Blood Diamond: Production Story
Warner Bros.
The Mzamba Gorge is an astoundingly beautiful place. Way off the beaten
track on the Wild Coast of South Africa – lush green land, blue sea and endless sky the deceptively sleepy Mzamba River has, over millennia, carved it’s presence into
the earth creating it’s own subtropical micro-climate as it goes. But for now, it’s
standing in for hell.
It took a crack Blood Diamond production team ten weeks to transform five
hundred acres into the alluvial diamond mines of Sierra Leone: a nightmarish
landscape of muddy pits filled with filthy water, humps of red earth, rusting pipes and
wheelbarrows, discarded plastic chairs and, incongruously, a couple of black
umbrellas sticking up in the mud.
Edward Zwick, director, producer and co-writer of the film, knew – with huge
relief – that they had found the place the moment he flew over it on an early scout.
‘We considered other places – Jamaica, South America – but I really wanted to shoot
in Africa. It’s the scope of the land, it’s the faces of the people, the rhythms and the
sounds and all the unexpected things that happen just by virtue of being in a place.
And it was important for the actors to be on this continent too.’
Set in Sierra Leone during the climax of the civil war in 1999, Blood Diamond
is an action adventure movie with a conscience starring Leonardo di Caprio as a
mercenary-turned-diamond-smuggler and the incomparable Djimon Hounsou as
Solomon, a Mende fisherman who loses everything and then finds the one thing
everyone will kill to have: a rare pink rough diamond the size of a duck’s egg.
The logistics of making a film here are challenging: 400 cast and crew from 40
different countries brought together for a unique film about contemporary Africa shot
on the continent using African extras and crew while avoiding the usual African
clichés. ‘This is a portrait of a modern West African nation as yet unseen in movies,’
says Zwick. ‘It’s not pastoral or romantic. It’s very gritty and real and the moral
centre of the film is an African. Imagine that, an African centre stage in a film about
Africa.’ He grins.
Three weeks in and the action has been brutal. ‘It’s been tough,’ admits
Zwick, ‘mainly because we’re doing the last third of the movie first which demands a
certain emotional pitch. The characters are already well into the arc of the action.’
When I first meet Di Caprio he’s exhausted and says he feels as though he’s
already been here for months. He looks sufficiently rugged for the role of Archer, a
jaded white African who’s lost his moral compass but finds a kind of honour by the
end of the film. He looks older – maybe 35 – and is mostly covered in a thin film of
mud and dust. On set he keeps to himself and speaks in a South African accent to
everyone. A few words slip into Aussie or American twang but mostly the South
African crew think he’s doing well.
Djimon Hounsou, meanwhile, is being stretched to breaking point. ‘This is the
most brutal film I’ve ever done,’ he says. ‘When I’m not being beaten up physically,
then I’m being beaten up emotionally. It’s like this every single day. I keep looking
for scenes where I might get a break and there aren’t any.’
When I first see him in action he is knee deep in a pit; his usually mild
mannered character is attacking his rebel tormentor, Captain Poison (played by British
actor David Harewood) with a shovel. Voices hoarse with screaming they chase each
other across the pit, slipping on the mud. Hounsou is consumed with visceral fury.
He’s still suffering from a scene earlier in the week when Archer is trying to
‘persuade’ him to tell where the diamond is hidden. ‘Take after take Leo was beating
me up. If I had been white, I would have been black and blue,’ he grins, disarmingly.
‘But it’s been worth every bruise. Solomon is a kind of African everyman; one of the
millions who suffer silently from all the wars and politics. This is one of the best
stories to come out of Africa in a long time. It works as contemporary story but it also
deals with so many issues that are going on in Africa now and… for centuries, really.’
For while Blood Diamond is an action adventure film - even a classic buddy
movie - as the pair join forces on a frantic mission to recover the diamond, Zwick
hasn’t spared us the reality of the horror that was Sierra Leone throughout the 1999s:
the amputations that became the gory signature of the RUF (Revolutionary United
Front); refugee camps and displaced people; the forced recruitment of children as
soldiers and the open street warfare that submerged Freetown in a blood bath that
resulted in 5000 dead. It’s all here and, along with it, the shadow suggestion of a war
funded by diamonds and the diamond industry’s implicit responsibility.
What attracted Zwick to such bloody subject matter for his first film in Africa?
‘In this single small country there was so much complexity; it was a microcosm,
really, a way of talking about all those stories that are not told, all those voices that
are not heard, how much is unspoken on this entire continent.
