One last dance with the devil

Allan Thompson

On location in Rwanda, as the cast and crew of Shake Hands with the Devil try to recreate an unimaginable horror Dressed for the part, actor Roy Dupuis eerily resembles retired general Romo Dallaire as he prepares for a scene in Shake Hands with the Devil, being filmed in Rwanda. I feel a real connection with this man, Dupuis says. He opened up to me.

KINIHIRA, Rwanda—Against a stunning backdrop of verdant hills checkered with terraced farm plots, banana groves and mud houses, Roy Dupuis sits alone, quietly transforming himself into Roméo Dallaire. The steely-eyed Quebec actor cast as the retired Canadian general is practising his lines, murmuring unfamiliar military lingo that wasn't part of his English vocabulary before taking the role of Canada's most famous soldier for the film version of Dallaire's Rwanda genocide memoir, Shake Hands with the Devil.

Dupuis, whose most recent role was hockey legend Rocket Richard, is sipping a can of Nestea and puffing Gauloise cigarettes. Finally, he gets up to stroll across the set and chat with crew members, lamenting that he forgot to bring the charger for his camera and won't be able to snap his own photos of the scenery that so mesmerized Dallaire, whose tragic story inspired this film. Squint your eyes just a bit and the handsome 43-year-old Dupuis looks eerily like Dallaire, sporting a carefully groomed moustache, summer tan uniform and authentic blue beret. Indeed, Dupuis is even wearing Dallaire's original army nametag and decorations from 1994.

Dallaire is collaborating on this project — right down to a line-by-line review of the script — and insisted on giving Dupuis the decorations to add authenticity. He also gave Dupuis something of himself.
"I feel a real connection with this man. He opened up to me," Dupuis says during an interview on the set, the first time he has spoken with media since the gruelling shoot began in Rwanda a month ago. "I'm here because of him."

In a chapel at the St. Jean military base near Montreal, Dallaire and Dupuis talked for hours. "Mostly he talked and I listened. He was generous because he wants this story told."
"This is the first time I accepted doing a movie without reading the scenario first," Dupuis says. "It was mainly my meeting with this man that got to me on this. This story should not die, it should be remembered so that maybe we could stop something like another genocide from happening."

Like others, Dupuis acknowledges he barely noticed news of the Rwanda genocide in 1994. "I recall hearing about it, that's pretty much it. Then basically when he started talking about it, it was like, `Holy shit, what happened over there?'"

In this tiny central African country that witnessed the slaughter of up to 1 million people when Hutu extremists set out to exterminate the Tutsi minority and Hutu moderates, Dupuis and the rest of the production team are visiting sites that are the virtual stations of the cross of the Rwanda genocide. Cast and crew alike have been struck by the breathtaking beauty of the country and the crushing poverty. Ragged bands of small children line the roadway to every shooting location, calling out "muzungu" (Kinyarwanda for "white man") and asking for empty water bottles to reuse. Shooting in Rwanda has added authenticity — including the red dust that covers nearly everything — but it has proved complicated and expensive. The country has no film industry and none of the gear — cranes, booms or complicated lighting equipment — required by major movie productions.

On this day, the set is a magnificent vantage point near a tiny village called Kinihira, a spot that Dallaire regarded as his secret place. Amid the carnage of the genocide, this is where the Canadian general who commanded a doomed United Nations mission would retreat to "become human again." And Dupuis says that is exactly the Roméo Dallaire that he intends to portray, a human being, not a hero.
"In a sense it is a heroic role because he went — in French we say `au-delà de lui-même' — farther than himself. But he did not succeed in what he would have wanted to do, so that's why he sees himself as not being a hero. "I'm not trying to play a hero. I'm trying to play everything I feel about him, as a human being."

Shake Hands with the Devil is being produced by Laszlo Barna and Michael Donovan. The film will be distributed next year in Canada by Seville Pictures. Donovan, who won an Oscar for the Michael Moore documentary Bowling for Columbine, has spent the past four years on the Dallaire project. The director, Ottawa-born Roger Spottiswoode, says the movie will be a compelling, factual account of Dallaire's Rwanda experience, all the more real for being shot on location. Early plans to shoot in South Africa were quickly abandoned after Spottiswoode visited Rwanda himself.

"It is the story of a disaster for a country and the personal disaster of a person who was put into a meat grinder and left with very little," Spottiswoode says during a lunch break on the set, pausing only to marvel at the spectacular scenery. "It's the story of a great tragedy and a remarkable person ... It's a story that has actually not been told before, even though people may think it has. I hope we'll get past them thinking Hotel Rwanda is the only story."

This is the first feature-film depiction of Dallaire's story. The Hollywood production Hotel Rwanda featured Nick Nolte in a composite character — a hard-drinking Canadian colonel — that was loosely based on Dallaire, but was neither a flattering nor accurate portrayal.

Both Dupuis and Spottiswoode spent hours talking to Dallaire about the film.
"He was very, very clear that this was not to be the story of a hero. He doesn't see it that way at all. I said that I understood that but that I would do my best to make it a truthful portrayal of him," Spottiswoode says. "But I can't alter the facts to make less of him.
"He was unable to prevent this happening, he stayed here as a witness to these events and could not carry the burden later. He's a sort of Shakespearean character," Spottiswoode says.

The film will also include difficult scenes of Dallaire's suicide attempts.
"I told him I was going to do it and I don't think he liked it very much, but he didn't stop me. I don't know how much he will approve of what we are doing. I hope his friends tell him that we got it right, but it will be painful," Spottiswoode says.
"We have to sort of part company. I'm not making it for him. I'm making it for other people. It's going to be kind of brutal in a way and I hope it will be honest."

The script moves back and forth between Dallaire's time in Rwanda and the period of his mental collapse and retirement from the military years later, with the Dallaire character speaking to a therapist.

Dallaire was scheduled to travel to Rwanda early this month to visit the set, but cancelled at the last minute.
"He's tired, that's what they told us," Spottiswoode says. "To be honest, it was unimaginable to me that he could ever come. How could you come back and see this being reproduced?"

One scene takes Dallaire through a village where there were so many bodies on the road that he had to get out and remove them to drive through. In another he encounters the body of a woman who has been brutally raped.
"We're just trying to be accurate and honest and not do a sort of Hollywood movie," Spottiswoode says. "We're not changing events; we're not doing heroic shots or heroic moments. We're not using movie techniques to create a leading character. We're portraying somebody who went through a very difficult time and doing it honestly.