Home
sign up| features / film interview |
 content by: editor |
 catch a fire interview
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.White hot. There were so many heroes in the struggle against apartheid, so it’s no surprise that many of them have gone unheralded. Director Philip Noyce, working from a scintillating script by Shawn Slovo (daughter of famous white ANC activist Joe Slovo), has now helped publicize another one. Noyce says, “Patrick Chamusso was, until this film came out, an ordinary persona. An unknown. He was not a Nelson Mandela or an Archbishop Desmond Tutu, but one of the hundreds of thousands of foot soldiers who fought against apartheid.” Working as a foreman in 1980 at an oil refinery, Chamusso (Derek Luke) was wrongly accused of being behind an earlier bombing. After weeks of questioning and torture he was released. He then joined the ANC and planted a bomb in his former workplace, the Secunda Oil Refinery. “The fact that he was an ordinary person was the real attraction of the story,” says Noyce. “This was not a man who came from a political story: he had no political leanings and enthusiasm. He just wanted a little piece of happiness that you might hope to get being a black man in South Africa. Circumstances forced him into action.”  Noyce mentions another film he made in which blacks are forced to go to desperate lengths in their fight against racism, when he describes why he had to tell this story. “I had made a film a few years ago called Rabbit Proof Fence, which was also a true story and was very inspiring in the way that it was told. And I thought here is another story about a real person, an ordinary person that in a way proves there is greatness and courage in all of us - it just depends on the circumstances.” The 46-year-old is no stranger to action sequences, with credits such as Patriot Games and Dead Calm, which he demonstrates in the scenes with counter-terrorism agent Nick Vos (Tim Robbins). This desire to create action-orientated sequences comes at a high cost though, as Noyce veers away from dealing with a key issue – that both the American and British administration used to call men like Chamusso and Mandela terrorists. Noyce defends this omission by falling back on the cliché that “one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.”
Kaleem Aftab
Catch A Fire, on national release 23 March 07.
 comments
Read members' comments related to this film.
|
 |
related info
 useful links
note: The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
books  books and comics archive Author interviews and reviews from 2002 to 2008. |
send to a friend
lff 06
access 1000s of articles