‘And then there’s this combination of brutality and humanity; of despair and
spirit that seems to co-exist in such stark juxtaposition in so many countries in Africa
and that’s so compelling: the co-existence of these two forces - the nature of man, his
goodness and his capacity for evil. How can love co-exist with such dehumanising
hatred?’
Then he introduces me to someone who would know. The Sierra Leonian
journalist, Sorious Samura has become more talisman than consultant; his constant
presence on set a reassurance that the film is hitting the right notes. He was the only
film-maker left in the country as Sierra Leone was ripping itself apart and when
Zwick requested a copy of his award-winning documentary Cry Freetown, Samura
offered his services. ‘It would have been a very different film without him,’ admits
Zwick.
Samura, for his part, has nothing but praise for the integrity and verisimilitude
of the film and the openness of Zwick and the actors to his suggestions. ‘Because it
was Hollywood, I had doubts about whether there would be a commitment to telling
the truth,’ he says, ‘But I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much truth they
actually want to tell.’
For Samura the subject of this film is deadly serious. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘I
still can’t look at a diamond without thinking about what these stones have caused for
my people. For me, diamonds will always be dripping in their blood.’
***
The climax of filming in the Gorge comes towards the end of a long, intense
rainy six-week stretch. The entire crew have been gearing up for a complex series of
life action explosions for the moment when the mine is attacked by mercenaries.
Filming the sequence will take a full two weeks. Every morning some 600
extras stream down the sides of the gorge singing Zulu chants led by a mountain of a
man called Izaak, the first black stunt man in South Africa who can remember filming
Zulu back in 1964. He has a core group of ‘action extras’ who’ve have been taught to
die convincingly and throw themselves (literally) into every take.
But the main event is a massive Russian Hind helicopter armed with rockets
and controlled by accurate computer target imaging hired from the South African
government complete with a pilot and ground crew. Classified as a ‘weapon of mass
destruction’, it’s 73 feet long and 22 feet high and uses 8000 litres of fuel per hour.
‘It’s like a house with rocket pods flying at great speed,’ Kevin de la Noy, line
producer and logistics wizard known for pulling together complicated African
productions after doing Ali for Michael Mann, admits relief when the sequence is in
the can. ‘It was a tricky operation. We had to co-ordinate 14 huge explosions with 200
fleeing extras multiplied three times. And we were filming from another helicopter
camera over the back of the attack helicopter down onto the ground while aligning it
at 70mph.’
It must have been one of the most expensive key action props in movie
history, but de la Noy believes it was worth it. ‘We couldn’t afford one flicker of
disbelief and if we’d used visual effects the audiences might have picked that up.
Having this helicopter roar down the gorge and actually land and have people get out
made it convincing.’
The irony that the production should then move to a refugee camp set up
nearby is not lost on him. ‘We’ve had two weeks of explosions and now we have lines
of refugees going into the Guinea refugee camp. It all begins to feel quite strange.’
As one of the perennial African images of our times the sight of a stream of
bedraggled refugees walking over the horizon is unsettling. As is the camp itself with
its warehouse full of sacks of grain marked with the World Food Programme logo, the
makeshift dwellings and army tents and scrabby market stalls selling dried fish.
Zwick compares it to a moment in Georgia when he was filming Glory, ‘On
Glory we were talking about slavery when we realised we were shooting outside
caves where slaves had once been held. There are moments in movies when you
realise you’ve evoked some kind of ghost. In this case, when you create a refugee
camp in a continent where there are literally millions of refugees, you’re touching
very raw places. You’re not doing something that’s a distant mythology but
something that’s in the currency of the culture.’
By now Jennifer Connolly has joined her co-stars. She plays Maddy Bowen,
an idealistic photo-journalist and foil to Archer’s jaded cynicism who exposes the
nefarious dealings of Van De Kaap – an international diamond cartel – who claim not
to be dealing in ‘conflict’ or blood diamonds. While Archer’s quest is to recover a
diamond that might buy his freedom and Solomon’s odyssey is about finding his
kidnapped son, Maddy Bowen is after a story that will define her career. She, like the
others, will risk everything.
It’s her role that has most likely been sending the diamond industry into a
froth of emergency spin about the film. Johnathon Oppenheimer, director of De
Beers, the cartel who still control some 60% of the diamond market, called the film
‘dangerous’ months before filming even began. ‘Can you imagine what this film
could do to our Christmas sales?’ he is quoted as saying.
