Andrew Worsdale
Russell Thompson says he’s not a shy person. “Hell, I’ve been known to take off my clothes and scream loudly from the tops of tall buildings,” he tells me over a demure coffee in Melville. It was a pleasure meeting the man – should I say director – who at 39 has the dubious title of “South Africa’s latest `young’ talent”.
Thompson is an aficionado of late 1960s and 1970s American movies – a genre we grew up on and that, through their kinetic intelligence, made us want, desperately, to make movies. And he has achieved a long-held aim with the release of his movie Sexy Girls, which was financed by M-Net.
It’s a fish-out-of-water story with Jamie Bartlett playing a disillusioned thirtysomething yuppie who catches his wife in bed with a friend and decides to snuff himself out with exhaust fumes in his Beetle.
His suicide attempt is foiled when he is hijacked by a group of coloured female gangsters, one of whom has been attacked and raped after “innocently” hustling a man. So the two groups from other sides of the fence take their journey of life together, both becoming more sympathetic to the other.
Although not as gritty as it could be (Thompson and producer Richard Green say the original script was much more scuzzy but was toned down for M-Net’s target audience) it is still a remarkably well-mounted and interesting local film that doesn’t delve into apartheid era clichs and notions of redemption. It just tries to tell a generic gangster tale. At times it is fetishistic and unrealistic. For example, Muizenberg is the setting for most of the action and there’s no mention of Athlone or Khyalitsha.
PC carping aside, Sexy Girls is the kind of movie the rest of us aspirant directors should be making – localised, infused with socio-political back-story but not getting self-conscious about our fucked-up histories.
Thompson studied at the Pretoria Film School in 1981 and made a short movie called Oswald with Bill Flynn as a lonely guy chasing his budgie. Financed to the tune of a lowly R15 000 the 26-minute movie earned him the attention of the industry. “Things were looking good then,” he says with an ironic smile.
He directed a commercial for Vadari, a kind of puzzle toy, and then wrote a screenplay on spec about a woman who burns out, leaves everything behind and eventually falls for a bounty hunter.
His first feature was a piece financed by Ronnie Isaacs, South Africa’s local schlock-meister, who also gave an early break to Darrell Roodt. Called Superhero, it was written in two weeks, shot in five days and involved an innocent guy who is mugged by a figure called Trashman.
With the movie industry proving to be a carousel of disappointments, Thompson relocated to Knysna with his partner Raquel, who worked as a waitress while he continued writing. He finally got a job as a runner on a French TV commercial. “I had to carry a wagon wheel and the top of it fell off and the tip of my dick was cut off,” he tells me. He was laid up in hospital and heard of the M-Net New Directions initiative and made the decision.
The result was his direction of Tertius Meintjie’s The Pink Leather Chair, also a Cape-based coloured gang drama. Thompson tells me, ” If I had to choose a group of South Africans around which to base a movie, I’d always choose the coloureds. I grew up in the Eastern Cape and love movies and love their colloquial mix of humour and violence.” One thing he makes perfectly clear is his love of humour to balance a potentially violent situation.
Thompson is a perfectionist. He story-boards everything. Green says, “Russell is simply great at the preparation, the juxtaposition of the story and getting everything together on time.”
Go and see it. With your bucks in the corporate pockets more of us cute, clever and occasionally over-the- top-local film-makers can make a living.So support the movie. It’s not The Godfather, but it’s better than Sarafina.