Just three truly local films were made last year: A Reasonable Man, Heel Against the Head and the video production of Leon Schuster’s The Millennium Menace, by far the most successful at the local box office. Yet two big foreign movies, with budgets to be envious of, finished shooting in South Africa last December. They used South African equipment, locations, crew and some local actors, but above all, they used the favourable exchange rate.
A $12-million production finished shooting near Broederstroom on December 18. The American Civil War tale Glory Glory was entirely shot on Nash’s Farm, an hour’s drive from downtown Johannesburg, which doubled for Texas, and has in the past stood in for Angola, Namibia, Milwaukee and countless other “geographical twins” for productions ranging from Darrel Roodt’s The Stick to the BBC’s TV series Rhodes.
An epic western, Glory Glory is United Kingdom-based Peakviewing’s seventh production here. The company has had a consistent, even insatiable, production output coming from South Africa. In 1993 it produced a miniseries Guns of Honour as a co-production with the SABC. It returned in 1997 to make a glut of family films like The Fairy King of Ar which was followed by The Last Leprechaun, The Little Unicorn and Merlin: The Return, featuring actors like Malcolm McDowell, David Warner and famous British comedian Rik Mayall.
In 1999 it made another three films here: Africa! with Elizabeth Berkley and Patrick Bergin, about a model who is forced to survive in “the truly wild landscape of Africa”; Pets! with Christopher (The Blue Lagoon) Atkins; and their biggest-budget film to date, Glory Glory.
“If produced in the United States, Glory Glory would be two to three times more costly,” says Peakviewing vice-president Elizabeth Matthews. “We built three complete western towns within the South Africa budget. When we first came to the country, we brought many UK crew with us, but our overseas crew is becoming smaller and smaller as we find local people in South Africa to fill the positions and now we take on quite a few people on a long-term basis to provide a degree of consistency in our training. We are spoiled for choice here because the talent of the crew base in South Africa is excellent.”
Marsha Vermaak, who was contracted to build a bridge for The Fairy King of Ar, is now in charge of construction and helped use 56km of plywood for the construction of one Texas town alone on Glory Glory.
Edward Thomas, the film’s production designer, is equally enthusiastic about the experience of shooting in South Africa. “We had two art directors in the UK who did pre-production and then about 215 people in South Africa who worked on the construction. If I ever have a chance to take any of the crew back with me to the UK, I wouldn’t hesitate. In fact, for our next film, Bezerk, which is a Viking tale to be shot in the UK, we’re going to do all our manufacturing here; all the moulding of the weapons and other major props will be done in Johannesburg.”
The company has a small studio-like base; the 540m² building includes workshops and edit suites for film and video post-production as well as office accommodation, make-up, wardrobe and art department facilities. It is used primarily for in-house pre- and post-production and works in conjunction with the various semi-permanent sets built in and around Johannesburg, including a full European-style village, a life-size replica of Stonehenge and, for Glory Glory and future westerns, its three “cowboy” towns at Nash’s Farm.
Glory Glory follows a renegade gang of women led by Hannah (South African soap star Chantelle Stander) who, along with a woman known only as The Widow (Amanda Donohue), embark on a campaign of terror in Texas as a way of wreaking a kind of vengeance on a society they feel has failed to protect them from the ravages and degradation of the Civil War.
On the day I visited the production there was a major set-up: the cavalry headed up by Paul Johansson (Beverly Hills 90210 and Lonesome Dove) arrive in the small town of Twin Forks which, on the previous night’s shoot, was blown to smithereens. Shooting on five cameras in the blistering sun, the scene, littered with extras playing dead, is completed very efficiently.
“With a six-week shoot it’s a tight schedule, but these guys have really got their act together,” says company representative South African David Wilson. “The difference I’ve experienced with overseas productions shooting in South Africa is that with our weak exchange rate they have the luxury of money, which translates into time. On local features money always puts a strain on things, so one finds that the international movies made here have more leeway.
“The other main problem, I believe, with South African feature films is that they are hinged around concepts and not stories. By the time they start thinking about the screenplay they’re already in production, and with time and money a problem, we end up with films about issues and not about drama.”
Peakviewing has a low profile in the country despite the fact that they have been extremely busy here over the past three years – unlike most South African producers who are forever blowing their own marketing trumpets with very little quality to show for it on the screen.
