Oliver Schmitz, who made arguably the most acclaimed anti-apartheid film, Mapantsula, in 1987, has returned to directing a feature film after 13 years – that’s how hard it is trying to raise finance for South African feature films that don’t feature Leon Schuster. Called Hi Jack, it’s a gangster comedy about a young middle-class black actor (who appears in programmes like the Zama Zama game show), living in the “white” suburbs. He has to audition for a role as a hijacker in a movie, but knows nothing about the lifestyle. So he journeys to Soweto where he undergoes some kind of method training with a real-life gangster and a kind of role reversal takes place.
What’s most interesting, however, is that this quintessentially South African story has no local financial backing. It’s a German/French/British co-production budgeted at $2,5-million, featuring Isidingo stars Tony Kgoroge and Rapulana Seiphemo in the two leads. No foreign actors are involved; there is, however, a French director of photography, acclaimed Michel Amathieu, who also shot the visually exhilarating Dobermann and Emir Kusturica’s eccentric Black Cat, White Cat, and a British editor, Derek Trigg, who cut Richard Stanley’s Hardware and Dust Devil. The music will be done by Howie B, a British music producer who worked on, among many other things, Wim Wenders’s movie The End of Violence. Sure, the crew is South African – line produced by veteran local Pierre Hinch – but all the camera equipment was flown in from Munich; all the processing and development of the negative is being done there and all the post-production will take place in Cologne. This is no indictment of the film-makers but more of our local industry which didn’t come on board.
When I visited the set, the ebullient French producer Philippe Guez told me: “We saw all the local people, the Jeremy Nathans and the Anant Singhs. They wanted an unreasonable amount out of the end deal and also wanted to cut the budget by two thirds. I think a lot of local producers in this country think they’re just there to raise the money and come up with the change whereas in Europe producers are much more creatively interested in the project. So we just went ahead for ourselves … As for the script, Oliver pitched to me at Cannes on a Friday, I read it and by Saturday lunchtime I had committed as a partner. It’s the first post-apartheid screenplay I’ve read that’s truly sharp and funny.”
Guez has always had an interest in South Africa and not long ago bought the rights to Andre Brink’s An Instant in the Wind. “It’s a great story but it would be too difficult to finance it with a South African director’s name attached, it’s just too big. But essentially what I’m interested in is not coming here just to use the place as a location, so if I plan to make a South African movie it has to retain the authenticity of the place.”
They were shooting in the Killarney Mall parking lot on a Sunday night when I visited the set. In the script the gangster and actor are finally bonding; the scene was set as a day exterior, but because of the inclement weather – which proved the major obstacle to the production – it was changed to a parking lot and shopping mall shot at night, with lighting that suggested day. It was the last day of the shoot so naturally everyone was a bit tired and frazzled, but all the same there was a distinct sense of unity and camaraderie on set; everyone from major German producer Christoph Meyer-Wiel to the grips, runners, stills photographer, make-up and wardrobe team seemed to be in love with the movie.
As with most productions there have been problems, though relatively few. A seven-week shoot of, basically, a road movie during the worst weather in Gauteng in decades couldn’t have been an easy task. In addition, they had to shoot around the Isidingo schedules because of their lead actors. By all accounts the producers of the popular soapie were very accommodating, rewriting scripts around Seiphemo and Kgoroge’s characters to allow them time to do the feature.
The skinny, angular bespectacled Schmitz, who breaks into a kind of breathless laugh every so often and chews on Super Cs as he views the video monitor, says: “I got sick and tired of hanging around doing pedestrian stuff for television and trying to get features off the ground. I mean Soft Targets, the film I intended to make about Robert McBride, was on and off for a couple of years, and these projects just lose momentum and you’ve got to come up with a new idea.” As for his prevailing interest in telling “black stories” while being an ex-Cape Town “whitey” DJ, he responds: “The terrain of black people interests me. I like the idea of mixing social commentary and humour while looking at the most painful and violent aspects of South African society. But I tell you this film wouldn’t have been financed if I didn’t have a German passport.”
The unique combination of European financing made Hi Jack possible; it’s a severe indictment of our local producers and financiers that they couldn’t see to it that one of our most talented writer/directors could find the bucks right here on his own turf. The film will be finished by July and already has distribution deals in France and the United Kingdom. No deal has yet been struck for South Africa. Sound unusual? I don’t think so.