Becoming Idi Amin

Academy Award winner for ‘The Last King of Scotland’, Forest Whitaker talks about the challenge of playing Idi Amin 

What helped you get in touch with the essence of Idi Amin?
Language helps you figure out how to touch the world in a way. One of the big things was understanding his accent and the way the words are used because it helps you understand his humor.

When you understand the humor of a culture sometimes, then you really understand the culture itself. Kiswahili put me into the conflict that I think he was in too because I wanted Kiswahili to be my first language and English my second so I was tricking my imagination into believing that. That conflict was always present when I was trying to understand and trying to communicate.

Idi Amin’s humor is quite pronounced in Barbet Schroeder’s documentary. How did you represent his private demeanor?
I did a lot of research on what it’s like to be Ugandan, the patriarch of a family, and I started putting all these things together — how I eat, how I sit, what I want. It could be as simple as when we’re doing the scene in my bedroom. All around the room there’s clearly a big long couch but I’m like, ‘No, sit here, join me on the floor.’

Becoming informed about a culture helps you create the private moments. The paranoia I understood. You can see the paranoia even in the Barbet Schroeder documentary. You can see when he’s cornered; when he’s talking to the doctors, in the beginning he’s really nervous. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen.

And then slowly he tells a joke and they laugh. His eyes are doing that scene with the doctors, when he’s just about to talk to them, and that was a big key into my understanding some of the paranoia. I accentuated that, based on the scenes themselves like the one where he says, ‘Cannibal. They call me the cannibal.’

Did he eat people?
You know, I never met anyone who said he did and I met his brothers and sisters, his ministers, his generals, his girlfriends, and all these people in Uganda who knew him, met him, and had experiences with him. It’s just Western propaganda.

How did shooting in Uganda change your view of the world?
I was given this amazing opportunity as an African-American, because I’d never been to the African continent. Daniel Ssettaba was my personal assistant and Colin Sendaula was my driver. I became really close friends with them; they helped me a lot to understand the culture.

It’s the difference between the way you shake a person’s hand. In some Masonic way the President shakes hands and then he shakes the elbow and that means something else. Well, it really is like that when you’re in Uganda. Because you shake one hand, you shake with two hands and it’s a certain sign of respect, you prostrate yourself and it’s another thing.

How difficult was this role? Because this is a dark character.
I think the character really still affects me in a lot of ways. Because when people talk about how dark he is, I get kind of defensive inside. I remember my wife was saying to me once, a while back, ‘You have to stop talking in first person.’ It does become a part of your make-up a little bit in the way you look at the situation.

I think now I have a separation, a stronger one, than when I first finished the movie. Luckily, I’ve done about three movies since. But now that I’ve started talking about it again and I went to about four different screenings and I remember him.

What’s the most useful thing a director can give you and you can give actors?
Acting helps me as a director. It helps me understand the process. The more I keep working on my acting, the more I think a better filmmaker I will be.

Directing doesn’t really help me as an actor at all. In fact, I think sometimes it’s a little bit of a hindrance. You don’t want to think about problems and things that are going on. You have to be a little more hermitised and a little bit more selfish.