Catch A Fire

Directed by Phillip Noyce

Australian director Phillip Noyce’s genre-spanning career has delivered superb thrillers as Clear and Present Danger and The Quiet American, as well as socially conscious dramas like Rabbit-Proof Fence. His latest, Catch A Fire, tells the true story of South African patriot Patrick Chamusso—who fought apartheid and was consequently imprisoned at Robben Island for 14 years and now, along with Mandela, Tutu and other African National Congress leaders, pursues reconciliation and cessation of racism in post-apartheid South Africa.

In the film, Patrick (Derek Luke) is a well-to-do, highly respected oil refinery foreman compliant with apartheid’s rules—until constant persecution by anti-terrorist security officer Nic Vos (Tim Robbins) drives him to join ANC’s military branch in preparation to blow up the plant where he worked. Written by Shawn Slovo (daughter of ANC’s military commander, Joe Slovo), the gripping drama represents stories of hundreds who, like Patrick, fought to end the apartheid regime.

“We watch movies to take magic carpet rides to other places—not necessarily joyous places. We’re transported to experiences that are like ours, but different. We want to identify with people on the screen, but we want them to show us things we don’t know or haven’t experienced,” says Noyce. “We want to live alternative lives, and we do it through film—in the moment. And movies are pretty cheap magic carpet rides, jumbo jets for $10 or less.” 

MERIN: How do you choose the rides you give audiences?

NOYCE: My sense is that if I want to go there, am enthusiastic enough to spend time on it, I can communicate that enthusiasm to audiences and take them with me on the journey. That’s my feeling.

Patrick’s story is quintessentially South African. You’re Australian. Derek Luke and Tim Robbins are American. How did you prepare yourself and them for the film?

I spent months investigating things before [the actors] arrived, working out rigorous boot camp schedules for them to follow upon arriving. Their pre-production schedules were more intimately calculated than the shooting schedule—hour-by-hour from seven in the morning to seven at night, each encounter calculated to help them transition into their character. Tim Robbins worked with Hentie Botha, the white ex-security branch member who’d used interrogation techniques like those depicted in the film, and met others like his character—went to their homes and football matches. Derek Luke worked with Napthalie Manana, who taught him how to deal with tortuous interrogation, then he had soccer training, language training, met people who’d worked in the refinery and went to Robben Island (which was the last point for Derek) to spend time in Nelson Mandela’s cell.

Even South African actors had preparation as well because they had to be taken back into the mindset of apartheid. David Mbatha, the freedom song advisor, sang 100 songs to me in a row, and then taught them to hundreds of extras. 

The process is an indoctrination for everyone. We’re all doing the same work: I’m investigating and choosing the experiences they’ll be exposed to, and they see what I want them to see. So, in the end, we’re all going on the same journey together, with a common frame of reference to work with.

That’s amazing. Did you invent this process? Do you do this on all your films?

Yeah, actually I do. It started when I was working on an Australian miniseries about Japanese prisoners of war who, in 1944, escaped—a thousand of them—from an Australian prisoner of war camp—not to live, but to die. They wanted to die to regain their sense of honor. The story was told from the Japanese point of view, and we all—the Australians and Japanese who grew up long after the war—had to understand what seemed to me to be such an enigma.

For Clear and Present Danger, I went to the CIA, Navy yard, Congress, the White House and visited Colombian drug cartels for three months to prepare Harrison Ford’s three-week preparatory trip. I call it a process of osmosis.

Do you enjoy preparation, shooting or editing most?

Preparation—because anything’s possible, and you’re are on a personal journey of discovery that’s so enriching. It’s also most decisive because it’s when you see the film and hold it in your head for about five years. As you’re making it, after you’ve finished it, you won’t see it that way again until dawn on some sleepless night in Istanbul, or someplace, when you’re jet lagged, turn on the TV and see your movie on cable television—and at last you’re able to just look at it. So, preparation is the greatest time.

Shooting’s all planned out. You have some money, decide how many days you can shoot, what you’ll shoot each day, piece-by-piece in a logical manner planned by people who’re smarter, more logical than I am. Logistics are easy—unless there’re many variables like water shooting, which is hard because water won’t do what it’s told. But mostly, when you’re dealing with humans, they can be organized. Mostly.

Then you put it all together and, somehow, with a good editor, it works. Or makes sense anyway …

Film’s an amalgam of image and sound. Do you have a personal psychological or physiological bias about which of these has most impact?

Probably aural. I believe sound goes directly to the central nervous system. It doesn’t require decoding, as does image. It takes a microsecond, but you must recognize images or gestures, then interpret that a man’s sad, in pain, whatever. But sound—low or high pitch vibration—goes straight into you, from ear to central nervous system. There’s a lot of subsonic vibration in Catch A Fire’s sound track—you feel the impact.