Oscar-winning screenwriter, actor, director and now Africa advocate Ben Affleck wants to make a movie about the troubled eastern Democratic Republic of Congo but has found no Hollywood taker yet.
"I would love to make a movie about Congo, but unfortunately I’ve asked Hollywood folks and they always say, ah, nobody wants to see a movie about Africa," said Affleck, who earlier this year founded the Eastern Congo Initiative (ECI) advocacy group.
"I think that points to this general sense that people sort of tune out, that it doesn’t matter," he said in an interview.
"It’s also a function of trends and conventional wisdom: if it comes down to a movie with fighting robots or a movie on what’s happening in eastern Congo, you’re not going to win."
Affleck was speaking Tuesday after launching a report by his advocacy group, which calls for the United States to lead an international effort to bring stability to the troubled eastern Congo or risk the Great Lakes region becoming "another failure of humanity."
"In eastern Congo, conflict and insecurity continue while the guns have fallen silent in other parts," the report said.
The Congo was riven by devastating back-to-back wars that began in the 1990s and ended early this century after claiming some 3.5 million lives.
"The international community — and the US in particular — must do more to address the challenges in eastern Congo if another failure of humanity is to be averted in central Africa," the ECI report said.
Affleck directed, wrote and co-starred in bank heist movie "The Town" and has a slew of awards to his name, including a 1998 Oscar for the screenplay of "Good Will Hunting." He is among a growing number of stars who use their celebrity to raise awareness of global crises.
George Clooney has advocated for Sudan, "Avatar" and "Alien" star Sigourney Weaver voiced a documentary film about ocean acidification and "Avatar" director James Cameron has spoken out for the Amazonian rain forest and indigenous peoples.
Affleck has already made two short documentaries about eastern Congo, collaborating last year with Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger on a 23-minute video called "Gimme Shelter," shot in the Nord-Kivu region and featuring the Stones’ hit song by the same name.
On Tuesday, Affleck posted a five-minute video on YouTube about eastern DRC, featuring the U2 song "Bad."
But if he makes a movie about DRC, it would be fictional rather than a documentary, he said.
"There have been a lot of documentaries already, and fiction is more gripping," Affleck said.
"You can tell one person’s story and really control the extent to which the history and the politics are layered in, but you keep that central through-line of a protagonist that you’re really rooting for."
Ideally, Affleck would like whatever movie he makes about eastern DRC to star African actors. And South African Oscar-winning actress Charlize Theron has already expressed interest in filming with Affleck in eastern DRC.
"But the other problem with movies about Africa is that there are no African movie stars in the United States. So the lead has to be someone who’s American, and you have to figure out how to get an American person wedged into a story about Africa," Affleck added.
"Leo (di Caprio) did it really well in ‘Blood Diamonds,’ so it’s not impossible."
In the 2006 film set against the backdrop of the civil war that raged in Sierra Leone in the 1990s, di Caprio played a South African mercenary who sets off to recover a rare pink diamond with an African fisherman, played by Benin-born actor Djimoun Hounsou.
