The budding South African film industry should draw from the country’s own rich and painful experience of the apartheid era and not try to emulate Hollywood’s big-budget movies, veteran actor Morgan Freeman said on Thursday.
”Go your own way,” the 69-year-old Freeman said as he appeared at a local film festival alongside South Africa’s brightest hopeful, 22-year-old Presley Chweneyagae, who played a township thug in the Oscar-winning Tsotsi.
”Trying to emulate Hollywood is a mistake because the Hollywood way is not always the best way. You don’t need large amounts of money to make a film,” said Freeman, who won an Oscar for his role in Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby and received Academy Award nominations for roles in Street Smart, Driving Miss Daisy and The Shawshank Redemption.
Anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela personally chose Freeman to play the lead role in the film based on his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom.
Bearing an uncanny physical resemblance, Freeman said that he also hopes to emulate the former South African president and international role model.
”He influences the world, me included,” Freeman said in a brief interview. ”His way of conducting himself … that it’s all right to be nice.”
Freeman met Mandela in Johannesburg on Tuesday. He said that when he agreed to take on the role of Mandela, he also said that he ”needed access to him”.
”Every time we are in close vicinity, we get to see each other,” Freeman said.
Cape Town’s Sithengi film festival invited Freeman and other United States movie figures to its annual festival in a bid to help the South African film industry learn from the experiences of Hollywood.
After years of isolation and neglect because of apartheid, the South African film industry is on a roll. Tsotsi won the Oscar for best foreign film this year, and another South African film, Yesterday, was nominated the previous year.
Tsotsi director Gavin Hood withstood pressure from sponsors to cast an internationally known Afro-American actor as the star because he wanted the film to be in tsotsitaal — the language widely spoken in the townships around Johannesburg.
Instead, Hood drafted Chweneyagae, an unknown young local with no formal drama training, and newcomer Terry Pheto as female lead to head up an all-South African cast.
Chweneyagae won hearts worldwide for his portrayal of a gang chief who hijacks a car and unwittingly kidnaps a baby at the same time — and then mellows into a hapless father figure.
The young actor said on Thursday that he is still coming to grips with his stardom. He made his first foreign trip one year ago to the Toronto film festival and is now ”working on” his accent to help him to play roles in non-South African films.
Freeman warned South African filmmakers not to let success go to their heads. ”This whole thing of, ‘If I get one success, the next will follow like bowling pins,’ is almost never true,” he said, stressing that bigger bucks do not necessarily translate into better films.
Despite the recent successes, the South African film industry is still very much in its infancy. Hollywood and Bollywood hits predominate at the box office and local producers and directors struggle for funding and acclaim.
”We should learn to walk before we run,” said the head of the South African Broadcasting Corporation, Dali Mpofu. ”We are a baby in the industry.”
”Fifteen years ago, some of us were going around promoting a cultural boycott of South Africa,” he said about the isolation of the apartheid era. ”We now have a cultural deficit.” — Sapa-AP