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A Rwandan child stares at the skulls of some who were massacred in and around the Nyamata Catholic Church and the surrounding Kanzenze community in 1994. Nearly one million Rwandans were murdered in the genocide. (Corbis Saba Photo / Louise Guss) One in a million Can genocide be truthfully represented in a feature film that focuses on one man's heroism? The screenwriter of "Hotel Rwanda" reflects on the filmmaker's responsibility to history--and to the present. IN 1999, I HAD JUST GRADUATED from NYU Film School and was working as a documentary film editor in New York when a novelist friend told me a story about a Rwandan hotel manager named Paul Rusesabagina who wheeled and dealed to save more than 1,200 people who had sought refuge in the Hotel Mille Collines during the height of the country's horrific genocide in 1994. My friend, John Robinson, had been living in neighboring Tanzania at the time of the genocide and had heard the story from a shocking news report broadcast over Radio France International by a Rwandan journalist trapped in the hotel. The refugees were forced to drink water from the swimming pool to survive, and as Paul did his best to hold off the murderous interahamwe (the Hutu militia) surrounding the hotel, the Western democracies--led by France, Belgium, and the United States--abandoned their vows of "Never Again" and turned their backs on the slaughter. Nearly one million Rwandans, most of them minority Tutsi, died in the space of a hundred days. I couldn't help but ask myself: If more people, certainly people of power, had the courage to act like Paul Rusesabagina, how many hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved? His story needed to be told. Little did I know that years later, having written a script about Paul and seen it produced (the film, "Hotel Rwanda," opens nationally on Jan. 7), another genocide would be taking place in Africa, this time in the Darfur region of Sudan, and the world would again be doing nothing. But in 1999, the question I faced was how to tell Paul's story in a film. How could a film do justice to both the heroism of Paul's story and the overwhelming horror of the Rwandan genocide? The first decision I had to make as a writer was whether to approach this as a documentary or a feature film. The documentary approach seemed obvious, but there already was a wealth of information on the genocide, including documentaries, and still most people seemed to know little of what happened in Rwanda in the spring of 1994. Feature films, on the other hand, have the ability to reach a mass worldwide audience. I also felt that Paul's story was well suited for feature films, not only because of its "one man can make a difference" message, but also because heroic stories are appealing to movie audiences--and movie studios. I called the few people I knew in the film business and the response was always the same: "You're talking about a genocide in Africa that no one cared about at the time, so why will anyone care now? Not to mention that raising money for a film with a predominantly black cast is next to impossible." Parting remarks were usually along the lines of, "Don't waste your time. It will never get made." But I pressed ahead and spent the next year interviewing Rwandan genocide survivors and experts in the United States, and eventually tracked Paul down in Belgium, where he was living with his family and working as a taxi driver. I called him, and he agreed to meet. In the fall of 2000, John and I flew to Belgium and met Paul Rusesabagina in a suburb of Brussels, and he invited us to his home. Paul explained that he was the first African manager for the Belgium-based Sabena Corp., which owned several properties in Rwanda. The position gave him the opportunity to curry favor with the country's elite, including high-ranking military officers. It also gave him an intimate knowledge of how to get things done in a country where official corruption was rampant. When the genocide began, Paul, a Hutu, was in a unique position to exploit these relationships and negotiate for the hotel's safety. Adding to his urgency was the fact that his wife, Tatiana, is Tutsi, one of the "cockroaches" the interahamwe set out to exterminate. Paul told us many details that day, and they laid the groundwork for what would become "Hotel Rwanda." After meeting with Paul, John and I flew to Kigali, where we checked into the Hotel Mille Collines, which was much the same as before the genocide, unscathed except for a noticeable repair job where a Hutu-fired RPG had exploded. Over the next few weeks we visited many genocide sites. We saw bridges where victims were thrown to their deaths and wells where helpless Tutsis were buried alive. We saw the church in Ntarama where the victims were left where they had been butchered, a constant reminder to all who pass. Mostly, though, I spent hundreds of hours interviewing survivors, especially those from the Mille Collines. . . . When I returned to New York to begin writing the script, I felt an overwhelming responsibility toward the survivors I'd met, especially Paul. I had a mountain of material, but I was going to have to condense time and create some composite characters. This was the most daunting challenge. Of course, every screenwriter tackling a true-life story has to do this. Even editing documentaries for PBS, I was asked to trim and shape reality to tell a story. In short, all filmmaking is subjective. The very act of picking up a camera and focusing on a particular subject frames out or obscures the rest of the world. It's an intrinsic effect of filmmaking that some academics like to call camera obscura. For example, "Hotel Rwanda" doesn't address every facet of the Rwandan genocide, much less the ongoing war and atrocities in neighboring Congo; it represents my subjective decision to focus on a specific man and his actions in a specific time and place. Yet having made this decision, I still had to answer basic questions as a screenwriter, the most important being, "What is Paul's dramatic arc?" The dramatic arc, simply put, is what your main character learns or how he changes. It's an idea as old as Greek drama. Given that "Hotel Rwanda" is based