Tag: Nelson Mandela

Back off, Hollywood

While South Africa’s currently high Hollywood profile is putting smiles on the faces (and much-needed cash in the pockets) of many figures in the country’s film industry, it appears that not all local actors are as pleased.

The Guardian reports that a number of prominent local thesps have spoken out against the casting of bankable American stars in plum South African parts — most notably Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela in “Invictus,” and Jennifer Hudson as his ex-wife Winnie in a separate biopic:

Oupa Lebogo, general secretary of the CWU [Creative Workers’ Union], said of Hudson’s casting, announced last month: “This decision must be reversed, it must be stopped now. If the matter doesn’t come up for discussion, we will push for a moratorium to be placed on the film being cast in South Africa. We are being undermined, there is no respect at all … We can’t allow this to happen. We have people who can play the role far better than Jennifer.”

The award-winning actor John Kani said Freeman had asked him how he felt about an African-African playing the former president. He said he understood the economics but lamented the fact that “I wasn’t even asked”.

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December 8, 2009
Freeman’s Mandela “less impersonation than incarnation”

It goes without saying that New York Times executive editor Bill Keller has a more informed perspective on Nelson Mandela than most of the critics currently assessing Clint Eastwood’s “Invictus.” Keller was, after all, the NYT’s Johannesburg bureau chief in the time that Mandela came to power.

So it’s interesting — if not particularly meaningful — that he, of all people, is thoroughly persuaded by Morgan Freeman’s portrayal of the former South African president, gushing in a profile of the film that Freeman’s work is “uncanny — less an impersonation than an incarnation.”

Keller acknowledges, as have several critics, that Freeman hasn’t mastered specifics such as the accent (he rather diplomatically says that Mendela’s voice is “less about accent than cadence”), but excuses this on the grounds that Freeman has more abstractly captured Mandela’s spirit.

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December 3, 2009
Hollywood, Johannesburg

In January 2005, exactly one week after I left my birth town of Johannesburg to study film in the brighter lights of London, Darrell James Roodt’s earnest AIDS drama “Yesterday” became South Africa’s first Oscar nominee in the Best Foreign Language Film category.

Only a month later, the rather better “uCarmen eKhayelitsha” took the Golden Bear at the Berlin fest; again, the country’s first production to take top honors at one of the major festivals. And only a year later, Gavid Hood’s “Tsotsi” went one better than “Yesterday” by taking the Oscar.

By this time, I was beginning to wonder if the movie gods were sending me a sign that I’d picked the wrong country: South Africa’s film industry seemed poised for a crossover explosion. That didn’t quite happen. Hampered by the usual financial constraints of a third-world industry, the country went back to its steady output of provincial lowbrow comedies and not-quite-there dramas, few of them seen beyond its own borders.

Almost five years later, however, something interesting is starting to bubble there again — but this time, it’s not South Africa’s own industry making waves as much as an international cinematic preoccupation with the country and its stories.

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November 9, 2009
PAGE TO SCREEN: “Playing the Enemy” by John Carlin

There are few things as antithetical to great drama as an unmitigated hero, a character rendered almost inhuman by unfailing nobleness and valor. In fiction and non-fiction alike, we are inevitably more compelled by the flawed and conflicted of our kind – whether in lurid warts-and-all celebrity biographies or more subtly probing character studies. In film, true-life heroes often make for worthily sanitized Oscar bait (from “Gandhi” to “Milk”), but they rarely provoke great art.

Few figures bear out this truth as handily as Nelson Mandela – a man who is surely the greatest political hero of our time, but who has nonetheless inspired a number of crashingly dull books and films. It’s not that the man wants for character or complexity: Mandela’s deserved (if artfully self-engineered) modern sainthood belies his early days as a fierce firebrand, but few biographies (and to date, no biopic) have bridged that gap, or made much of an attempt to study the man beneath the myth.

So it comes as no surprise that John Carlin’s “Playing the Enemy,” which forms the inspiration for Clint Eastwood’s recently-titled film “Invictus,” does little to change this, casting the first black president of South Africa less as a freestanding character than as a perma-haloed symbol of democratic benevolence. Of course, in this instance, Carlin’s intent was not to write another Mandela biography – just as it should be stressed that Eastwood’s film isn’t really a Mandela biopic.

In narrowing his focus to South Africa’s monumental victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup, the currency of which extended beyond simple sporting patriotism to a kind of symbolic consolidation of the country’s international post-apartheid rehabilitation, Carlin’s aim is precisely to dehumanise Mandela to an extent. At the book’s core is the somewhat tenuous thesis that Mandela almost single-handedly enabled this against-the-odds triumph via an elaborately strategized charm offensive – though Carlin pays sporadic attention to Mandela the man, his chief interest lies in the mid-1990s invention of Mandela the brand, and the influence it could wield.

