this role?
Hurt: It’s kind of interesting, isn’t it, because you’re dealing with something in a sense that you wouldn’t wish to do. But, on the other hand, you’re obligated to do. It became utterly and completely fascinating. To take the role was greatly to do with the fact that it was with [Director] Michael Caton-Jones, who I’d worked with twice before. [He] called me up and said, “You’re not going to like me for this, but I want you to play this role.”
NBN: What do you think the movie tried to accomplish?
Hurt: The purpose of any thing of that nature is to put humanity on the table so it can be seen, and so that these things cannot happen again. That I think would be what would be hoped for.
NBN: How much did you know about the Rwandan genocide before you got involved with the movie?
Hurt: Like anybody else, I’d read it in the newspapers. I’m just as remiss as everybody else as far as not worrying about distances away in Africa. There’s a certain understanding of that, because if you were to take note of every single blemish of humanity on this globe, you would go stark raving crazy. It isn’t until something like that that it is brought to your attention [that you realize] it is such an extraordinary example. I think it underlines a great deal about human behavior, in a kind of horrendous but simple way.
NBN: Were there any particular scenes that were memorable or difficult to film?
Hurt: I think there were certain things that were difficult for the Rwandans. It’s only 10 years old, the end of the slaughter. It’s still very much with them. There was always a danger of hysteria. The sounds made by the Hutu extremists surrounding the camp very readily bring back the horrors of it to mind. All our assistants, and people running the show as it were, were all survivors, people who lost their entire family, often killed in front of them. It was something that was just extremely painful, extremely difficult to come to terms with, particularly when you’re recreating it.
NBN: What was it like filming in the very spot where 2,500 people died? Did that weigh on you?
Hurt: Well, it does, you find yourself becoming very concerned and it would be quite peculiar if you weren’t. The spirit that was displayed by the people who were working on the film and the people who were working around you was quite extraordinary. I don’t think that we in the West could begin to think how you even get out of bed after what they’ve been through. To see the way in which they manage to do it, was uplifting on one hand, but you went from being uplifted to being depressed quite frequently.
Beyond the Gates opens at Century Evanston on Mar. 30.
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NUDAC argues Northwestern should divest from the genocide in Sudan. Or you can return home.
Hi John
Do you remember John Godfrey from Lincoln High? I am his wife. He is very sick at the moment and I remember him talking about you.
almas godfrey
September 15, 2007 at 6:22 am