Meanwhile, De Beers quietly stalked the production: there were requests to visit
the set, rumoured invitations to cast members to enjoy safaris at the Kruger National
Park. Mandela was alleged to have made a statement about how good diamonds are
for Africa. And the World Diamond Council unsuccessfully pressured the filmmakers
to add a disclaimer saying that events depicted in the film are historical and the flow
of conflict diamonds to world markets have been stemmed through the self-regulating
Kimberley Process convened in 2000. Some months after filming De Beers hired the
services of Hollywood PR firm, Sitrick & Co for a reported 15 million dollars for
damage limitation purposes.
Zwick is pragmatic about the controversy, ‘This is a film about something that
happened. It’s not telling people not to buy diamonds. It’s asking some questions such
as - how did this horror take place and why and what do we learn from it. However,
we wouldn’t know about conflict diamonds if it hadn’t been for a small group of
determined people who focused the attention of the international community on an
intolerable situation. That is what birthed the Kimberley Process which is by no
means perfect. If the film serves to increase that awareness for the future and keep
people honest that’s a very good thing.’
Blood Diamond filmed for nearly two months on the Wild Coast. Crew took to
calling it a ‘back lot’ as some 30 different sets were used over the 4000 acres that
stretched beyond the Gorge itself. The weather turned schedules into a dance as the
rainy season - a necessary choice because the film needed Sierra Leone’s jungle green
– kicked in. Low cloud curtailed the light, drizzle kept everyone damp, storms
occasionally shut down production and almost everyone came down with tic bite
fever – a lingering nasty condition that turned people a pasty white and sent them to
their beds. By the time orders go out to ‘strike’ the various sets everyone is ready to
move out of the bush and onto the streets of Maputo, the ramshackle coastal capital of
Mozambique.
‘It’ll present its own challenges as we step into someone else’s world,’ says
Zwick. ‘We’ll face the entropy of planes and cars and noise and police and corruption
and all the things we’ve forgotten about and that will be hard – on the other hand like
shooting in New York you have to let that into your movie and I have never seen a
place more photogenic than Maputo: a combination of street markets, dilapidated
colonial façade, soviet constructivist weirdness, and life lived on the street.’
Even Samura agrees that Maputo is an excellent fit for Freetown but there is
one more challenging similarity that the filmmakers have had to consider in choosing
this location. Mozambique, one of the most impoverished countries in the world,
suffered a 16-year civil war before they could even get on their post-independence
feet. It only ended in 1992 so memories are still fresh: of child soldiers and freakish
atrocities, guns and mortar attacks.
Weeks before the production decamped, Kevin de la Noy organised a ‘practise
run’ of shutting down streets, firing off AK47’s and exploding a car to gage the
concerns of the population. ‘It wasn’t so long ago that Mozambique was in a full
blown war situation and we didn’t want to cause alarm,’ he explains. In the event noone so much as flinched, a relief as a public outcry might have shut down filming. But
it evoked more ‘ghosts’ as the sound of gunfire shook the buildings.
Samora was more absent than usual for the Freetown sequence, ‘To be
honest,’ he told me, ‘this is all a bit too real. Only imagine that on the film we hear
this gunfire for 10 minutes. In Freetown the gunfire started at 8am and continued long
into the night. And we couldn’t put our hands over our ears.’
***
On January 6th 1999, after nearly a decade of simmering civil war,
human rights atrocities, coups and counter coups, Sierra Leone was consumed in a
frenzy of violence. Freetown was overtaken by RUF rebels and in terrifying scenes,
many filmed by Samora in his documentary Cry Freetown, civilians were beaten,
killed and raped with impunity. Machetes were used to amputate fingers, arms and
legs of men, women and young children. The ECOMOG forces, largely made up of
Nigerian troops deployed by the UN to restore peace, did not behave any better,
beating and killing any innocent they suspected might be involved with rebel groups.
‘The devil is loose in Africa,’ wrote an aid worker in a widely published email, ‘and
he is no friend of mankind, but uses men to kill and mutilate fellow humans.’
The war the West had tried to forget in this tiny West African country
exploded with a brutality matched only by the earlier genocide in Rwanda. ‘I hadn’t
realised how long it had been ignored and I was shocked at how badly everyone
behaved,’ Zwick recalls moments of revelation during his research. ‘The government,
the peacekeepers, the rebels, the mercenaries: everyone. There were so many victims.’
His challenge is to re-create those terrible days as Archer and Solomon begin
their journey though the capital as RUF ‘technicals’ terrorise the streets. Everyone
receives a 30-page Battle Action Plan for the Fall of Freetown as a network of streets
in downtown Maputo are shut down for shooting.
