Leon Schuster, the 54-year-old Afrikaans comedian, plays a black woman many years his junior in the upcoming Mama Jack. The protagonist, Jack Theron, a crew member on a movie set, gets into a personal war with his American director boss.
Hounded by the law, Theron takes on the disguise of a domestic worker, only to find employment at the home of the very man he is trying to escape. He falls in love with his adversary’s wife and gets along famously with their cute blonde kid.
It’s vintage Schuster: cheeky, daring and in very poor taste. Some will find it demeaning to black women, even though Mama Jack is a typical, full-bodied African beauty with a shy smile.
Schuster is, arguably, the most successful filmmaker in the history of South African cinema. That’s if success is measured by box-office takings.
Earlier this month, Mama Jack showed at the American Film Market in California. Producer Anant Singh put out a press release stating that the audience ‘rated Mama Jack as a better film than Mrs Doubtfire and Big Moma’s House”.
Mama Jack is the fourth Schuster directed by Gray Hofmeyr. It stars Lionel Newton, Alfred Ntombela, Jerry Mofokeng, Mary-Anne Barlow and Sharleen Surtie-Richards.
Do you have to make a movie ever year? Is this your routine?
I used to. Now it’s a movie about every two years. This one came quite quickly after Oh Shucks, I’m Gatvol because the concept had already been developed.
Is there a Schuster formula?
Stay with your audience. Keep the gags thick and the story-line thin, give them what they want. It’s not necessarily what I want. But I’ve got security with my public and I’ve got to satisfy them.
Will you ever take another road and head into the distance?
I’d like to make a movie that is totally different from anything else I’ve done, but I’d like to do it alone over four years. Jamie Uys had that freedom when he made The Gods Must Be Crazy. He went to the Kalahari and did his research for a very long period of time and, by the time he came out of there, he basically knew what his movie was going to be about.
Where were you born and raised?
I was born in Vereeniging, but brought up in Bloemies. A lot of my stuff comes from the fact that I grew up in a normal society with a lot of humour. My mom is a prankster, a spirited old lady, and my dad had a keen sense of humour. He told the best Jewish jokes — he could impersonate that accent 100% accurately.
In Bloemfontein we had the old Ritz Theatre, and we had shorts before the main feature: Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers and, my all-time favourite during those years, Jerry Lewis.
Growing up in a rugby school with a bunch of guys; there’s always fun there. In those days we went on sports tours by bus and it took us days to get anywhere, so we had to entertain ourselves. I would grab the mike, sing songs and tell jokes. I would do my stuff, basically knowing that this is what I would like to do one day.
Does your mom like your work?
She gets a bit fed up with me when I get dicey. She says, ‘Why do you need to say bullshit? Why don’t you say ‘Oh shucks’?”
What does a Schuster movie cost these days?
Between R15-million and R20million.
That’s enough for everyone to live nicely while it’s being made.
The only thing is that you have to go very high in your box office to break even. When they lowered the ticket prices, we all started panicking because now you had to put double the amount of bums on seats.
Wouldn’t that mean more people had access to the cinema?
Funnily enough, it didn’t work like that. I think if people want to be entertained and they want to see something specific, they will pay money to see it.
You play a lot on the racial divide. Do you think South Africans are not reconciled?
No, I think they are reconciled at this point in time. But I think I would not have had the freedom to do a movie of this nature in the old regime. It seems to me, the more politically incorrect I am, the more I draw my African audience to the cinema.
How do you know black South Africans enjoy your work?
Because of the reaction I get when I go to the Engen garage to fill up my car, when I go to Woolworths, when I go to Pick ‘n Pay, there’s always someone who says, ‘Hey Mr Bones, give us the gwarra gwarra! How’s it in Kuvukiland?” It’s fantastic. That is reconciliation; to get everybody to laugh at the same stuff — whites, blacks, Indians, coloureds.
Do you ever get called a racist?
Not in my professional career. Because I wasn’t preferring to play gags on black people or preferring to play gags on white people.
But you do stereotype people.
Well, a domestic worker is a domestic worker. That’s reality. I couldn’t do Mama Jack speaking [impersonates an upper-crust accent] ‘Oh my darling”. They just don’t speak like that. The ladies that I was working with, who play the part of the domestics, that’s how they speak.
This base level of humour — the idea of elephant dung flying in people’s faces — is that you?
I cannot afford to make a movie where there’s an age restriction. I’ve got to involve everybody. The critics get upset when I have a little bit of that humour in my story line.
Toilet humour …
Okay, let’s call it toilet humour. Incidentally, Ben Stiller in Along Came Polly can sit on a toilet and do the thing full-on and very gross for seven minutes and the critics don’t seem to be so troubled by that as when I do it.
It’s meant for kids. For some reason, me sticking my hand up an elephant’s backside, the kids found very funny.
How many people need to see Mama Jack for it to break even?
In South Africa, a million people.
Are you expecting a million?
I don’t know. Everybody around me seems to be positive. But since I was a laaitie [youngster], I never went to my mom and said I got 70% for history. I would say I got 55% and, if I got 75%, the surprise was so much better. And if I did get 55%, I wouldn’t feel as kak about it.
Are you rich?
If I’ve got to compare myself to the average rich person in South Africa, I’m not rich. I’m not poor. After Mr Bones took R32million at the box office, everybody approached me and said, ‘ Hell, how does it feel to put R32million in your back pocket?” But little do they know the movie cost R30million to make. The cake is that big and the slice is that small. The ideal situation is to have a lot of money to invest in your own movies because that is when you make a profit. I can go to a bank and raise funds, but then I’m back to square one — I’ve got to pay the money back.
What are you going to do next?
I feel that I’ve got an obligation, especially to my kid audience, to do another Mr Bones, Bones II. But I don’t have an idea of the storyline yet. I thought yesterday, it just crossed my mind, why don’t you combine Mr Bones with Mama Jack? But I don’t think it’s such a good idea to go back into that make-up for another long period of time. But an idea will just come up — whatever it is it will just come up.
Mama Jack opens on November 25