Macdonald acknowledged that Slahi, who wrote about his experiences in the book Guantanamo Diary, including about months of torture that led to him to sign a false confession, is a Big Lebowski fan.
“He’s got this incredible frame of reference. He’s a very bright guy. He’s the first person from his family to go to high school,” Macdonald said of Slahi, whose father was a camel herder. In the film, that frame of reference is on display when Slahi is asked to recount everything he said under torture.
“That’s like asking Charlie Sheen how many women he dated,” Slahi says.
It should come as no surprise that Macdonald himself, who spoke to The Jerusalem Post on a Zoom call to mark the release of The Mauritanian – which stars Tahar Rahim, Jodie Foster, Shailene Woodley and Benedict Cumberbatch, in a digital format in the US, as well as on Blu-Ray, DVD and on Amazon Prime Video – also has an incredible frame of reference.
The Scottish director, who won an Oscar for his 2000 documentary, One Day in September, about the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, has divided his career between high-profile documentaries, such as the music bio film Marley and Whitney, and politically engaged dramas including The Last King of Scotland and State of Play.
He is also movie royalty, since he is the grandson of legendary director Emeric Pressburger, who was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and went on to become the most British of movie-makers, making such classics as The Red Shoes, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and The Tales of Hoffmann. Macdonald directed a touching documentary about his grandfather, The Making of an Englishman.
“It’s always a bit of a burden and a blessing to have such a great forbear in the same industry that I’m in. These days I’ve sort of come to terms with the fact that he made great films and I’ll be happy if I can make good ones,” said Macdonald.
Speaking of Slahi, the director said that he got through the 14-year ordeal through focusing on the people around him.
“In Guantanamo, I think what kept him sane and kept him alive and kept his spirit going is he’s fascinated with other people. He’s the most empathetic person you’ve ever met. In his book, he’ll describe how he’s talking to somebody who’s torturing him, and he’ll say, ‘Why are you doing this, what’s your background? What’s your education? Do you really think that God wants you to do this?’”
Slahi actually became so close to one of his former guards that the man came to visit him in Mauritania recently while on a vacation, a visit that itself became the subject of a documentary, My Brother’s Keeper.
“They’re very close and that sense of humanity is so beautiful, and nobody has made a film about the war on terror from the Muslim perspective, from the point of view of all the people who were caught up in it unjustly and suffered unjustly because of what happened. And it may be challenging for some people to think, ‘Oh, they were human beings who lost their livelihoods and lost decades of their lives.’ But I think it’s important to try to tell those stories and to make people understand the other, to make people understand people we’ve been told to fear, and Mohamedou was the perfect vehicle to do that because he is so appealing, so funny, so warm, so forgiving, and yeah, so that was what made me want to make it – him.”
THE FILM, which also tells the story from the points of view of a lawyer (Foster) and a prosecutor (Cumberbatch) was a challenge to make on several levels.
“This film was very complex structurally, because we’ve got three different stories going. Obviously, Mohamedou’s in the central one, we’ve also got Jodie’s story and we’ve got Benedict ’s story and you’ve also got these different levels of time.”
Filming out of chronological order was a challenge for Rahim. “When we meet him for the first time, he’s completely free and easy, and when we meet him for the next time, it’s four years later and he’s been through all kinds of stuff that we only learn about as we travel through the movie. That was very, very complicated for him, particularly because of the way the schedules for all the different actors worked, he had to do his very first day. The very first scene he shot was he had to do his end scene in the courtroom. He had to do that speech at the end before he’d experienced anything else, and that was the moment I thought, ‘This is an incredible performance,’ because he did such touching and beautiful work on that speech without any of the build up to it.”
Macdonald feels this might be a breakout role for Rahim, a French actor of Algerian descent who is best known for starring in Jacques Audiard’s The Prophet, for which he won a Cesar and a European Film Award.
“He’s a movie star. I’m hoping this is the movie that really puts him in Hollywood’s eye and that he’s going to get the big opportunities in Hollywood. I don’t think we would have made it without him.”
After meeting Slahi, he called up Rahim and said, “I’ve got a part for you, but it’s going to take a while for it to come together. We didn’t make it for another two-and-a-half years, but I thought he’s the only guy who could do this.”
Macdonald worked to make the movie as realistic as possible. “We shot most of this film in South Africa, in Cape Town, and I went to Robben Island where Mandela was held with the production designer and we said, ‘Wow.’ The Americans learned to squeeze the last bit of humanity out of the prison when they built it, because in Robben Island they had windows, they had slightly bigger cells, and a garden. I mean, it’s an awful place but there is some bit of humanity in it, where in Guantanamo it’s a machine for torturing people, it’s a machine for making people feel dissociated. They’re in metal boxes with no light, they’re not allowed to associate with other people. It made me think that Mohamedou is a kind of Nelson Mandela, he’s got that same quality of someone who’s been through these horrible things, but he comes out with a wisdom.... He’s one of the most remarkable people that I’ve ever met.”
Macdonald would be happy if The Mauritanian inspires some viewers to read the original book. He recommends buying the new edition, in which nothing is redacted and which features an introduction by Slahi that puts his story in context.
“The book was written as these letters to his lawyers and a legal document and he never got to edit it, he never got to revise it. It’s kind of a bit raw and rough and repetitive, but when you read the introduction, you realize Mohamedou is a real writer, he’s a poet, he’s got a writer’s spirit to him.”
Macdonald is reportedly working on a documentary about Oprah Winfrey, but when asked about whether it will be his next project, he only said, “Maybe.” Macdonald mentioned that Slahi has just published a novel, saying, “It’s about a Bedouin’s relationship with his camel.” Asked whether he might direct a screen version of that, he laughed and said, “That might be even harder to finance than this movie.”