Australian director Phillip Noyce and South African David Tomahole, who worked on Catch a Fire with him when it was made in this country, are laughing about a scene they shot in Cape Town. It dealt with the return of prisoners (including Patrick Chamasso, the protagonist) from Robben Island in 1991. On the docks to greet them are crowds singing freedom songs — except most of the extras they’d employed were immigrants from further north. So Tomahole had to teach them a range of South African freedom songs — and, says Noyce, by the time they started filming, the extras were word-perfect.
Catch a Fire may take its title from a Bob Marley song, but it’s about the 1980s in South Africa — the height of apartheid repression, as well as resistance to it. It traces an Umkhonto weSizwe attempt to blow up the Secunda power plant, focusing on the agon between Chamasso, whom Noyce describes as a “reluctant warrior”, and the security policeman, Nic Vos, who interrogates Chamasso when he’s only suspected of involvement in a bombing attempt, and, ironically, turns him into a hardcore freedom fighter.
Scripted by Shawn Slovo, daughter of Joe Slovo (impersonated in the film by Malcolm Purkey), Noyce seems a natural choice for director of the movie. A sense of the socio-political landscape, and how this informs the lives of his characters, has played a role in many of his films. Backroads, his first feature, in 1977, was a road movie that highlighted Australia’s racial issues via its lead characters — one black, one white. (Seems like a template a South African filmmaker could usefully borrow.)
This tendency in Noyce’s work resurfaced in his more recent Rabbit-Proof Fence, which took him back to his native Australia to tell the sad tale of a 1913 incident of the harsh treatment of Aborigines, and in his masterful adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel, The Quiet American. There, Noyce (and scriptwriter Christopher Hampton) gave this biting view of the United States’s earliest involvement in Vietnam the impact it lacked in the 1958 version, which rather soft-pedalled matters.
If all that makes Noyce look like a bit of a lefty, he also directed two big-budget CIA thrillers with Harrison Ford, Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. Noyce points out, though, that his interest in the latter, at least, had to do with the way it portrayed the corruptions of power, and its resonances with the Iran-Contra scandal. Then again, he has also made a couple of utterly non-political Hollywood extravaganzas: the Sharon Stone vehicle Sliver, and the updated version of The Saint with Val Kilmer — whose attempts to deliver a South African accent (for one of the Saint’s disguises) must have prefigured Noyce’s work with his American lead actors on Catch a Fire.
The story of Catch a Fire reached Noyce, he says, in “a very conventional Hollywood manner. I was having lunch in West Hollywood with an Australian producer who gave me the screenplay. She knew I was flying back to Australia that night on a 13-hour flight, and, as she’d hoped, I would read the screenplay.”
He took to the story and the era: “The cauldron that was South Africa at that time, as a filmmaker, I found quite attractive … You get to enter a time and a place, as a storyteller, and on behalf of all the characters.”
Also, says Noyce, “The story spoke to us today.” It interested him in the context of today’s “war on terror” and the new global discourse of “terrorism”. “Should we consider all terrorists the same, or are some of them freedom fighters? If you look back in history, you’ll always find something to illuminate the present … There’s a Nic Vos in Guantanamo Bay right now.”
Vos is played by Tim Robbins, and the security policeman is treated in a relatively complex way in the film: if Chamasso is a “reluctant warrior”, you might say Vos is, in part at least, also a reluctant torturer. The Vos character is an amalgam of the two policemen who interrogated Chamasso, and Noyce spoke to several ex-security policemen while preparing the film. If most white male South African actors appear to have had a turn playing the security policeman in one movie or another, it was perhaps inevitable that the big lead role in the international production would go to an American star.
Noyce is frank about the need for a star such as Robbins in financing the film. “Without Tim Robbins, there wouldn’t have been a film. We sat here [in South Africa] for months without the green light. We were preparing the movie but we had no sign we were actually ever going to shoot it! It was only when Tim said yes, within a few hours the green light was pressed and it was go, go, go.”
On the other hand, says Noyce, his motivation for choosing Derek Luke (who made an impressive debut in Antwone Fisher, with Denzel Washington) to play Chamasso was “specifically because I thought he was the best man for the role. He was able to bring a dignity to that role that I thought was essential. He’s a Gary Cooper, not a John Wayne.”
As for making it in South Africa, “There was never any doubt that we wanted to shoot it here, and to use as many South Africans as possible.” Apart from Noyce, his cinematographer and his editor, the crew was entirely South African, and of the $14-million budget (a very cheap movie by Hollywood standards), well over half of that was spent in this country. And, unlike in many another international production shot here, in Catch a Fire South Africa plays itself.
Catch a Fire opens in cinemas on Friday