“There is no reason why challenging themes and engaging stories have to be mutually exclusive—in fact, each can fuel the other.”

“To me, this movie is about what is valuable,” says director/producer Edward Zwick. “To one person, it might be a stone; to someone else, a story in a magazine; to another, it is a child. The juxtaposition of one man obsessed with finding a valuable diamond with another man risking his life to find his son is the beating heart of this film.”

“These two men set off on a journey, one with the intent of getting off the continent, the other with the intent of getting his family back,” notes Leonardo DiCaprio, who stars as Danny Archer. “But each character ends up struggling with his own moral decisions.”

Djimon Hounsou, who stars as Solomon Vandy, sums it up: “Archer is pursuing a diamond, but Solomon’s diamond is his son.”

The world sees diamonds as sparkling, beautiful and highly prized. They are symbols of love and fidelity, affluence and glamour. But in the African country of Sierra Leone, where many of the world’s diamonds are mined, they have taken on a much darker connotation.

Zwick explains, “‘Conflict diamonds’ are stones that have been smuggled out of countries at war. They then go to pay for more arms, increasing the death toll and furthering the destruction of the region. They may be a small percentage of the world’s sales, but, nonetheless, in an industry worth billions of dollars, even a small percentage is worth many millions and can buy innumerable small arms. In the late 1990s, people from such NGOs as Global Witness, Partnership Africa-Canada and Amnesty International gave them a name in order to help bring the crisis into the public consciousness:

“They called them ‘blood diamonds.’”

Zwick had only a passing knowledge of the term and its meaning when producer Paula Weinstein first sent him the script. “I had heard the phrase, but I didn’t fully understand its implications,” he offers. “The more I learned, the more fascinated and horrified I became, and the more I realized this was a story that needed to be told.”

Weinstein developed the screenplay with screenwriter Charles Leavitt and executive producer Len Amato. Producer Gillian Gorfil had initiated the project with C. Gaby Mitchell, who shares story credit with Leavitt. When they came on board the project, Zwick and producer Marshall Herskovitz continued to develop the story with Weinstein.

Weinstein recalls, “I had made an anti-apartheid movie called ‘A Dry White Season’ many years ago and spent some time in South Africa. I knew about conflict diamonds, so the idea of making a film that showed their effect on the people of Africa was very significant to me.

“First of all,” she continues, “we had great writers, and then the moment we got the script, I wanted to go to Ed Zwick. Ed and his partner, Marshall Herskovitz, have demonstrated a sensibility that I share; they are interested in stories about the real world, and they are committed to telling them truthfully. knew they would not only embrace the material but be fearless in telling the whole story. A project like this needed someone with a creative backbone in order to get it made, and made right.”

Herskovitz has had an association with Zwick dating back almost 30 years. He acknowledges that the subject matter of “Blood Diamond” posed a challenge to the filmmakers in balancing images that have the potential to, at once, confront and entertain an audience but adds that there is ample precedence for walking that tightrope. “It was hard for us to look at some of the material about Sierra Leone and the truly horrendous circumstances there and imagine them in a Hollywood film, but history has repeatedly shown us you can do films that deal with difficult subject matters for a wide audience when there is an important story to be told.”

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