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Amistad was not about slavery - says Morgan Freeman |
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Written by Webmaster
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Monday, 17 September 2007 |
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Amistad's visit in London coincides with an interesting interview with Morgan Freeman, one of the stars of the Spielberg's movie Amistad published in The Sunday Times - a British newspaper occupying a dominant position in the quality Sunday market.
Morgan Freeman: the pimp who became God
How does a Broadway lowlife get to heaven? Morgan Freeman talks about his journey from obscurity to Hollywood elder statesman — and taking on the role of Nelson Mandela
Interview by Nicola Graydon published in The Sunday Times on September 16th, 2007
EXCERPT:
(Morgan Freeman) “...Somewhere in my youth I learnt an awful lot from the movies – they are the best teachers because they get your attention. So you see a movie about the Lewis and Clark expeditions, or Ben Hur or El Cid, and without realising it you are learning something about history. There’s a lot of history, of American history, that has not been told, and I think if you have the option to do it, then you have an obligation to do it.”
For this reason he cites Glory, the heroic story of the first all-black volunteer regiment in the civil war, as one of his most important movie experiences. “Here was a historical moment that might have been lost had it not been for Ed Zwick resurrecting it for the screen.” I mention Amistad as the only mainstream historical film about slavery, and he corrects me: “Amistad was not about slavery,” he says, “it was about the separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary. Slavery as a trade had already been outlawed, so these people had been kidnapped. We need to clear up some stuff about slavery. We look on the US as the culprit, but all they were doing was taking advantage of cheap labour. Slavery existed in Africa for hundreds of years. We did not go in there and capture people; they were kidnapped by African and Arab slavers. It would be a good thing to finally take that stigma off ourselves.”
(Nicola Graydon) ...To my naive English ear, this sounds like sacrilege coming from an African-American, but I’m beginning to realise that Freeman is more iconoclast than icon and he resolutely refuses to let racism be an issue, despite his early experiences that might have tainted his view. America, he (MF) says, is not as racist as it thinks it is. He tells a story of a long discussion he had with a Cambodian film-maker. “She said to me, ‘You know what you have in America? You have a mild case of racial intolerance. We had racial hatred in Cambodia. It was there in Rwanda, and you have it in Darfur.’ That put things into perspective for me.”
read original article published in Times Online
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Last Updated ( Monday, 17 September 2007 )
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