Romeo Dallaire glad to have Roy Dupuis on his mission
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Roy Dupuis and Romeo Dallaire after Friday's news conference announcing details of the film Shake Hands with the Devil |
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Romeo Dallaire may not be a film critic, but he knows that he would rather have Roy Dupuis playing him on the big screen than Nick Nolte.
The retired Canadian lieutenant general talked about his preference for Dupuis over Nolte at a press conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Friday announcing the imminent start of filming in Rwanda on a feature based on Dallaire's award-winning memoir, Shake Hands with the Devil. Dupuis, one of Quebec's top vedettes, was sitting beside Dallaire at the event, with the actor looking more than ever like a rock star with long, unkempt hair, shaggy beard and moustache, and his usual cool style.
Dupuis will play Dallaire in Shake Hands with the Devil, a $10 million Canadian film that begins shooting in Kigali in mid-June with Ottawa-born Hollywood veteran Roger Spottiswoode directing.
Nolte portrayed a character based on Dallaire in Hotel Rwanda, a Hollywood film about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Dallaire was head of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the African country at the time.
"Hotel Rwanda is OK," said Dallaire, who is now a senator. "It achieves my aim. My aim is to keep the Rwandan genocide alive. And unless it absolutely sins against the truth, if we can capture that interest, if people can walk out of the movie theatre and say, 'What was I doing when that happened? How did that thing slip by us?', then that's fine. I'm not a big fan of Nick Nolte and I didn't spend time at the bar of the Hotel des Mille Collines (as the Nolte character frequently does in Hotel Rwanda)."
Dallaire was much more enthused about Dupuis, saying "I'm humbled that an actor of the calibre of Roy Dupuis is willing to take on this mission."
Dallaire says he's pleased that it is an independent Canadian production rather than a Hollywood film that will now be telling his story. If it was a Hollywood film, "we'd probably end up with a two-star Marine Corps general shooting up the place or something," Dallaire said.
Dupuis, who was most recently seen on the big screen playing French Canadian hockey hero Maurice Richard in the biopic The Rocket, took issue with one journalist's question that implied Dallaire was not a hero.
"He was powerless," said Dupuis, referring to Dallaire's force's inability to stop the genocide, which took the lives of over 800,000 Rwandans. "But he did succeed in convincing all the people around him, the (UN) soldiers, to stay. So in that way he was a winner."
Shake Hands with the Devil is being produced by Laszlo Barna, Michael Donovan and Arnie Gelbart, president of Montreal-based Galafilm. The film will be distributed in Canada by Seville Pictures.
Donovan - the Halifax-based producer of the hit CBC comedy series This Hour Has 22 Minutes and the Oscar-winning Michael Moore documentary Bowling for Columbine - said he has spent the past four years developing Shake Hands with the Devil and that it has been an exceedingly tough task.
"You'd think since I have an Oscar that it should have been easier," said Donovan. "But it was hard. I have probably had 100 meetings with buyers around the world who said, 'Rwanda has been done,' or they say, 'A film where one million people die, who's interested in that?' They just don't think they can sell the movie."
One industry player that did back the production big-time was federal film agency Telefilm Canada, which is pumping $3.5 million into the flick.
Even with all the rejections, Donovan never once considered giving up the project, because he feels so passionately that this story has to be told once again.
"It tells the story of this small group of soldiers who decided to stay behind, even though it was a great risk and even though their ability to do things (to stop the genocide) were limited," Donovan said.
"They just decided that they couldn't abandon these people and they saved 35,000 people. They stood there (guarding the Rwandans) under orders from Romeo Dallaire. The whole world turned its back on this situation because there was no strategic value (in Rwanda). It was his personal courage that did it and that's a great Canadian story. That's why I'm doing this film."