Hugh Dancy Talks About Horrors Depicted in "Beyond the Gates"

You can’t do a movie on genocide without showing a massacre – but how to do it? For Beyond the Gates, about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, director Michael Caton-Jones chose to treat it less like a message movie, and more like a thriller.

“It is a message film in some respects,” the film’s star Hugh Dancy told Current, “but if we start with, ‘This will be our message,’ we’re going to be doomed. The fact that the story is important does not mean it will tell itself. What drew me to the film was the script, and the shape of it, and the structure of it. I thought it did a brilliant job of building tension -- like in a good horror movie, without showing the monster.”

One of the first things Dancy talked to Caton-Jones about was how to ratchet up the tension in each situation, and no situation is more tense than the roadblock scenes. When Dancy’s character Joe Connor thinks the UN troops should be more involved with protecting the Tutsi against the Hutu, he goes to get a BBC news crew so they report on the situation. “In a slightly vainglorious decision,” Dancy said, “he gets into a van and goes into town on his own, and what he sees brings reality crashing in, not the least at the roadblock.”

There, a BBC reporter, a BBC cameraman, and he are pulled out of their vehicle by men with guns and machetes, who make them kneel on the ground while they shout questions at them in French and Kinyarwandan. Joe doesn’t seem to understand, and tries to stay silent, while the BBC reporter attempts to respond in French, to explain that Joe is a teacher and she is a part of a news crew. While on their knees, Joe sees a man to the side of the road murdered by machete, and can’t not look, despite his companion’s pleas to look away. And then he spots François, who worked as a gardener and groundskeeper at his school, smiling and carrying a bloodied machete.

“This obviously shatters his delusions,” Dancy said. “Joe’s been a witness to a murder, he’s been physically threatened himself, and he sees that François has been complicit to the murders, and is still smiling at him, like he hasn’t gone over to the dark side, he’s just going about his business. That’s when he and the audience see the real damage to the country – it’s not just the victims, but it’s also the people who were persuaded to go out with machetes and murder their neighbors.”

“Joe’s needed to believe that everything will be OK," Dancy continued, "and while there isn’t any one revelatory moment, these moments are incremental to help him realize he really can’t fight this. His need to believe in a better world is like a light in the darkness, and it’s going to flicker and die.”

Getting the roadblock scenes right was vital, since anyone who lived through the Rwandan genocide would need to recognize them. “We were going to succeed or fail on that basis,” Dancy said. Luckily, when the film was completed and shown to a stadium full of Rwandans in Kigali, the roadblock scenes got the most visceral recognition from the crowd.

“Everyone carries that in their minds," he said. "The roadblocks went up and people started dying. We didn’t want to be heavy-handed, and there isn’t a lot of violence in the movie, but those scenes needed to have maximum impact on the people who had been there, as well as the people who had never been there too. Otherwise, what was the point?”

Beyond the Gates airs on Current TV on Friday, January 28 at 12 am ET/9 pm PT.