Idris Elba goes into the belly of the beast
DRIS Elba just might be audiences’ pick for the next James Bond, be widely adored as a sex symbol, and also remembered as the coolest of crooks from The Wire. He event has a reputation as a decent urban DJ, and has done a few guest appearances as a rapper.
Yet, beneath all the stardom, beats the heart of a man who takes his African roots very seriously. His dad, from Sierra Leone, died two years ago and it also meant a lot to Elba to to make upcoming Netflix film, Beasts of No Nation, in Ghana, his mother’s homeland.
The 43 year-old, who was born Idrissa Akuna Elba in Sierra Leone, had moved to London with his family as a child. “I’d never been to Ghana because my parents couldn’t afford to take me when I was younger,” he notes. “Now my mum loves anything I do that has to do with Africa of course, but this was especially touching to her because it was the first time I’d gone to her country of birth.”
The film’s director Cary Fukunaga, who had previously impressed with Sin Nombre (2009), Jane Eyre (2011) and the TV show True Detective, had approached Elba to play the role of the Commandant, a recruiter and trainer of child soldiers, while he was directing the first season of hit HBO series.
“I needed to cast the actor well in advance because I knew their schedule would dictate when we would shoot the film and people of that calibre get booked up at least a year ahead of time,” Fukunaga explains. “I didn’t think we had a chance of getting Idris actually. When I called him I was shocked to find that he was already signed up from our initial conversation. I’m a cynical person so up until the production I was still unsure if he was really coming. But when he showed up he showed up ready.”
In the making of the film, the actors and crew braved tough jungle conditions, with Fukunaga even doing a bit of snake wrangling.
“Precarious locations, deadly animals, all those things came into play. I almost stepped on a black mamba on set and our location scout squealed like a girl when he saw this thing and he held me in front of him like a shield.
“We were shooting there with 200 people for two weeks so we hired people to trying to capture the snake but it was probably migrating and had moved on.”
Elba, meanwhile, almost fell over a small cliff. “I leant on a tree, which was not a tree, it was a branch and I went shoop! I was ‘Oh shit, I’m about to die!’ which was not fun. But it was a spectacular way to die, I have to say.”
Still it was all worth it. Elba hopes the film will engender debate that will make the situation in Africa more familiar.
“If you look at the refugee situation in Europe it’s very similar to how Africa’s become entrenched with the wars there. It’s poverty, it’s a lack of leadership and it’s devastating. So when you look at Sierra Leone it was just about getting on its feet and then ebola came along. This film is timely because you look around the world and you say, ‘Wow, these kids in the film aren’t the only children going through a lot of turmoil’. There are kids in Syria and other places of conflict.’
“This isn’t necessarily a film about child soldiers. If you really watch it again it’s about how the hell does a country eat itself alive like that from poverty.”
In his role as a mean though troubled warlord, Elba is not the star of the film. In awards terms he is most likely to receive a supporting actor nomination, while 14 year-old Abraham Attah, who plays 11year-old Agu, a child soldier the Commandant takes a shine to, has already taken out the best young actor prize in Venice and looks set for more awards attention.
Attah is riveting to watch. Untrained and mostly uneducated he had been working at a local street market in Accra, Ghana, when discovered. We observe the action through Agu’s eyes as the Commandant plucks him from his village in an unnamed country and trains him to kill.
“We had guys looking for a boy everywhere from Cameroon all the way to Sierra Leone,” Fukunaga explains. “No one came to casting calls and I really felt we didn’t have an actor for the movie even a week before shooting. Abraham had never done anything like this before and it was very hard for him. I remember him struggling in the beginning with the repetition of it and me pushing him harder to deliver a performance in the emotional scenes. I didn’t tell him that one day he’d be winning awards,” chuckles the director, “but I said, ‘If get through this you’ll be very happy that you did this one day’.’”
How is he handling the attention? “He’s a really cool kid. Even when we were shooting he was very unphased by things. But I keep telling him, especially when we were on a private jet, ‘Abraham this is not normal life. It’s not always like this.’ For him I think it doesn’t even matter as long as he’s got things that make him comfortable and happy. I don’t know whether he’ll go onto be an actor or not. The most important thing is that this is a positive, beneficial experience for him in his life.”
Fukunaga, 38, knows about being a high achiever. The son of a third generation Japanese-American father and a Swedish-American mother, he’d studied history and political science at university and had been a professional snowboarder before enrolling in New York University’s graduate film programme. Currently with a musical and a sci-fi film in the works, and hoping to do a horror movie, he says he never knows which of his projects will become a success. And that includes True Detective.
“I’m not sure I want to know,” he admits when inevitably asked about the hit series. Though it may have something to do with his insistence on keeping things fresh. He didn’t return for the much-maligned second season starring Colin Farrell. “I’ve never planned on directing two full seasons of anything. It’s a lot of work and it’s the same thing over and over. I’ve already said everything I wanted to say.”
On Beasts, a project he had worked on for over a decade, he was not only the director and writer (having adapted Uzodinma Iweala’s 2005 novel), he was also cinematographer and producer. He had a lot of input regarding where the $6m production would end up.
Ultimately the film is spearheading the first foray into the cinema market for streaming giant Netlix who picked it up for a reported US$12 million.
On October 16, the same day the film streams around the globe, it will screen in select US and UK cinemas as a qualifying run for the Oscars.
As for releasing a movie online and in cinemas and on the same day, he says, “I don’t know how it’s going to change things or what the conversation will be six months from now. It’s definitely not for me to decide.”
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