‘We need to make it as real as possible,’ Zwick explains as we weave our way
through battle-scarred streets: burnt cars, bloodied bodies, clothing, glass. ‘It’s hard to
say what makes things real: that’s dependent on what we are seeing on the news.
Today, it is the footage from Iraq, harsh, over lit and electronic whereas ‘real’ used to
be grainy 16mm news reel from World War 2 and early TV stuff from Vietnam – so
our definition of ‘real’ changes from decade to decade.’
The director is all over the set: moving a bloodied dummy to a more
convincing position; talking to action extras about their performance; consulting with
the armourers and special effects team.
Eighty Mozambican paramilitary police have been hired to play ECOMOG
soldiers and older RUF rebels who could convincingly handle weapons - then they
were trained not to shoot. ‘How you deal with a weapon when you want to kill
someone and how you handle a weapon on set when you want to make it look as
though you want to kill someone is poles apart. So we had to help them to separate
what they had learnt to do previously with an AK47. We had to de-programme them.’
Geoff Dibben, is the British assistant director who’s wrangling 400 extras, most of
whom have never been on a set before. And this set will have some 200 guns, a
couple of rocket launchers and a heavy Soviet anti-aircraft machine gun known as a
Dushka.
By now Hounsou and di Caprio have become firm friends which is a good
thing because these scenes require synchronicity and tight choreography to succeed.
‘We’ve become partners and friends in a real sort of profound way,’ admits di Caprio
and explains the growing connection between the two characters. ‘They’re men who
are polar opposites but this is the beginning of the bond they start to create because
they have no other choice if they’re to survive.’
Di Caprio is suffering from a knee injury so the sequence is changed
somewhat: ‘It might actually work even better,’ says Zwick. ‘Now Freetown falls
apart around them.’ Which doesn’t mean that the gruelling physical exertion is
softened at all.
‘We’re running through this inferno,’ Di Caprio has a few moments to talk in
between increasingly frantic takes, ‘and Ed has really managed to create complete
chaos.’ He grins as he wipes street grime off his hands. ‘We’ve had some really
intense moments shooting this sequence.’
There’s a scene where Archer and Solomon hurl themselves behind a burning
car as a technical comes careering towards them. Then, seconds after they leave their
shelter, the technical crashes into the car. It all seems extremely finely-tuned for a
multi-million dollar actor doing most of his own stunts.
Di Caprio undergoes an extraordinary transformation as Archer that’s evident
as he goes in and out of character. It’s not just the accent it’s his entire being. Zwick
believes this role will be seen as a departure for the actor, ‘I’ve always respected his
work but on this I’ve watched him inhabit the skin of this character in a remarkable
way,’ he says. ‘He’s had to find a very different place in his head, a very dark, sad and
at times tormented place. He manages to suggest a whole past, someone who’s gone
through an enormous amount. It’s a lot to carry around with you all day long.’
Especially when surrounded by hundreds of extras and dodging bullets and
rocket fire that felt real enough for the camera crew to flinch and jolt during the
heavier sequences, ‘accidents’ that will contribute to the documentary feel of these
scenes. It’s sobering to experience the physical effect of gunfire and explosions; the
thumping on the solar plexus as rockets burst through walls but Zwick is adamant that
despite the impact of these action scenes, they are merely a back-drop for his
characters; they never become an end in themselves.
‘The truth is that all of this stuff, all the scale and the effects, is really only the
context within which the relationships exist. In war, people are driven to extremes and
then reveal things about themselves that might otherwise have remained dormant so
the action, or the violence is never there for it’s own sake. The real drama is always
the journey of the characters.’
Paula Weinstein, the producer of Blood Diamond took the original script to
Zwick precisely because of his talent for narrative and human drama. She visited the
Maputo set during the Freetown sequences. We talk interrupted by bursts of gunfire.
‘I chased Ed for months because he has this ability to make movies that are
real and true but at the same time are great dramatic, commercial films. He can shoot
a great action sequence but also makes his characters three-dimensional with a vital
emotional reality. He’s an extraordinary man and smart. You have to be prepared
when you talk to him but he is fundamentally a kind, sensitive, articulate man to work
with.’
‘Today has blown every expectation I had out of the water,’ she continues. ‘It
is so rich. Ed creates these little vignettes in the midst of the drama: a woman
protecting her baby from gunfire; a woman reaching for a man who has fallen while
Solomon and Archer running for their lives. He’s never exploitative. He does not let
the camera push in on a face being blown up it’s all about how to keep the emotions
real so the audience connects to the story we’re telling.’
