With his latest, , he tackles South Africa at the height of Apartheid, but instead of being based on a bestselling book, it tells the true story of Patrick Chamusso, a family man falsely accused of terrorist activities, who after being tortured in jail, joins the military activist group ANC with the purpose of blowing up the oil refinery where he used to work.
ComingSoon.net recently had a chance to talk with this amazing director, who knows how to tell a visually-appealing story and get the most out of his actors, as he does with Derek Luke as Chamusso and Tim Robbins as the head of the anti-terrorist police unit sworn to stop the ANC.
He's also one of the biggest directors I've met in terms of size, probably close to 6' 5" (!), but when he lets loose his warm, jovial laugh, it immediately puts you at ease despite his imposing size.
ComingSoon.
net: You've done a few political thrillers based on fictional novels, but this one is based on the true story of a living person. What were some of your concerns going into it in terms of sensitivity about the subject matter?
Phillip Noyce: My major concern was how as an outsider, a white Australian, how would I be able to tell this story?
Because there's so much history that had to be uncovered, as well as attitude orientation, and that's why I had so many advisors. You see them all listed there, people who I often had three or four of them on set at the same time working alongside me. The major concern was authenticity and in terms of sensitivity, I had so many people who were there to point out when I was heading in the wrong direction.
CS: When we spoke with Patrick Chamusso, he told us that he wasn't really involved in the movie until you came on board. Was there any kind of script when you signed up to direct?
Phillip Noyce: Yes, because [writer] Shawn Slovo had spoken to him more than ten years before.
He and Shawn met in 1991, soon after he came out of Robben Island, so those interviews had been done years before. He maybe had forgotten them.
CS: Once you met with him the first time, what were some of the questions you had for him and what did you want to find out for yourself?
Noyce: Oh, just everything from birth to present, really.
Because I also had to reconcile his court records, and all the other materials I had asked Working Title to gather. I wanted to see his ANC records, his prison records, his court records, what he was accused of, all of that, just to make sure that we weren't making a film about a guy who was making it all up. (chuckles heartily)
CS: Did anything change after you came on board?
Noyce: Yeah, sure. I guess I had a different focus in the questions that I asked him than Shawn, but also, I had the advantage of being able to know that we had a little bit of money. I was able to put him in a car around the locations where the story took place.
As an example, we stood outside this oil refinery and I said, "Well, I can't work out how you got in there, how did you do it?" And this wasn't in the screenplay, for example, and that's when he said, "You see that mine over there, there's a shaft underground, and they take the coal and it goes up those conveyor belts, so I ran along the shafter and then I got on the conveyor belt, and just rode over the top of the wall and passed all of the police and army, and that's how I got in." That's one example that hadn't been in Shawn's screenplay.
CS: You actually went and snuck into Secundo or did they know you were there with Patrick?
Noyce: No, at that stage, we weren't making the film yet, we were just investigating about making it, so no, they didn't know we were there. We were outside the gates, so they sent guards to find out what we were doing.
Other things, how he got through the border, the fact that the character called Zuko and Six-Pence both disappeared, that wasn't in the script when I came to it. We were traveling around with Patrick and he came to the township where Zuko had lived, and while we were getting gas at the station, someone came up to Patrick and said that he was responsible for the deaths of those two people, because when he was undertaking his mission, he had gone back to them, and that led to their arrest.
CS: That must have been tough.
Were the authorities at Secundo nervous about having Patrick back there considering his previous experiences there?
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