James McAvoy, is the star of the award winning ‘The Last King of Scotland’. The film is based on Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, James plays Dr. Nicholas Garrigan, Idi Amin’s personal physician, a fictional character based on a number of westerners who became close to Amin in the ‘70’s.

 

“Locations were really beautiful, but rough and we didn’t have trailers and that kind of stuff. It wasn’t like pampering. I mean if you wanted to go and sleep you went and found a tree, sat underneath it and hoped a snake or spider didn’t come along and sit on your face.

“Yeah...it was intensely beautiful and very low budget. Ha! It was one of those things. The good thing about low budget is – compared to a bigger film aswell – is the fact that there aren’t things like, after you’ve done the scene there’s people saying, ‘We want you to go away now and hide so that we can stay and do this’, and ‘You just get out of our hair now.’ and ‘Look, we’ve got you a nice big trailer with a TV in it,’ and all that kind of stuff. There’s none of that, so you just stay there all the time – which I love doing, and you learn a hell of a lot more, because there’s no time for you to go anywhere anyway. They need you to be there because you’re helping create the scene more than in big budget movie where everything is pre-visualised on computers beforehand.

You’re more immediate and you feel more contact with the material and more ownership of the material so because of that, that’s what that was. Also, being able to do that somewhere like Uganda and feel like you’re making contact with a country, because it’s nice to go on holiday to places, but when you’re actually working in a place, you get a different contact with it. It was incredible to be somewhere like Uganda, but be working and be contributing and to be actively engaging people other than just socially. You get a lot out of people that way because you’re co-dependent. You have to give of yourself and they have to give of themselves.”