on Paul's true story, I wanted to create an arc that was truthful. So I went back to the facts. It is true, for example, that Paul had curried favor with the country's elite. It is true that when the genocide started his most pressing concern was to use this favor to save the life of his family. It is true that when the first convoy left the hotel with Paul's family at the height of the killing, he stayed behind because the safety of the hotel's refugees depended on it. Based on these facts, I decided to portray Paul as someone who was fiercely protective of his family, and then as the genocide erupted and he was faced with its horrors, felt his greater humanity awakened and committed himself to a larger good--that of the hotel's refugees. This is why the scene early in the film when Paul's Tutsi neighbor is being dragged away by Hutu soldiers before the genocide is so important. He empathizes with his neighbor, but he can't help because he's conserving his favors for later use, to save his family if the time comes. In short, Paul places his family's needs above others. Later in the film, when he lets his family try to escape on the convoy and stays behind, he places the good of others above that of himself and his family. After a year of writing, I finished "Hotel Rwanda" in the fall of 2001, and boarded a plane for Los Angeles to look for backing. Luckily, the script fell into the hands of veteran filmmaker Terry George--who co-wrote "In the Name of the Father" and directed "Some Mother's Son"--and he agreed to direct it. The first thing Terry did was fly Paul to New York in the summer of 2002, and the three of us spent days poring over the script, checking facts and filling in more details. It was then that Paul told us how he had bribed a government official with a car to get Tatiana, who was working as a nurse, transferred from Ruhengeri to Kigali so he could steal her away from a doctor and marry her. Terry jumped out of his seat, saying, "That's it! That's got to be in the script!" It would be a lighter moment, adding depth to Paul's character and showing that even in love he wheeled and dealed. After Paul returned to Belgium, Terry and I spent the next several months rewriting "Hotel Rwanda," paring down the supporting characters and toning down the violence--keeping the most graphic scenes of killing in the distance or off-camera--so that we could go for a PG-13 rating and reach a wider audience. When Terry started shopping the script around in Hollywood, we were told that no studio would fund the film unless Will Smith or Denzel Washington were attached to star. But in the end, producer A. Kitman Ho and MGM/UA executives Chris McGurk and Danny Rosett decided to take a chance on it. . . . It is now five years from when I first heard the story of the Mille Collines, and the faces and the stories of the genocide survivors I interviewed are still with me, especially Paul's. But there's one survivor from the hotel who haunts me like no other, maybe because she was the first one I met. When I started doing research back in 1999, my first call was to the Rwandan Embassy in Washington, D.C. A woman answered the phone, and I told her I was interested in Paul Rusesabagina and the events surrounding the Mille Collines. She replied that she was a survivor from the hotel. I hopped the next train to D.C. and took her to a local restaurant for dinner. For four hours, never once touching her food, she told me the most harrowing story of how she, as a Tutsi, survived the genocide. For weeks, before things got truly desperate, she hid in the shrubs behind her house with her 2-year-old son. At last, half starved, she approached the neighborhood interahamwe leader with a bogus check and bought his protection, knowing full well he would enslave her. She asked just one thing: that he not share her with anyone. For the next two months he raped her, often covered in the blood of those he killed, only a mud wall separating her nightmare from her toddler in the next room. (She asked that I never use her name.) When the Tutsi rebels, The RPF, finally closed in on the neighborhood, he could have killed her and her son, but miraculously he took them to the Mille Collines. Months later, she confronted me, wanting to know why I was writing a script about the Mille Collines. "We all survived there," were her exact words. The real story of the genocide, as she put it, was the near one million people murdered. "Write about them." At that moment, she had described the powerful effect of camera obscura better and more poignantly than any film theorist ever could. I agreed and explained to her that I was trying to tell the story of those who had died, because Paul's story would draw people into the theaters, and they would walk out knowing how many people had been killed in the genocide. Surely they would ask questions and want to know more about why it happened. Steadfast, she repeated that the real story was the near one million people dead. I tried to explain further, telling her that Paul serves as a lesson to us all. If the leaders in the West had been half as brave, countless Rwandans would have been saved. I even added, my voice waning, "The subject matter needs a heroic story." She stared at me and changed the subject. So I hope that those who see "Hotel Rwanda" will sit down after watching the film and try to imagine nearly one million people being hacked, stoned, clubbed, and burned to death. If you can do that, then try to get your mind around the genocide that is happening right now in Darfur, where at least 70,000 people have been killed so far and an estimated 10,000 will continue to die per month if aid does not reach them. After all, "Hotel Rwanda" is only a film. What's most important is what you, the audience, take away from it. Hopefully someday, when we say "Never Again," we'll actually mean it. Keir Pearson co-wrote the screenplay for the feature film "Hotel Rwanda." © Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.


Paul Rusesabagina, former manager of the Hotel Mille Collines, is credited with saving the lives of more than 1,200 Rwandans during the genocide. (The New York Times Photo / Shannon Stapleton) SEARCH THE ARCHIVES Advanced search / Historic Archives Advertisement