NPR on Blood Diamond
All Things Considered on NPR did a story today on the industry campaign to minimize the impact of Blood Diamond, the Warner Brothers movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio scheduled to open December 15. The transcript and audio are available online. This isn’t news: last month, the World Diamond Council ran full-page ads in 10 newspapers about the Kimberley Process, the three-year-old, U.N.-backed certification system designed to keep blood diamonds off the market. NPR interviewed Cecilia Gardner of JVC and the World Diamond Council and Allan Mayer, a Los Angeles crisis-management specialist who has consulted with the World Diamond Council for the past year. “We want people who see the movie to understand it is the past,” Gardner said. “Lots has happened since that time.”
NPR asked the movie’s director, Edward Zwick, about the industry’s request that he add a disclaimer that the civil war in Sierra Leone was long over and that the issue of conflict diamonds has been addressed by the Kimberley Process. He said he never considered making a change. “My reaction is, I try not to take notes from the studio” Zwick told NPR. “And I really didn’t think it was proper to take them from an industry lobby.” Zwick said that he wanted shoppers to question where diamonds are from. “What I wanted to create in their minds is consciousness,” he says. “A purchase of a diamond just has to be an informed purchase. I think after seeing this movie, people will feel it incumbent upon themselves to ask for a warranty, so as to guarantee the diamond they’re buying is not from a conflict zone.”