Blood from a Stone

“It has been my belief that political awareness can be raised as much by entertainment as by rhetoric. There is no reason why challenging themes and engaging stories have to be mutually exclusive – in fact, each can fuel the other. As a filmmaker, I want to entertain people first and foremost. If out of that comes a greater awareness and understanding of a time or a circumstance, then the hope is that change can happen. Obviously, a single piece of work can’t change the world, but what you try to do is add your voice to the chorus.”

Edward Zwick is talking about Blood Diamond, a fast-paced political thriller set against the backdrop of the civil war that engulfed Sierra Leone during the the 1990s, when families were torn apart and the able-bodied were forced at gunpoint to work in the diamond fields, while children were snatched and coerced into working as soldiers for the revolutionaries. The seriousness of the subject is such that would lend itself to a documentary, perhaps, or more the hard-hitting style of, say, an Oliver Stone film, certainly not to be seemingly trivialised as the entertainment that Zwick states his movie to be. Not at first glance, at least.

In fact, Blood Diamond reaffirms the need for narrative film and well-told human stories. Exciting, gripping, often breath-taking, and intensely moving, the audience is forcibly propelled into this world, experiencing it rather than intellectualising, engaging with the characters, being drawn into their lives. Documentaries show and often distance but there is no such luxury here. One image – be it rebels riding into town firing indiscriminately, dissenters having their limbs hacked off, or young children being blind-folded and told to shoot, only to find they have shot a gagged prisoner – speaks volumes. The overall effect is that the viewer leaves the film with the sense they have experienced what these people have been subjected to for so long, are affected by it and feels compelled to learn more and, just maybe, want ‘to do’ something about it. Ten out of 10 for Mr Zwick.

In Blood Diamond, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Danny Archer, a Zimbabwean ex-mercenary who, whilst in prison for smuggling, stumbles across a Mende fisherman, Soloman Vandy (Djimon Hounsou), who knows the location of a rare pink diamond. For both men, finding it will give them something even more precious – escape from Africa and from a life of violence for Danny; saving his wife and daughters from the refugee camp and his son from life as a child soldier for Soloman. Together with the aid of an American investigative journalist, Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly), they set out on a hazardous trek to achieve the impossible.

The director, who has been on similar ground before with Glory, producer Paula Weinstein and stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Connelly and Djimon Hounsou were in London this week for the European Premiere of the film, on the day that the 2007 Oscar nominations were announced. Zwick is slightly peeved.

“I’ve just learned about this initiative that’s been proposed which began at the Golden Globes and they’re intending to have at the Oscars, which is the ‘raise your right hand’ campaign.” He continues: “They’ve offered a charitable contribution of $10,000 to any actor or actress who’d wear bling, and the cruel irony, which I’m sure is unconscious, in raising one’s hand and the using of one’s hand to vote was the promot for the United Revolutionary Front to chop off hands in Sierra Leone. It’s either some colossal cluelessness or remarkable indifference to that reality that would somehow try to equate raising one’s hand with a diamond on it as a promotional counter-measure to the effect of the film. My grandfather always told me that charity was best done in private, of course, and this notion of a charitable contribution as a brandishment to wear diamonds is the creation of a new trope, I think; it’s the charitable bribe, and I find that rather distasteful I have to say.”

Indeed, there is a line in the film that puts it remarkably well: “In America it’s bling bling; in Africa, it’s bling bang”. However, the Oscar ceremony and all it’s red carpet and jewelled pitfalls is an obstacle which both DiCaprio and Hounsou will need to manouvre, as both actors have been nominated as Best Actor in a Leading Role and Best Actor in a Supporting Role respectively. That the film is not mentioned as Best Picture or Zwick as Best Director is probably a fair reflection as it is the towering performances of the two male stars, and the relationship of their characters, that drive the picture. At this point in the day, however, they are yet to hear if their names appear on that exclusive list.

“It’s nice to be recognised like that”, says DiCaprio, already an academy award nominee, “to truly put a lot of hard work and effort into a project or character like this and then for it to be recognised – how can it not be? It’s certainly not something I expect by any means or is something that we strive for during the pre-production proecess, or even the filming process. It’s one of those sort of things that the more I’ve acted the more I’ve realised I have (a) absolutely no control of and (b) no way of really quite understanding how people will react to anything I do or any movie I do”.

But will they be wearing diamonds on the night? After all, as Zwick points out “Hollywood has been very complicit in the mythology of diamonds and the celebration of them for many, many years.” As they each proclaim they would never wear or give diamonds that weren’t certified conflict-free, the actors appear a little sheepish that they hitherto had probably done so, down to ignorance on their part.

Says Connelly: “Since making the film and becoming more informed about conflict diamonds, I have worn diamonds because I feel a boycott is not necessarily the answer, it doesn’t solve the problem because there’s implications to that as well – there are benefits that diamond mining can bring to these communities, even if at the moment the economic benefiction is not as equitable as it can be in the future.

“The diamonds I have worn since becoming more educated have come with certificates guaranteeing that they’re conflict free.”

It has been said that visiting Africa changes you and the making of Blood Diamond does appear to have had a profound effect on all concerned with the production.

“To see the conditions and the way that people live there every day” says DiCaprio, “how they somehow manage to maintain an amazingly positive attitude and outlook on life was inspiring for all of us. You come back home and sort of question what any of us has to complain about. It was the spirit of the people that was the most astunding and moving for me to witness.

“In Mozambique, four out of 10 people have the HIV virus. There was poverty everywhere, there wasn’t enough clean water and yet they maintain an attitude about just being alive. It continues to be a place that deserves the western world’s support as much as humanly possible.”

“It was my second time in making a film in Africa,” adds Paula, “the first was in the eighties in Zimbabwe and going back to South Africa was fantastic, to see the post-apartheid and really get to know the people and see the struggles they are going through for reconciliation which is still going on there.

“What struck me most in Mozambique sas how desperately everybody would embrace us and embrace any economic help they could have because everywhere you turned on the street there were selling jewellery they had made. They were enormously entrepreneurial people and you sit there and think ‘My God, with aid, with businesses going, with real help – these are people who want to do well, were taking care of their families, who have a very optimistic view and are great workers.”

All three of the leading actors have become involved with humanitarian work, DiCaprio with Save our Souls in Mozambique and is known for his environmental interests. Both he and Connelly have worked for Amnesty International, for which Connelly particularly is a spokesperson for human rights education in the United States, and Hounsou has been involved with Oxfam for some time. Zwick, however, explains the full impact filming had on the region.

“It’s a matter of public record now, although we began in private, that everyone there could not help but be moved by some of the places in which we worked. We were in villages and neighbourhoods, and we all just decided to put together a certain amount of money, which was then matched by the studio, to do things for the various people who had been very gracious and generous to us in their villages.

“You know, a movie company has a number of resources available, and we were able to build classrooms and fix roads and build wells and, I think above all, a film company comes to a place and it brings $30-40m of cash into it’s local economy, and it’s not like a loan from the International Monetary Fund to build a bridge, where money gets sent off into bad governance, this money goes right like a shot in the arm into the local economy, where a driver gives it to his wife, who gives it to the butcher, and so on.

“Probably the best thing we did was just to do the movie there.”