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June 10, 2009
Freeman tapped Eastwood to direct ‘Invictus’

Toward the top of this John Powers profile of Morgan Freeman (published in part online and appearing in full in the June issue of Vogue), the actor drops an interesting bit of information I wasn’t aware of until now. Most people were (as always) quick to call Clint Eastwood an Oscar hound for his choice of material this time around. Obviously a film featuring a revered individual such as Nelson Mandela and covering the historic events of John Carlin’s book “Playing the Enemy” sets off the Oscar bait alarm, but it appears Eastwood didn’t exactly go searching for his next big awards season get:

Effortlessly dapper in a black jacket and a white polo shirt at breakfast in Beverly Hills, [Freeman] says that at this point in his storied career, “there aren’t many challenges in making movies.” Luckily, he’s about to embark on one of them—going to South Africa to produce and star in a big-budget Hollywood film about Nelson Mandela. “If you are playing a living figure who’s revered by the world, you’ve got yourself a major, major undertaking. You’ve got to do this without embarrassing yourself, your audience, and especially Madiba [Mandela’s nickname]. Knowing that, you can be entirely too self-conscious. There are pitfalls, but I am going to be working with Clint.”

He’s referring, of course, to his good friend Clint Eastwood, who’s directing the film at Freeman’s request. “Morgan is just right for the role,” says the man who helmed Freeman’s Oscar-winning turn in Million Dollar Baby. “His stature in the acting world is like Mandela’s in his world.” (Eastwood’s confidence turns out to be well-founded. “Things are going fantastic here,” Freeman later tells me by phone from Johannesburg. “Everything has just fallen into place. The thing that’s surprised me is how easy it’s been to adapt to being Mandela.”)

Also, I have to say, “Invictus” is growing on me. Even though it’s totally wrong for the scope of the film and isn’t commercially appealing, I think it’s a very attractive title. Strong. Confident. I dig it.

June 5, 2009
EXCLUSIVE: Eastwood’s Mandela film titled ‘Invictus’

It’s interesting how news bites trickle down. A passing comment from our own Chad Hartigan over at Twitter stirred the stagnant buzz nest of Clint Eastwood’s still-filming Nelson Mandela project for me, so I did a little digging.

Anyone who follows the film awards season is well aware of the project, which will star Morgan Freeman as the esteemed former president of South Africa and Matt Damon as Francois Pienaar, captain of the South Africa Springboks rugby union team that won an unlikely World Cup trophy in 1995 as the nation was in the midst of post-Apartheid transition. The story was committed to print in John Carlin’s book “Playing the Enemy” in 2008. Eastwood mentioned at the Santa Barbara Film Festival in January that Carlin’s book covered similar territory to his as-of-then untitled film but didn’t mention whether Anthony Peckham’s screenplay was a proper adaptation of the volume.

But back to that Twitter message. It read, quite simply, “Eastwood’s film called Invictus.” So I called Malpaso, Eastwood’s production company. I asked if this was indeed the case and was told, swiftly, “that’s still all in the works.” No confirmation was forthcoming. Fair enough. I got Chad on the phone and tracked down his source, which was an internal industry email that read: “Please note, Clint Eastwood’s untitled Nelson Mandela film is now titled ‘Invictus.’” A quick email to his source at Warner Bros. and I got the confirmation. We have a title. But what does it mean? Read on to find out.

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June 2, 2009
SANTA BARBARA: Clint Eastwood hailed as a Modern Master

So Clint Eastwood arrived in town tonight without all the pizazz you might have expected, as I reported from this evening’s Arlington Theatre event. But inside the place was bananas. Every single seat in the theater was filled, many of the locals vocalizing their shock on the way down the aisles. “I’ve never seen it this packed before,” many of them said as they found a place to settle in and behold the career the festival was honoring.

Moderator Leonard Maltin seemed to bite off a little bit more than he could chew. Seriously, an hour and a half in and we were just getting to 1971. I figured the 1980s would be a blur and indeed they were — Who wants to remember “Heartbreak Ridge” and “Firefox?” — but I would have liked some discussion on “Bird,” maybe, or “Pale Rider.” But Maltin warned at the top that if he didn’t get to your favorite film, please understand. We’re talking about six decades here.

Early in the discussion Maltin spent a lot of time picking Eastwood’s brain on his early career — a contract player at Universal, roaming around the lot soaking up what information he could, getting the gig on television’s “Rawhide” and, of course, Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns that didn’t find release in the states until rights were cleared up regarding Akira Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo.” On the whole it was one of those kiss, kiss sessions, but the crowd was pumped.

Every film that might be mentioned briefly in passing seemed to find this pocket of applause or that. The “Dirty Harry” stuff was an obvious favorite (of course we were treated to the infamous “I gots ta know” sequence), but “Gran Torino” really brought the house down, especially the old guy vs. the homies scene that might have been Eastwood’s Oscar clip had the performance been nominated a week ago.

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January 30, 2009