| Forest Whitaker Becomes The First King Of Hollywood - Page 3 |
Page 3 of 3  The first meeting between Whitaker and McAvoy's characters, with Gillian Anderson supervising  Keisha and Forest Whitaker at the 2007 Screen Actor Guild Awards, where Whitaker took home another of his best leading actor awards for "The Last King of Scotland"  James McAvoy as Nicholas Garrigan and Gillian Anderson as Sarah Merrit in "The Last King of Scotland"  Whitaker as Ugandan dictator Idi Amin FW: I think I'm a little more an internal person. I don't really know him, and I really admire his work, but I felt a little awkward just going up and shooting on whatever is going on and stuff. I went to that movie because the actor had asked me to come see it. I thought he was brilliant, actually, and to come talk to him afterwards. So it was great. Q: Can you speak about your longevity and some of the things that may have helped with your career? FW: Yeah, it's been a while, and I've been going for a long time, it's cool. I think I've always been trying to do stuff that I believed in and that affected me. I was lucky that the things that I chose did well. Because some of them were kind of risky choices, no one wanted to do "The Crying Game" when I was doing it, nobody financed it, nobody wanted to be involved with it. People were trying to get me not to go to Manila to do "Platoon," nobody wanted us to go. I think it was chancy, I love Jim Jarmucsh, but with a character where you don't speak? I don't speak for most of the movie. With Idi Amin, the question's a very relevant question. People would ask me, "Why would you want to play this character, people could look at it as why are you showing this monster from the African continent?" But I have my point of view on it, and it could ultimately be a good thing, so I just made my choices by my heart, really. Q: After consuming such an extreme character, how do you come down and become Forest Whitaker again? FW: At the end of the movie the last day, I had a little bit of a ritual. I kind of take a shower, try to wash the character away, I try to yell his voice out of me, I try to get my voice back, and then I think in this case I was lucky, I don't remember what movie I did, but I had another movie I had to go do, so when I got home I started working on another character, and so that helped me get rid of him. That was really important. Q: Is it hard to find parts that give you this kind of richness? FW: This kind of character, he's so unique, you don't find a character like this too often. I'd stopped acting for about four years, I was just directing, producing, and so then I started about two years ago to start acting again, I did all different kinds of movies. I did an animated thing with Spike Jonze, "Where the Wild Things Are," based on the book, and I did this movie in Mexico just recently which is kind of an action thriller with William Hurt and Dennis Quaid, it's about an assassination attempt on the president told through the point of view of five different people in the same fifteen minutes. I did a Chinese parable with this young filmmaker, Jieho Lee, I play Happiness and Kevin Bacon plays Love and Brendan Frasier plays Pleasure and Sarah Michelle Gellar plays Sorrow and it's about how our lives all interact when Happiness meets Pleasure and then meets Sorrow and what happens in our lives. So I've been just kind of doing whatever I feel. Hopefully they'll do okay. Q: So there is a kind of spiritual thread in the characters you pick. FW: I think that we're all people on a journey so every character I play is going to have some sort of that. Q: How do you feel about the Oscar buzz for you for this film? FW: I'm happy that people like my work enough to say that, and I hope it makes people go and see the movie, but other than that I have to let it be. I was working on "The Shield" earlier this year, and everyone was saying that I'd be nominated for an Emmy or win an Emmy and everybody would say "Oh, if this doesn't happen I'm going to be so upset," and I wasn't even nominated. Q: Were you upset? FW: No, that wasn't me, that was a press person. No, I was off doing a movie somewhere, I think I was in Mexico. Q: What made you leave the acting and go to directing and then go back to acting? FW: When I left college I started directing my friends on stage, and then I started directing music videos. Originally when I first left college my first professional job was I wrote a script in college, the first thing I was offered professionally, so it's a part of me, so when it happens it happens. I'm just telling stories and stuff. Q: Do you feel that you've become a better actor as a result of making your own films or vice versa? FW: I think you're right, I think that acting helps me as a director because it helps me understand the actor and the acting process. I think directing can be detrimental to acting for me. I'm already kind of a considerate artist so when I'm working on a movie as an actor and there's problems on the set and there's problems going on, I think you can become too reasonable. I think people want you to at least know when to stand strong, and sometimes you say, "Now I've got to get the day, now I've got to move the location, the lights are gone, oh, I understand," instead of being like, "We need to go one more time," because they don't know that that one more time happens, it could be something extraordinary. So I can lose sight and be like, "Oh, okay, well, I'll be in my trailer, when you guys work it out, just call me." Q: You mentioned being a spiritual actor. Do you see Idi Amin as someone who was spiritual or just as someone who considered himself to be spiritual? FW: I think Idi Amin in the classic sense of spirituality became more in touch with his belief system when he went to Saudi Arabia when he left Uganda. He became much more of a practicing Muslim then. The legend is that his father was a Christian preacher, he converted to Islam when he went to a menthe plantation and so did his father. Idi Amin all through his reign referenced spiritual things. Idi Amin would always say "I had a dream. I had a dream they told me to get rid of the Asians, I had a dream they told me they needed to name all the lakes this." So all through his reign he was always saying things like that, just like, "I know the moment of my death. No one can kill me." And that's true, he believed that. You'd see him saying that in the [noted British interviewer] David Frost interview. He truly did believe that, I don't think it was something he was just making up. He believed that he could see his death. He believed in his dreams and he believed in his destiny. Sometimes I think he made up certain things but that I think was the key to his personality and his spirit. |