SHATTER PREJUDICE
HARNESSING DRAMA TO
A
Muslim, a liberal and a colonel walk into Guantanamo Bay prison. The cruel punchline is that no justice is served here.
Kevin Macdonald, director of “The Mauritanian,” faced a big challenge in weaving together three distinctly different points of view to tell a story that humanizes the least loved of cultural villains, the Muslim male.
Macdonald wanted audiences to experience the injustice and torture inflicted upon the body and soul of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, known at Gitmo as detainee MR-760, a Mauritanian held without charge for 14 years.
“The Mauritanian’s” serious subject matter may have justified documentary treatment, but that isn’t the movie Macdonald, an Academy Award-winning documentarian, envisioned. He wanted to create a film that could be appreciated by the full spectrum of audiences who would turn out to see Jodie Foster and Benedict Cumberbatch: “It’s a story of incredible injustice and heroism and forgiveness,” he says. “Big themes.”
“Documentaries are not in the now,” says Macdonald. And that is the experience the director wants to deliver to the audience: being “in the now” with Slahi.
“Fiction movies are empathy machines; they are all about making us feel for somebody. That’s what I wanted to do,” Macdonald says. He wanted the engine of empathy roaring at his back when telling a story with a sympathetic Muslim lead.
“You know you are going against a whole lot of prejudices and a whole lot of expectations,” he says, “and the best way to do that is by appealing to people’s emotions and their sense of common humanity.”
To move viewers, Macdonald upended genre conventions. He set up the movie like a legal thriller, featuring the troika of an anonymous suspect, an icy defense lawyer and a prosecutor primed to avenge the death of a friend killed in 9/11. Slowly, though, the film evolves into a study of Slahi. As the Mauritanian’s character and situation are revealed, audiences grow to care for him far more than they care about the particulars of his case.
Macdonald decided early on not to focus too deeply on the personal lives of the lawyers played by Foster, Cumberbatch and Shailene Woodley. “The humanity is all going to be on the Mauritanian,” Macdonald says.
He took some dramatic license, including combining two real-life lawyers into a single character (Woodley), and time-shifted Slahi’s introduction to a key guard he later befriended. But he strove to get the details of Guantanamo precisely correct: the size of the cell, the mesh of the fencing and the details of the torture Slahi endured. It had been important to Slahi for people to see what his treatment was like and for the feel of the place to be right.
“This is stuff that had to be accurate, because I didn’t want people saying that it didn’t happen to him,” Macdonald says. “All those things are documented, not just from his book but on the American side.”
At the beginning of “The Mauritanian,” when prisoner 760 is taken into custody, it is unclear whether he will be hero or villain. By the end, the audience comes to know the humorous, resilient and fully human man.
The director saw Slahi as a man of intellectual ambition and a freethinker. He took the Mauritanian’s Muslim male profile and dove deeper to portray a sympathetic human.
“He’s not a man who hates; he’s a man who wants to understand everybody around him,” Macdonald says of Slahi. “I think his superpower is empathy in the same way I was saying cinema is a machine for empathy.”
When Macdonald speaks of empathy, he is also referring to Slahi’s own gifts, born of years of suffering.
“He knows that if he can befriend you, you’re not going to hurt him.”
BY: R.F. Terry
Kevin Macdonald used drama to challenge the audience’s prejudices and make a cultural bogeyman sympathetic
Watch as Variety's Jazz Tangcay leads a panel with director Kevin Macdonald, editor Justine Wright, production designer Michael Carlin and cinematographer Alwin Küchler on the importance of finding the right lead, recreating Guantanamo Bay and filming torture scenes in "The Mauritanian."
