Once I got the role, I called him. He was in Brussels at the time. We spoke over the phone a few times, which was kind of tricky because, you know, the distance and time gap. When Paul’s talking, he’s translating through Kinyarwanda and then French and then he speaks English. And you can’t see someone’s face so that made communication a little tricky. But then once I went to Africa then he came to Africa before we started filming. I was able to spend some good quality time with him and really just not grill him – I felt like that could actually be an affront and I didn’t know where he was as far as his processing of what had happened. It was only 10 years ago and I mean he lost many, many people. I just felt that that would have been an affront. It was more just sitting with him and us gaining sort of a comfortableness with one another. He would just start talking. He would just tell me things. But knowing that he had signed off on the script and was wholeheartedly supportive of the story that we were telling, made me pretty confident that I could trust that and rely on that.
What was your impression of him as a man?
Paul is great. At first, you know, you see him and you think that he’s potentially this very… His comportment is so specific and he’s so well put together and always has a tie on and a jacket, and is very thoughtful with his words and thinks about everything he says. Then when you get to know him for a while, you’re like, “Yeah, because you’re translating through two languages and you’re picking every word.” When [he] speaks Kinyarwanda or when you hear him speak French, he flies because that’s in his comfort zone. You go out to dinner with him and he drinks. He loves to drink, loves to eat, loves to crack jokes, and loves to party. And what I started to get from him was a real sense of his joie de vivre, this joy that he just had of being alive, which makes so much sense. Which I didn’t expect. I thought I was going to find a shell of a man who was just completely crushed. It was quite the opposite. He’s just very open and ebullient and just light.
How did they locals handle working on this film?
Some of them were survivors of the genocide.
Was there a therapist on set?
No, we didn’t have that kind of budget. For a lot of them, I think doing the movie was kind of a therapy for them. One day in the hotel, one of the women, one of the extras was having a really hard time. Whenever I would see someone just in the throes of something, I would just assume that they were a survivor and they were just dealing with it. Her friend came over and said, “Can you come meet her and you just come talk to her for a second because she’s really having a hard time?” I came over and she just started telling me her story of what she had gone through. I just said, “You know, you don’t have to be here. I know you’ve been established in this shot but it doesn’t matter. We can work around it. You don’t have to go through this.” She said, “No, I have to. I have to be here.” It was very important to them that they be there and that the story be told, and that it get out because they felt ignored by the world.
Will you talk a little bit about the tie scene where the whole situation really seems to hit Paul extremely hard? Did you talk to Paul about that and did that really happen?
No, Paul had many of those [moments] over the course of the whole event. I don’t think there was any one time where he just became undone. He had a lot of, over the 100 days, smaller ones. Every day he said he thought he was going to die, and every day it was gripping like that.
When Terry [George] and I were looking at the script, he’d had a scene in there that was kind of different. We were talking for weeks about what we were going to do, and how we were going to structure that, and where we were going to place something like that. We didn’t know exactly what it was going to be. I didn’t know exactly what it was going to be. When we shot, I didn’t know exactly what it was going to be. We just said something needs to happen here to sort of encapsulate all of this that has happened.
It was like this train that had been going on this track and Paul never allowed himself to deal with it or feel it, because he couldn’t. If he had come apart, everybody was going to come apart. So he couldn’t really deal with that publicly and had never even given himself a chance to deal with that privately. But it seemed like a time and place after the river road scene, to let that happen and then get it back and go on.
