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HBO:
How did 'Sometimes in April' come about?
Sam Martin:
Well, a couple years ago, for Black History Month, HBO Films presented a pair of films: 'The Middle Passage' directed by Guy Deslauriers and 'Lumumba' directed by Raoul Peck (the director of 'Sometimes in April') a great film about Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister of Congo, who was assassinated in the 1960s.
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This was taken at 5am on January 1st 2004. On New Years Day I was on the way to see Dian Fossey's mountain gorillas on the dormant volcano Sabinyo Mountain.
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Of course, the fact that these films were originally in French was the major impediment. So we decided to dub them! There are a lot of new dubbing technologies, really high-tech ways to insert English dialogue so that people don't even realize that it was a foreign language film. So I met Raoul during the process of acquiring and dubbing his film.
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"We sent Raoul on a research trip to Rwanda in the summer of 2002. And when he came back he was very excited and said, all right, I know this is an important story to tell, and now I know how to tell it." |
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— Sam Martin
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And after that experience, we started talking about doing another film with him and areas he's interested in. Raoul is very political. He's a Haitian national, he was born in Haiti. He lived in Congo as a boy, so he has an affinity for and experience with Africa, and then he was educated in France and in Germany. So, he's this global guy, he's got a fantastic sense of the world and a good eye for material.
Once we started talking about Rwanda, it really dawned on me that there was not much news coming out of Rwanda at the time of the genocide in April of 1994. And looking back, if you think about it, I remember where I was when Kurt Cobain's death was announced on April 5th, 1994 - that news totally eclipsed what happened in Rwanda on April 6th, right? (The president's plane was shot down that night, marking the beginning of the genocide.) And there was everything that was happening in Bosnia as well....
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This is an actor dressed as a wounded UN Solider - he's taking a break.
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So the airwaves were filled with MTV and fans mourning Kurt Cobain and the genocide out of Eastern Europe, but the genocide in Rwanda initially got very little coverage. Internationally, it got more coverage, on the BBC, but not really until July.
Raoul and I we were talking about what that says about America and the idea of "never again" and genocide. And Raoul said, well I don't know what story I would tell, and we said, why don't you go to Rwanda and do some research and find the real story?
We sent Raoul on a research trip to Rwanda in the summer of 2002. He went for a few weeks, met people and did lots of interviews, started listening to stories. And when he came back he was very excited and said, all right, I know this is an important story to tell, and now I know how to tell it.
So he started writing a script. The story of 'Sometimes in April" is based on interviews he had with people there: soldiers, teachers, people in the government, survivors all of them - true stories. And when we got the script back, it was great: moving, authentic.
It's a story of two brothers, two Hutu brothers. One is a solider, a military man and the other is a journalist - a radio personality. In Rwanda at that time, "hate radio" was used to spread prejudice and incite people to violence. Recently, a number of journalists were convicted of crimes against humanity for their role in inciting people to genocide in this manner.
And so the one brother is working at the radio station, called RTLM, and the other is a soldier in the army, which at the time harbored a radical faction called Hutu Power that is pushing for the elimination of the Tutsi minority.
The brother who is a soldier, Augustin (played by The Wire's Idris Elba), is married to a Tutsi woman, which is very common. There was a lot of intermarriage between tribes - frankly the whole tribal situation is quite complex. What we really fought against in the film is simplifying the tribal situation.
Most people assume that the conflict between these two tribes, Hutu and Tutsis, has been going on for millennia. I think people used that to discount the severity of what was happening, and actually, it's much more complicated than that.
There's a long history of Belgian colonialism in the region, Congo being the prime example. What happened in Rwanda in the simplest terms is that they pushed the Tutsi minority into ruling position and cut the majority - the Hutu majority - out completely - it was a colonial management strategy of sorts.
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The Church of Giterma, which was the site where more than 5,000 Tutsis victims sought refuge.
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As I understand it, in many ways Hutu and Tutsi are like social castes. Certainly there are physical differences but in the most basic sense, to be a Tutsi was to be a herder and to have wealth through cattle, which in East Africa is a fairly common sort of financial model, and the Hutus were more sedentary, farmers working the land. So the Belgians came in at the beginning of the 20th century and exploited this social construct to their benefit, developing a model that elevated and empowered the Tutsi minority over the Hutu masses. They installed a Tutsi king, Hutus were degraded and maginalized, that sort of thing.
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"After all of the research we did and after working on the script, I said, Tutsi, Hutu, oh I get it, tribalism, it's quite straightforward. But it's not that easy, and once I was there I realized that so much of it is about terrible poverty - as is so often the case - the abuse of power and human nature." |
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— Sam Martin
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By the time of our film though, the tables have turned - in the 50s and 60s during the period of African independence, the Belgians decided to throw in with the majority and left the country under Hutu rule. Thousands of Tutsis went into exile to avoid retribution. And by the 1990s, they wanted to come home and reclaim their place in their country. And a lot of Hutu men had married Tutsi women which complicated things even further, as we see in the film.
After all of the research we did and after working on the script, I said, Tutsi, Hutu, oh I get it, tribalism, it's quite straightforward. But it's not that easy, and once I was there I realized that so much of it is about terrible poverty - as is so often the case - the abuse of power and human nature.
HBO:
How many people were killed in the genocide?
