Simon Hattenstone talked to Joe Menell and angus Gibson, the men who made the extraordinary filem Mandela, now on circuit.
DO you believe film-makers can change the world?
Jo Menell: Definitely. If not change the world, at least wake people up, give them something to think about.
Angus Gibson: I’m not sure films change the world, but they do point people in certain directions or away from certain things.
Menell: As a documentarian, I believe a documentary carries additional weight because it’s about things that actually happened or are happening, whereas a feature is ultimately the construct of a screenwriter and actors.
Jo, you are best known in this country as the man who made Dick, a 15-minute film starring a multitude of limp penises. Was that a human-rights film?
Menell: Absolutely. Because I think human rights are inextricably bound up with censorship. And Dick was a film that challenged censorship.
How many willies were there?
Menell: One thousand. I’ve made over 60 documentaries, won prizes, and no one will remember any of those, but I don’t mind being branded with Dick. I just hope Mandela gets some recognition. It would be nice if people realised I could do something besides Dick.
Has Mandela seen Dick?
Menell: Noooooh, he hasn’t. But the people around him, particularly the women who were very instrumental in us making the film, had. I didn’t go out of my way to tell Mandela about it. He’s from another generation. Women in South Africa think it’s fantastic; men have a lot of problems with it because they find it threatening to something they regard as sacrosanct. Two festivals tried to show it in South Africa and both times it was deemed unsuitable because, they said, the repetitive nature of the image may cause offence.
What inspired it?
Menell: Censorship. Just seeing women’s anatomy being explored on screen in a prurient way while Mickey O’Rourke gets out of bed from a sweaty fuck with Kim Basinger with his underpants on – I find that hypocritical, dirty and strange. As a documentary-maker, I have had to remove full- frontal nudity from my films even when it was in context. I wanted to challenge a taboo that is based on dirty-minded thinking. What is wrong with the limp willy? Not that I think there’s anything wrong with the erect willy …
In recent years we’ve had Hoop Dreams, Crumb and Jonathan Demme’s Cousin Bobby, documentaries that have been shown in the cinema. Have documentaries been rediscovered as a cinematic medium?
Gibson: It’s still a struggle. The process of rebirth is still under way. It’s still very hard to get documentaries into cinemas. To get Mandela shown in cinemas has been a much harder struggle than I expected. But I think it’s a battle we’re going to win. Mandela has opened in mainstream cinemas in South Africa. Brazil has bought it. We have a distributor in the US.
How did Mandela feel when you asked to trail him for seven months to make the film?
Menell: His reaction was, “No problem. I will do everything to make the film as you want it to be made.” This was November 1993. The election had been called, the date had been set, but the campaign hadn’t begun. He gave us incredible access, although a lot of the stuff behind the scenes was considered too sensitive for us to record. Also Mandela made it quite clear he did not want to talk about Winnie. It wasn’t clear how difficult things were between them at the time …
What most moved you in the seven months of conversation?
Menell: When he talked about his circumcision. It was the most crucial event in his life, the becoming of a man. He talked about the moment the spear slices his foreskin and he admitted that he showed fear and pain, that he wasn’t as brave as the boys who had gone before him. And this was obviously significant to the rest of his life. After that he seemed determined never ever to show his fear.
What would you like us to come away feeling from this film?
Menell: This is a man who spent 27 years in jail, and his one message is the need for reconciliation. I was looking for even a hint of racism, of anger about what happened to him and his colleagues. What seems to amaze most people who’ve seen this film is that Mandela can sit down with the whites, the racist apartheid government, and negotiate with them a transition to majority rule which will include them in the process. Over a period of seven months I would probe him on this, looking for any tell-tale signs that underneath the calm he was really angry and anti-white. But the man is colour-blind.
Gibson: The point of the film was to make something that would be accessible for a world audience, not necessarily a film for people well-informed about South Africa and Mandela. Jo realised I would be useful for archive material because of my previous work in South Africa. There is a legacy in South Africa of archive being hidden and not looked after. It makes it tough to recreate history.
Post-apartheid, did you feel an identity crisis?
Gibson: Completely, completely. Writers as much as film-makers, everybody. There has been a terribly difficult period in which people have been unable to find a way forward. Now there are beginnings of new, exciting developments.
Menell: My main reason for involving Angus was that he’d lived through this period and I hadn’t. I’d been banned from working in South Africa and I’d been working in South America and the US. I was determined the film should have a South African feel, and that is what he brought.
Why were you not banned, Angus?
Gibson: Because I was careful. At one point I wanted to make a vrit film on Soweto, following three characters. I’d got all the funding from Channel 4 and I returned to South Africa, and the second state of emergency came in. It was 1986 and there were all sorts of media restrictions that compromised the film I wanted to make.
Some of the subjects of my films became victims – they’d be on television in Britain and the security services were aware of this and had them assassinated. I started to feel that I had to work in a different way, making historical films that were imparting the same message but were not compromising the subjects of the film. By exploring archive material, I could continue to work. We wanted to change the nature of film-making. Everything that had been made about South Africa in that period had been made by people who were not South African.
Is the future of South African film with documentaries or feature films?
Gibson: I’m in the process of shifting to feature films. I’m currently developing a film, Street Bash, written by a young writer from Soweto. The film is not in English, and it feels reminiscent of the French movie La Haine to me. There’s no tradition of feature- film-making in South Africa that one can be proud of. And I feel now is the time to shift that. In the Eighties, it seemed appropriate to make socio-political documentaries, but now we want to change that. In the Eighties, there was a battle being fought. Culture wore its message on its sleeve. Now we have shifted into a different era. We need to reinvent ourselves.