On the morning after the premiere in Soweto of Paradise Stop — the new action-comedy produced by Jann Turner, Kenneth Nkosi and Rapulana Seiphemo, and starring Nkosi and Seiphemo — Turner’s house had been transformed into an impromptu film set. T
They were shooting skits for a television show. There was noise and silence, mirth and mayhem. Spirits were high because the premiere was a success, the movie was — is — wonderful and everyone knew it, felt it. This is a home that laughter built.
Outside in the back garden it was impossible to look at Nkosi and take him seriously. The actor — a veteran of theatre, television and several major local feature films — was in full drag, dressed in a dull button-up frock complete with a thick plaid blanket tightly wrapped and pinned around his ample torso. When he removed his wig to talk between takes, he still looked part-nanny, part-gogo, a kanji tattoo on his arm, a big bald head, a rich warm voice.
On the bench, opposite, sat Seiphemo, less comic in shorts and a T-shirt, but no less animated. The two men, who have known each other since they met at the Market Theatre precinct in the late 1990s, talked fast, filling the gaps in each other’s sentences. They are Matthau and Lemmon; neither grumpy nor old nor odd, but the perfect foil for the other’s energy. ‘We have a lot of shared values,” they say.
In a way it was the easy rapport between Nkosi and Seiphemo that drew New York Times best-selling author Ken Follett into the picture. The story goes like this: Turner is Follett’s stepdaughter. She had met Nkosi and Seiphemo in 1998 on the set of the soapie Isidingo (they were acting, she was directing). The three of them then went on to set up their own production company, Stepping Stone Pictures. On Follett’s numerous trips to South Africa, he’d often share meals with the actors who, by that time, had become firm family friends. ‘They always made me laugh,” he says.
When Turner told Follett she wanted to develop a movie with Nkosi and Seiphemo — what would become the company’s first feature-length film, White Wedding (2009) — the family was on holiday at Follett’s house in Antigua. Follett says he thought the film sounded like a good idea. Then he asked Turner how she planned to finance it. ‘She said: ‘I don’t know.’ And so I asked her how much it would cost. She told me a complete lie, of course, so I said: ‘Why don’t I finance it?’ ” Follet says. And he did.
‘In the movie business, this is the only way things get started,” Follett says. ‘I loved the story idea. I love my stepdaughter. I suppose it could be hazardous, doing business with family. But I went into it relaxed about the money. I could afford to lose it.”
As it turned out, White Wedding achieved the fairly remarkable result of ‘pretty much breaking even. And the money we got back from that has gone into Paradise Stop,” says Follett, who is executive producer of both films.
‘I never envisaged myself being very much involved,” Follett says, ‘and that’s pretty much how it’s turned out. I don’t want to go into the movie business. The main thing I do in Jann’s movies is look at the script, give notes about the story. I’m not South African. I couldn’t have written this film. It’s something that’s deeply rooted in this country. I tend to look at it as I might a story about ancient Greece. The principles are still the same. Even in comedy, you need a story. But they don’t need much help from me — there’s a lot of talent already attached to the project.”
White Wedding and Paradise Stop are both written, collectively, by Turner, Nkosi and Seiphemo. The actors improvise dialogue, Turner grabs ‘a book or her laptop, and we have a brainstorming session”, Seiphemo explains. ‘There’s nothing as beautiful as working with your friends.”
Nkosi adds: ‘We never start by saying something like ‘we want to make a movie about crime’. We start with the characters. Jann’s strengths are as a writer. She fleshes out the story. We are the storytellers — the ones that create the characters.”
Nkosi and Seiphemo prefer the old-school approach of building each character up from scratch, creating a character bible, a back story.
Blended with the narratives that emerge are the trio’s own experiences and idiosyncrasies: Turner’s search for a proper cup of coffee (or a real cappuccino) in small-town Limpopo and Nkosi’s craving for hot wings and chips from Chicken Licken both ended up in the script for Paradise Lost.
‘The most intense periods for the three of us are before and after the shoot,” Seiphemo says.
‘During the shoot, we keep it together,” Nkosi says. ‘It’s really important we have a happy crew. We create a family.”
‘If things fall apart, it’s only from a production point of view,” Seiphemo says.
‘Yes,” says Nkosi, ‘like trying to find accommodation in Mookgophong when there’s a school athletics meeting. Me and Raps ended up sleeping in a shack somewhere.”
‘But when the movie gets done,” Seiphemo says, ‘the crew ask us when the next one is happening. They want to work on the next one.”
Nkosi admits that the trio was a little nervous after the success of White Wedding, wondering how they would top it. ‘Or at least match it,” says Seiphemo.
The way they did this was to create ‘something completely different”, Nkosi says.
The pair’s characters (Seiphemo plays an overly conscientious police detective named Potso Mogopudi; Nkosi is garrulous truck-stop owner and secret criminal Ben Khumalo) are markedly different from the roles they portrayed in their first movie. Although there’s still plenty of playful banter between the two, there’s a more serious, thoughtful note
underlying the easy laughs of what Follett describes as a ‘crime-caper comedy”: corruption, xenophobia,
violence.
It’s these little reality checks that add a necessary, and believable, sobriety to Paradise Stop — and make the laughter more heartfelt, more deserved. This is not the slapstick of Leon Schuster: it is the natural evolution of South African comedy, a little darker, a little bittersweet.
Nkosi and Seiphemo say that the first time they watched the movie with an audience they were surprised to hear at which parts people laughed and at which lines they didn’t. The audience in Soweto responded to different lines to viewers in Durban, for example.
‘We wanted to write a universal story,” Follett says. ‘There are lots of jokes in there I didn’t get. It’s difficult, watching a comedy on your own without an audience. That’s why they have things like laugh tracks.”
More than just providing a good laugh — or some surprisingly good action scenes — Paradise Stop has a message of something else: hope. It’s a story that will remind viewers there are more than a few good men and women in South Africa, and the production will remind the media that our own industry is more than capable of producing something brilliant, without having to use blackface or wooden giraffes as a prop.
Perhaps the least believable part of the movie is towards its end — there’s no spoiler here, so you can read on — when the story seems to imply the wicked will be punished, justice will be meted out.
Even if you have faith in the goodness of individuals, it’s hard at this point in our country’s story to believe that the criminal justice system is really set up in such a way. The bad guys may well be captured, caught red-handed, but they’ll make bail or get out early for medical reasons, or make friends with an African dictator who knows exactly what strings to pull.
When I mention this to Follett, he says: ‘Ah, yes, of course. But this is the movies. Everything is handsomer than it is in real life.”
Paradise Stop opens in selected cinemas on March 25.
For more information go to
www.paradisestopmovie.com