The executive producer of this year’s Oscar-winning movie for best film, Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, thinks the Cape is a fabulous place to make a movie. He should know — he’s making one here.
Cologne-based German producer Andreas Klein chose the Cape as a location for his film almost by chance when the catastrophic events of September 11 brought on an understandable bout of doubt about his first choice of location, Turkey.
In Cape Town with French co-producer Philippe Martinez and his fellow-countryman director Jean-Pierre Roux to shoot the thriller The Piano Player, starring Dennis Hopper and Christopher Lambert, Klein overflowed with enthusiasm for the unlikely serendipity of having his second choice turn out to be preferable to the first.
“We got scared when we realised we were going to be near to this war,” he said. He had heard of the Cape as a possible location, found that the landscape was similar enough to the south of Turkey and it was merely a bonus to discover that the shift south would cut the costs significantly because of the friendliness (to some) of the rand. “It was also very surprising and very good for us to find that there are a lot of people here who have experience in the film industry, which we wouldn’t have had in Turkey.”
With these twin factors in mind, he and partner Martinez are considering shooting future features in the Cape.
However, before anyone gets too starry-eyed, a couple of sobering points. For one, Soderbergh’s film was made on a budget to write home about — $50-million as compared with The Piano Player‘s $10-million. Traffic was also blessed with an A-list cast, including Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Heading the cast of The Piano Player are Hopper and Lambert, and while Lambert barely scrapes into the B-list rankings, Hopper is one of those category-defying actors whose presence lends gravitas to almost any film. (He’s been, he said wryly this week, in three of the most expensive films ever made — George Stevens’s Giant, Frances Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Kevin Costner’s Waterworld, not that the last could in any way be classified a success.)
And while Roux is an unknown quantity as a features director (The Piano Player is his debut), Soderbergh began his career with a splash when his Sex, Lies and Videotape caused a sensation at the Cannes Film Festival in 1989.
Which is not to say the film could not fly — it’s merely an unknown quantity. In style, said Martinez in Cape Town this week, the film will be like Peter Weir’s Witness, a beautifully made murder thriller set in an Amish commmunity.
The film was to have had a Turkish milieu, but this has been rewritten so that The Piano Player is set in South Africa. So Cape Town, for once, will be Cape Town in a movie.
In The Piano Player, Hopper plays a South African who takes care of a Mafia family’s money. His accent need not be South African, which will be a relief to some — the character learned to speak English by watching US movies on television. Ain’t that nifty?