Amistad

Casting Cinqué took longest on Steven Spielberg’s film. Open auditions ran in London, Paris and Sierra Leone, more than 150 actors were seen, and 9 weeks before shooting the part was still empty; Spielberg was ready to delay the production by up to 2 years rather than settle. An audition tape settled it: Djimon Hounsou, then little known. He had 10 days to learn Mende, spoke some lines phonetically, and has said that real chains and shackles on set made him consider quitting on the first day. Chiwetel Ejiofor, still a LAMDA student, auditioned while playing Othello at the Royal National Theatre and made his screen debut here. Retired Supreme Court justice Harry Blackmun appears as Justice Joseph Story, and Morgan Freeman’s Theodore Joadson is an invented composite. The whole film was finished in 51 days. It drew 4 nominations at the 70th Academy Awards and won none, though Hounsou and Freeman took NAACP Image Awards. A good fit if you like a courtroom film that builds its lead in a language the court cannot follow. Not for anyone reading it as a summary of the slavery argument of its day; the historian Eric Foner wrote that the case turned on the Atlantic slave trade, outlawed by international treaty by 1840, with no bearing on slavery as a domestic institution.