Right? A yet watching it, you’re gripped. “There’s a French film by Robert Bresson called A Man Escaped that’s like, that’s it, a man escapes. With a film of this sort there’s also the challenge of making it scary when – in no small part thanks to the title – most viewers will feel certain that at least one person escapes successfully. “There were some other political scenes which I really liked but the decision was made to trim those down or lose them so we’d have more time to explore the escape itself.” And also we wanted to make the film.” he hesitates, no wanting to use the word ‘commercial’, eventually settling for ‘broader’. We had to make a lot of little cuts to get everything to fit, which meant that certain scenes were lost which meant that other things didn’t work. Pulling the whole thing together to make it work the way he wanted was quite a challenge, he says. "People had very different and very passionately held opposing views as to what the best method was" Photo: courtesy of Signature Entertainment People had very different and very passionately held opposing views as to what the best method was.” So it was an attempt to look at how it wasn’t so clean cut. The younger generation were potentially more militant. It depends on things like when people were born. I was quite keen to try and keep that element because otherwise it can seem a bit too clean cut, like ‘everyone’s against Apartheid, this is the way to dismantle Apartheid, finished,’ and, like no. “There was a lot of scenes that I didn’t want to lose that I had to lose for very good reasons but there’s still one scene where you realise that although all the main characters are against Apartheid there are very divergent views as to what the method of fighting Apartheid should be. “The opening tries to set the context and I like that because first of all it makes the film feel a lot more grounded and it puts it in a very realistic framework, but it’s also for audience members who maybe don’t really understand what Apartheid is,” he says. How did he approach having to convey not only the immediate dangers faced by the characters in the film but also the profound strangeness of living under a system like that? There’s a generation of filmgoers now who grew up after Apartheid ended. I was very, very interested in the book.” Wait there.’ They gave me the book and I got right back. I love African politics but then I love all politics,’ and they said ‘Literally, we’ve got the exact film for you. They eventually got the rights to his book and then met me.ĭaniel Webber, Daniel Radcliffe and Francis Annan at work Photo: courtesy of Signature Entertainment So that was my more distant access to it and then I met the producers in 2012 and they had actually met Tim back in 2003 and got talking. My mum would tell me all these stories about, you know, how crazy it is over there. “My grandfather and my mum would go over to Africa and they’d come back with all these stories. What the heck? Like, how has that happened? In places like Kenya or other East African countries there was much more peace between the European and the African communities and in West Africa it was the same thing, so how did it happen in South Africa that there was this thing? I think a lot of Africans had a kind of voyeuristic sense of intrigue as to, like, how could that possibly have happened? “To put it in perspective, it’s a bit like how Brits or other Europeans looked at East versus West Germany, or Chechnya or Yugoslavia,” he explains, reflecting on his experience growing up in a family with strong connections to the African continent. Talking to Francis whilst he was at the Glasgow Film Festival, I asked him how, as someone who was born in 1984, he first became aware of what was happening in South Arica. It’s based on the autobiography of Tim Jenkin and recounts the true story of how he and fellow political prisoners Stephen Lee and Denis Goldberg – all white men enjoying substantially better conditions than the black convicts on Robben Island, but still confronted with day to day cruelty – plotted their escape. Tim Jenkin (Daniel Radcliffe) s forced to part with girlfriend Daphne (Ratidzo Mambo) in the opening scenes.
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