The Last King Of Scotland Watch a scene from the drama, starring James McAvoy.

Kevin Macdonald won an Oscar for his first movie, the documentary One Day In September (1999), and took the first steps towards drama with his 2002 doc Touching The Void, which included recreations of a traumatic mountaineering incident. Now he plunges fully into drama with The Last King Of Scotland.

Despite winning acclaim since debuting at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2006 - and Forest Whitaker stacking up a slew of awards for his performance as Ugandan dictator General Idi Amin - The Last King Of Scotland has taken a long time to ascend the throne. Joe Penhall (Enduring Love) first took a crack at adapting Giles Foden's 1998 novel, but it wasn't until Peter Morgan (The Queen) came onboard and jettisoned most of the novel's plot that things finally took shape.

The Last King Of Scotland received its UK premiere at the Times BFI London Film Festival in October 2006, which is where we met up with the film's director. Kevin Macdonald talks here about making the film on location in Uganda and how you deal with someone being Idi Amin 24/7...

Was it inevitable that you would move into drama after the success of Touching The Void?
Kevin Macdonald: Not really. Up until Touching The Void I never wanted to do drama at all, I was only interested in documentaries. But then on Touching The Void I got interested with the whole process of working with actors. I had read the manuscript of Giles Foden's novel before it had come out, because I used to work at Faber & Faber very briefly, and actually showed it to my brother [Andrew, the producer of Trainspotting and 28 Days Later] and said "Maybe you should do something with this?" He of course didn't have any interest in his brother's opinion and then seven or eight years later Andrea Calderwood and Lisa Bryer called me up and said, "Oh, we own the rights to this film set in Africa called The Last King Of Scotland, don't know if you've heard of it?" That's how I came to the project.

You brought your editor and composer from your documentaries with you. What are the similarities between the two forms?
I think they're more similar than most people would imagine, because the kind of documentaries I make are very narratively driven and adopt a lot of stylistic ideas from fiction into them. I think if maybe I was the kind of person who made sensitive, observational documentaries about children in Leeds or something, it wouldn't seem such a similar thing. But ultimately, it all comes down to storytelling and it all comes down to having characters who are interesting and have depth and ambiguity, and aren't just obvious clichés. And the editing and the music is all part of the storytelling, so that's why I was able to use the same people in both.

The real difference is the actors, and trying to understand these mysterious creatures - how they see the world, how they see their part, how they see the script. That was tremendously educational for me, and I'm not quite sure if I really understand them. Because when you've done documentaries for so long you're used to seeing the filming process in a certain way, whereas actors see it in a more oblique way and the good ones really do understand the person they're playing in a way that is very hard for a director or anyone else to grapple with. Also, the two actors had completely opposing styles - James [McAvoy] is a classic British actor: highly trained, highly skilled and he switches it on and off; whereas Forest adopts the character of the person he's playing.

The thought of someone channelling Idi Amin on set sounds scary...
It was frightening for him, and a little bit frightening for everyone around him. And I think that was a real baptism of fire for me - understanding 'performance'. And of course persuading somebody to do something different when they're being Idi Amin is a hard thing to do! I think for Forest, what happened after a while is that he no longer wanted to show the negative side of Amin because he had fallen in love with him in a way, so trying to get him to do the darker scenes sometimes was difficult and I had almost to provoke him to anger. But it was also an interesting experience, because James could never really form a relationship with Forest outside of his character as Idi Amin, so there was always an edginess on set and James was always a little bit edgy around him and trying to please, like the character he's playing. It was psychologically intriguing.

As a director how much were you encouraging this atmosphere, and how much was organic?
I think it was organic. I've got this pompous theory which is that there are two types of movie-making: one is people coming from, for want of a better word, the Hitchcock line, which is people who want to control every aspect of the filmmaking process - storyboard everything and where the actors are cattle; and the other side is the Rossellini/De Sica neo-realist line, which is 'Let's capture real life, because real life is more amazing than anything you can come up with in your head'. And I come from that tradition.

My technique, if I can call it such a thing, was basically to let things happen, and then to film them - make the environment right so that the actors felt they could go way off script if they wanted to; try to film every scene in one take if I could, even when loads of it is useless because they've got their back to you - just keep shooting, keep shooting, and then 'accidents' happen: the actors do something different, or something different happens in the background, and you think, 'That bit of spontaneity is really nice, let's keep that'. That was my modus operandi.