“We are low profile, that’s who we are, probably because we’re so busy,” says Matthews. “Clearly, we are very comfortable in South Africa and would recommend it to anyone looking to produce any genre of films. The important thing is to come to South Africa and take a look and then to believe what is said. Too many foreign producers come to the country and go away sceptical of the talent base and of the budgets. The South African government also needs to start counteracting the incredibly bad publicity that the place gets in the international press, vis-Ã -vis crime. The most incredibly wild accusations get made without retraction.”
Another foreign-financed movie that finished shooting in December is Dr Lucille, one of the first films to be made under the South African/ Canadian co-production treaty which was signed at the Cape Town Film Market three years ago. Additional funding came from Italian television.
Budgeted at R20-million, with over half of that spent locally, it tells the true story of Canadian Dr Lucille Teasdale who, with her husband, paediatrician Piero Corti, started a dispensary and for more than two decades dedicated their lives to caring for the sick and wounded in the civil war in Uganda. This time parts of Pretoria stood in for international locations. Westfort hospital, a one-time leper colony and mental institution, became a rural village and home to Lucille’s humble dispensary, which was to become the 500-bed St Mary’s hospital in Lacor and is now at the forefront of fighting Aids in Uganda. Among other locations “in drag”, the Union Buildings became home to the Italian government.
The film was shot in less than five weeks; “We went according to our schedule – 29 days! – which was not a lot of time to make the movie that we wanted to make,” says Canadian producer Claude Bonin. “But the South African crew and actors were great and we’re going to definitely come back here with another project.” A South African was even found to play Idi Amin -Â “Brains” Mokhala Mofokeng, stage manager on Bopha and Sarafina. Vanessa Cooke also stars alongside other South Africans Vusi Kunene and Robert Whitehead.
Says Kobus Botha, South African producer on the film: “What is great about a movie made with foreign money is they come here and spend a shitload of cash and there’s no gold or steel or endangered species being taken out of the country – they just take the pictures and the movie is seen around the world.”
Botha has a lot of respect for the Canadian film industry. “There the government pushes local crew and local employment and so reaps the benefits eventually, whether it be through taxes or other stuff. They put up a guarantee on the money used, so say on a $10-million movie they would guarantee one-quarter and the money comes back to them in less than four months,” he says. “In South Africa we don’t have an industry, we have good crew and good actors. But with the SABC spending between R5 000 and R10 000 rand a minute, what can you expect?
“I also think that the government shouldn’t be putting money directly into movies because they inevitably put in so little, splitting up the pie too many times. It’s just not real. We are film-makers and it’s a business and we should raise funds that the state can match, like in Canada. There’s this culture of getting money on a plate, but you’ve got to do something for it. The way it works now you get R25 000 to develop a script – I mean, you can’t get a decent writer for that.”
The only movie with South African content which was completed in the last half of 1999 was The Long Run, written by Johan Potgieter (writer of SABC TV’s The Game, and the feature Vyfster: Die Slot, among many others). It was produced by Singh but directed by UK-based TV director Jean Stewart and photographed by Brit cinematographer Cinders Forshaw. Stewart is an award-winning TV director and Singh justifies using her by saying she was born in South Africa.
The Long Run tells the story of a washed-up marathon trainer played by Armin Mueller Stahl (Academy Award nominee for Shine) who is replaced as coach by a black man (originally Amistad’s Djimon Hounsou who, after “creative differences”, was replaced by Brit TV actor Patterson Joseph). The old geezer ends up befriending a young illegal immigrant, falling in love with her and grooming her for success in the Comrade’s Marathon.
Before we get our own Trainspotting or Reservoir Dogs to kick-start the industry, it seems foreign movie-makers will be cleaning up local production capabilities, and local movies like The Long Run or last year’s production of Boesman and Lena (Danny Glover and Angela Bassett) will be forced to use overseas talent in front of the cameras. New legislation passed by the Department of Home Affairs, in which the insistence on special work permits and conditions for imported technicians and cast members is scrapped, means they need only apply for business visas, which has made the independence of the local industry even more tenuous.
And until the government stops acting like an NGO funder for the movie industry and becomes an active business partner; until local producers get realistic about the business of movie-making and not just television; and, most importantly, until Joe Public feels that seeing a “Seff Effrican fliek” needn’t be a cringe-inducing experience, the landscape from Mpumalanga to Cape Point will always double as anywhere else in the world.