****
There are times when that story becomes all too real. Especially when children
are involved. Sometime after the Fall of Freetown, I catch up with filming in a
derelict brickworks down at the end of a long dirt track outside Umbuluzi, an hour
from Maputo. The abandoned factory, dank, depressing and smelling of decay, is the
sinister location for Solomon son Dia’s initiation into the Revolutionary United Front.
In the clammy darkness a huddle of naked children, lying together like
puppies for warmth, are woken by RUF leaders, screaming, firing guns and whipping
their naked backs. ‘Your mothers and fathers are dead. You are dead. But you will be
reborn with us. We are your family now.’
Sorious Samura as usual, is nearby. ‘Today is D-Day for the kids,’ he says.
‘This is when they turn a child into a killer. This is the worst part of the whole story.
In Sierra Leone, these kids are a lost generation.’ AT the height of the civil war there
were some 7000 child soldiers, some were abducted and recruited when they were as
young as 7-years-old.
In the next scene, aggressive teenagers handling guns with unnatural ease are
placed around the broken walls. The ten young boys, Dia’s fellow prisoners, are
shivering in a row on the floor wearing blindfolds. An RUF leader roughly pulls Dia
to his feet and puts an AK-47 in his hands. Still blindfolded he is forced to shoot.
Unknown to him, a male prisoner has been put against the wall. When he lifts his
blindfold it is to realise he has killed for the first time.
‘This is a big week for Kagiso (Kuipers),’ says Zwick of the fourteen-year-old
actor he discovered in Johannesburg. ‘We see his character, Dia abducted from his
family, being trained and indoctrinated and committing his first murder before raiding
another village and killing again.’ Zwick has worked closely with Samura to come as
close as possible to reality although, if anything, he has held back slightly from the
horror.
‘In real life he would probably have been forced to kill a member of his
family, his mother or his father,’ says Samura. He describes how children who found
themselves unable to shoot had amphetamines injected into their heads and, then, still
dazed by the killing, were cheered and celebrated.
‘That way they can never go back,’ Quiteria Mabassa, the child psychologist
hired to work with the child extras and actors, worked on rehabilitation programmes
after the Mozambican civil war where at least 10,000 child soldiers were forcibly
recruited. ‘The greatest problem we had was reintegrating them with their
communities because of the shame of what they had done. They never thought they
would be forgiven.’
Costume designer, Ngila Dickson, steeped herself in graphic images of child
soldiers around Africa to create the disturbing combination of kitsch fancy dress, rap
star and military cast offs that personifies your typical West African child soldier:
‘They’re extraordinarily stylish; watches are huge, the bigger the better and they all
wear crazy sunglasses. Then they mix it up with the whole African thing – cowrie
shells, beads, crosses. It became like doing a rap video yet behind it is this insanity
and total disregard for life.’
She was frustrated by being unable to get clearances on any of the images seen
on tee-shirts throughout the continent; ‘America dumps all their cheap clothes onto
the developing world, especially Africa. It’s all about rap and brand names: Nike,
Adidas, American football, Mcdonalds, Eminem, Puff. Not one company would give
me permission to use their images. It made me so angry.
‘Those marketing people are so in to believing their own version of the world;
that the vast amount of clothing they dump on the world all magically disappears.
Well it doesn’t. It ends up on children with guns in Sierra Leone who will shoot you
for a dollar.’
For Zwick, Dia’s journey from child to killer and ultimate reunion with his
father is the most effecting storyline in the film. ‘I’m the father of a teenage son so I
had a personal affinity for what it means for your child to be taken by those whom
you know to be one of the most abusive groups the world has ever known. Solomon’s
quest is the moral centre of the film: his absolute relentless and unwavering
determination to get his boy back.’
‘But it was also very important to show the reconciliation: to show that a kid
that strung out is salvageable and can be reintegrated into society.’
‘The one thing that struck me when I was writing this film was this phrase,
‘the child is the jewel’,’ Zwick continues, ‘and ultimately this film came to be about
what we value. There was a time in Sierra Leone when greed consumed humanity.
And all these characters are on a mission to find something of value: for the diamond
smuggler obviously the diamond is the jewel; for the journalist, the jewel is a story
and, to Solomon and most of us, the child is the jewel.’
‘Yet, there are still 200,000 child soldiers in Africa alone. What does that say
about humanity as a whole? They are the future, and in Sierra Leone and
Mozambique and in places like the Congo where child soldiers are still being used,
the future has been stolen.’
‘Movies can’t change politics but they can contribute to changing
consciousness. One hopes that by putting those images out there you shine a light on a
situation and that brings awareness and change.’
***