You also had Anthony Dod-Mantle as your Director of Photographer. Was that because of his past working on Dogme films and documentaries?
That's exactly why I wanted him, plus he'd filmed in Uganda before - he'd made a documentary there. And coming from the Danish film industry he's used to making do with not huge budgets, and we had a pretty small budget for what we were trying to do and he was really amazing at making a little go a long way. And doing things very quickly, he's extraordinary at that.

He uses an interesting mix of Steadicam and handheld camera shots...
As the pace of the movie picks up it becomes more frenetic and handheld, but at the beginning it's basically Steadicam. It's always a confluence of decisions that are made for you by your economic and shooting circumstances. I wanted to shoot, for instance, with two cameras a lot of the time, and the only way we could afford that was to shoot most of the film on 16mm. And then you think, 'Well that's quite nice because it gives you a grainy 70s sort of look'. And then that leads to, 'Well if we're 16mm, it's a lot easier to do a lot of Steadicam because it's not so heavy for a Steadicam operator'. So necessity becomes the mother of invention and the two things mix.

Simon Channing-Williams, who made The Constant Gardener in Kenya, gets a credit in your film. Were you picking his brains before shooting in Uganda?
Well Kenya's a relative Hollywood in comparison to Uganda! There hadn't really been anything shot in Uganda so we basically trained people up from scratch. We brought a crew of 40 with us, and there must have been about 200 Ugandans who also worked on the film as crew. But Simon has a
credit because he put us in touch with some Kenyan fixing company who helped us out a lot.

Originally there was pressure on me to shoot in South Africa because you get a lot for your money, and it's easy and comfortable, all of those things. But I pressured a lot to go to Uganda just because, being a documentarian, you want authenticity - you want the sense of the 'real' all around you. And I think it was the best decision, to be honest - one of the few good decisions I made!

For Forest to be surrounded by people who were judging him against the real Amin put a lot of fire under his bum

I think it impacted everything: how the actors were, how the crew felt about being there, the intensity of the locals with their desire for it to be good - because it was their story, a lot of them had lived through the Amin period or knew Amin - and for Forest to be surrounded all the time by people who were judging him against the real Amin put a lot of fire under his bum. He had to live up to that - and imagine how intimidating it is to stand on a stage in front of 4,000 Ugandans who know who Idi Amin is, and you have to convince them that you're their leader.

It also made a big difference to the look of the film, because I fell in love with the modern architecture of Uganda - the 50s and 60s look. There's some fantastic buildings there, a lot of which we had to repaint, like the hospital. It's got a very special, unique feeling, it doesn't feel like anywhere else in Africa. And to show this different world to people was very exciting to me. To make a film in London, you're constantly thinking, 'How can I make this look different from how everybody else has shown it?', but when you go to a place like Uganda you think, 'Well anything I do is fresh because nobody's seen any of this before.'

Logistically it must have been difficult though...
It were very difficult because, as I say, we ended up employing a lot of Ugandans and that was fun and gave the film a very home-made feel, but also working with people who don't know what they're doing all the time is exhausting and the 1st AD almost had a heart attack from the experience. But the way the extras behaved was so fantastic, they were such good natural actors. When you ask them to do something that is close to their own experience, it's just amazing. And when you ask them to do something that feels false to them, it's just dreadful - and that was a great marker for knowing when you had got it wrong.

At the end of the film you use footage from a Barbet Schroeder documentary about Idi Amin. Did you watch much footage from the time?
We looked at as much footage as we could get hold of, and the Schroeder documentary is one of the best things out there - it's particularly good because it's in colour and so you can see the colours and architecture of the place. That film really helped the set designer. I think our Amin is an example of lying to tell a greater truth. I think Forest is very authentic to what Ugandans experienced, but if you see Idi Amin on film, he's not the same person as Forest Whitaker is playing. Forest is a heightened, 'more real' version of Idi Amin, if you want to put it that way.

How liberating was it for you to not to have to deal with the truth here?
Very liberating, because obviously in documentary you're obliged to stick to what actually happened. That doesn't mean there isn't fictionalising in the form of selecting what shots or bits of an interview to use - you're always manipulating - but you have to be secure in your own mind that what you're doing is not a lie. Whereas with this you can decide to change someone's name or have someone dance naked - whatever whim you have - and that is tremendously liberating.

We were talking earlier about the differences between documentary and drama, and I think working in documentary you feel mostly that as the director you are making every decision about everything. Whereas in drama I found that I had great Heads of Department - not only Anthony but the costume designer, set designer, etc - people who know more about what they are doing than you do. So that liberates you to be able to think about the bigger picture.

The Last King Of Scotland is released in UK cinemas on Friday 12th January 2007.

Adrian Hennigan | Published 11 Jan 07

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