Sam Martin:
Most media and human rights groups have estimated from 500,000 to 800,000. The Rwandan government published a brief this spring based on census data estimating about 970,000 killed.
HBO:
And this happened over the course of how long a period of time?
Sam Martin:
One hundred days. Starting April 6, 1994, through July.
HBO:
Unbelievable.
Sam Martin:
The primarily Tutsi rebel army, the RPF, which had been embroiled in a civil war with the ruling Hutu regime, advanced into the country during the later days of the genocide and stopped the killing. The genocide petered out throughout the country in different ways.
I think we were looking to tell a story that was very emotional and personal. That's sort of what we do at HBO Films: we try to tell a political story through a personal, character-based prism.
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Young boy on homemade bike.
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So through the story of these two brothers and their relationship and the facts of genocide once the president's plane is shot down on April 6, we get directly to the experience of being trapped a city that's in the middle of a genocide.
You had people killing with farm implements, spades and hoes, scythes and things like that - machetes. Machetes are a very, very frightening weapon. You can't really protect yourself from the slash of a machete. When you see people who are survivors they often have terrible long scars, machete wounds, it's miraculous that they survived.
There were a number of young people who were survivors, who were ten years old or so during the genocide, working with us on our crew. Many had escaped to neighboring countries, grown up as refugees and had come back to Rwanda in their teens.
One really striking story: we were scouting, this was early on in September 2003, the first time I went there, and we were scouting a swamp. Rwanda is an incredibly beautiful country, it's completely unlike what most people think "Africa", looks like. You know, that savannah, or brown plains terrain of East Africa, a sort of safari image.
Rwanda is a very small country, it's maybe three hundred miles across, and it's completely mountainous, it's at a high elevation, and it's totally green and lush, at least in the winter and fall. Frankly, it looks like Switzerland. As we were driving around I just kept saying this looks like the Alps! In Rwandan culture, they have a myth that Rwanda is the country where God goes to sleep at night, the mountains are so soft and inviting and green.
HBO:
Sounds beautiful...
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I'm with our Line Producer, Daniel Delume. We were short on white extras that day so he dressed as a French Paratrooper.
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"We had a consultant, a twenty-one-year-old kid who was ten at the time, who was very matter-of-factly telling us how he hid and how he survived. This is the level of detail we worked with." |
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— Sam Martin
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Sam Martin:
It's very beautiful. So we were to scout this swamp, and we drove out for quite a long time to our location and then we hiked down to a swamp in an area, it's primarily a Tutsi area, where people actually had hid from the Hutu soldiers.
Now the horrifying thing is, because it was a Tutsi area, they bussed in Hutu soldiers at the time of the fighting, to track down and kill the people. So the soldiers would come down, the local people would flee into the swamp, hide all day, then at about eleven-thirty, twelve, the soldiers would break for lunch, and they would go up and have their lunch. The people would know this schedule, and they would come out and they would scramble for food and clothes and different things, and they would go back in after lunch when the Hutus came back.
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Water bottles are a hot commodity in Rwanda, not to mention, fresh water.
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We're at the swamp and the DP is setting up a possible shot and one of the kids, an assistant AD who was working as a translator says, very plainly, well you know, I was hiding here when I was ten, my mother and my small brother and I were more - over there - not over there. Here we had a consultant, a twenty-one-year-old kid who was ten at the time, who was very matter-of-factly telling us how he hid and how he survived. Needless to say, they changed the shot. This is the level of detail we worked with. It was amazing.
HBO:
You cast many locals as actors as well, didn't you?
Sam Martin:
We had more than five thousand local extras. The film has small portions that play in Washington, DC so for the American side we had Western actors, but our cast was almost entirely African, almost of the our leads are African by descent, Idris' people are from Sierra Leone and Ghana, the actor who plays his brother is Nigerian.
HBO:
I imagine it must have been very emotional to be re-telling these events.
Sam Martin:
We anticipated that. We had psychologists on set, and if anybody on the crew or in the cast or extras felt the need to speak to someone, there was someone available to talk them through it. It was unpredictable. It could be something very subtle, just a particular street, or a particular situation that to us didn't look like much, but might be traumatizing to someone who had lived through it.
HBO:
How long did you shoot?
Sam Martin:
We shot 53 days in Rwanda and 7 in Paris - 60 days altogether. I was in Rwanda for a total of nine weeks - hard to believe. It was just fantastic to be able to see the project through from beginning to end.
The experience of shooting in Rwanda was like shooting on location anywhere. When I came back people kept asking, did you have food? [LAUGHTER] You know, did you have water, oooh - what was it like? And my main issue was that when I first went down there I had intended to stay for maybe a week, so I only brought one pair of shoes, very clunky hiking boots [CHUCKLES] I mean, that was my biggest problem, footwear, because otherwise it was a completely normal location shoot. We had email, Internet.... I bought presents on Bluefly for Christmas!
HBO:
This must have been really exciting for you, since you were on it from the very beginning, being so hands on and all.
Sam Martin:
Exactly, that's what I really enjoy doing. I think of myself as a filmmaker, and HBO Films allowed me to be very hands-on with this project. That's what I like about working for HBO Films, everyone is very passionate about the filmmaking. To be there for so long just took it to another level for me.
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