Making Mandela a Freeman

Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela in Invictus. Photo / Supplied

For New Zealand rugby fans, the 1995 Rugby World Cup might be fading into history as the last time their team got close. It was only the second time the All Blacks made the finals in the Cup's 20-year history. On paper, it wasn't much of a game. Three penalties and two drop goals to three penalties and one drop goal, though the Springboks' winning points came in nail-biting extra time. For South Africa, it represented much more - a celebration of post-apartheid nationhood in the first year of the presidency of Nelson Mandela, who had spent 27 years in prison until his release in 1990. In Invictus, his film about the sporting event based on John Carlin's book Playing the Enemy, Clint Eastwood shows how Mandela used a national sports obsession to unite a racially divided country.

While Matt Damon may cover more ground in the film as Springboks captain Francois Pienaar, it is, most definitely, Morgan Freeman's movie. In his portrayal of Mandela, many, including the leader himself, believe that Freeman was born to play this role, it was just a matter of timing. "It's an honour to have been hand-picked by him to play him," says Freeman. "Madiba named me as his heir apparent. He said to me once that if anybody ever played him in a movie, he wanted it to be me. But after all is said and done, I had to think to myself, 'Can I do it? Can I pull it off or will I wind up embarrassing myself and everybody else?"

With rave reviews of Freeman's portrayal of Mandela, and a Best Actor nomination at the Golden Globes, he can breathe easy.

Says Eastwood, 79, who directed Freeman in the Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby, "Morgan spent a lot of time with Nelson Mandela and there was some talk of him at one point doing the movie version of Mandela's autobiography, The Long Walk Home. So Morgan knows exactly in which knee Mandela has the arthritis, he knows his mannerisms and affectations. In fact, when I first met Mandela, the two of them were in the same room together," Eastwood recalls. "They are both the same height, although Mandela doesn't stand up quite as straight as he used to, but he has this tremendous magnetism, and still remains one of the more charismatic people in the world," Eastwood says. "I have to say, one of the biggest obstacles in making this movie was not to make Mandela too Christ-like. But he is."

Looking at Eastwood's directorial track record, it seems he has a penchant for the underdog. He explains, "Because of apartheid, South Africa had been banned from participating in international sporting events for years. No one thought the Springboks had much of a chance of winning." Quite the understatement when you consider there are many of the view that the Springbok victory was not entirely kosher. There were allegations that a hotel employee named Suzy had poisoned the All Blacks, although nothing was ever proved and it just added to the two teams' contentious history - the year before in 1994, All Blacks captain Sean Fitzpatrick was bitten by the South African forward, Johan le Roux.

The mild-mannered Eastwood, whose demeanour is unfailingly charming, reacts almost viscerally when the alleged food poisoning incident is brought up in our interview. "What?" he says, raising his voice slightly. "And Jimmy Dean's alive too, I suppose?" After a pause, in answer to the question, `Were you ever going to address this issue in the movie?' He scoffs, "No, because that could have just been a poor loser attitude. It sounds preposterous to me. It sounds like that story would be some other director's project," he says, and laughs it off.

Shot in South Africa, primarily around the coastal city of Cape Town, Damon and his family relocated there for several months. In order to play the famed captain, Damon had to start with the rules of the game. He says, of his first meeting with Pienaar, "He invited me over for dinner the first day I got to South Africa. He opened the door, I looked up at him, and literally, the first thing I ever said to him was, 'I look much bigger on film!' He laughed, gave me a big hug and that was it. We got along really well." And as for the accent? "It took me six months. I'd spend about eight hours a day doing voice drills _ it was a lot of work."

After he accomplished his verbal skills, Damon had to convince us he was a veteran rugby player. Says Damon, "Chester Williams, who was on the original Springbok team [and the only black player] was our coach. He put together plays and choreographed them so that I could follow them." Damon, no stranger to changing his physicality for a role, had put on some weight and muscle. "It was a lot of hours in the gym. Every day I had weight training, sprinting, and boxing. When Chester saw me after some weeks of training, he looked at me and said, `You look good. What have you been doing?' I told him about my workout regime. He said to me, `Why don't you just play rugby? That's basically what rugby is'."

Pienaar, also present this afternoon at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills to support the movie, sits alongside Damon and Freeman. He weighs in on the result of the movie. "It's difficult to put a movie together about Madiba's life as well as a sporting event - and get everything 100 per cent right. As an athlete you look at how good is the team and the way it's portrayed in the movie. The Springboks looked like a team of no-hopers, which really wasn't the case. But we were the underdogs, and Australia was the favourite, not New Zealand, in 1995 because they were undefeated. That first game against Australia was the most important because we realised that if we beat them, our road to the final was easier."

It was no secret that Mandela put a lot of pressure on Pienaar to win the Cup in order to help unite their problematic country. Recalls Pienaar of the morning before the match, "We had such a sense of responsibility. In the morning of the World Cup, it's the biggest day of your life. You get one shot, one opportunity to make history and make your dreams come true.

"We collected down in the foyer of the hotel and went for a little run. On this run, as you see in the movie, the guys couldn't talk. They were quietly reflecting and getting themselves ready for the game. [There were ] four little kids selling newspapers on the street corner. They saw the Springboks and they ran after us. Just four little black kids and they knew the names of the players. They were shouting, and they had huge smiles on their faces. I got gooseflesh and the hairs at the back of my neck stood up. I realised, `I have a sense of responsibility here'."

Most of the rugby players were cast in South Africa and were comprised of rugby players and actors, handpicked for their likeness to the original players as well as their ability on the field. The New Zealand Rugby Union was on board to make sure the haka was done correctly and Inia Maxwell, who assisted in the training, was present when that scene was shot to ensure authenticity. Invictus, meaning "unconquered" in Latin, isn't for everybody - particularly if you're not a sports fan. The climactic faceoff, played in front of 62,000 fans, mostly digitally enhanced, at Johannesburg's Ellis Park Stadium where the original game was played, lasts 18 minutes of screen time.

Arguably, this film is an inspirational story for an unlikely team who won against one of the most successful in rugby history, and Eastwood's love letter to South Africa witnesses a downtrodden country forgetting their woes for a moment in time, in favour of triumphantly dancing in the streets.

Concludes Pienaar, "You could not believe what happened in the streets of South Africa after that game. The movie captures it but the reality is that scene on steroids many times over. How people hugged one another, how they cried, how they laughed. There was one story, [about] a famous politician in South Africa. He couldn't get to his car because it was mayhem. So a taxi pulled up that was going to Soweto. Finally, he got out and said, "How much do I owe you?" And the taxi driver said to him, `Today, nobody is paying anything.' And he just stood there, knowing that this country needs people to hold hands in order to understand their responsibility. If we don't, it's going to end in tears."

Lowdown

What: Invictus, the Clint Eastwood-directed movie about Nelson Mandela and the 1995 Rugby World Cup final, starring Morgan Freeman as Mandela and Matt Damon as Springbok captain Francois Pienaar. Based on the book Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Changed a Nation by John Carlin.
When and where: Opens at cinemas on January 28.