Jenkin is philosophical about what he hopes audiences will take away from the story besides its historical and political specificity and it's prison escape thrills: "I wrote the book as a metaphor for life," he says. I realised that I didn't have to do much, that the combination between how Francis shot and how I reacted would tell the story." A lot of information is communicated in those close-ups. "He showed me a film before we shot called A Man Escaped, much of which was shot in close-ups. Radcliffe admits that the thought of so many scenes in which so little happens and so much needs to be expressed was initially daunting, but he acknowledges the skill of his director. That was my character and that was the character he tried to get across in the film." "Daniel rolls on the bed from the pain and the fear and the stress of it and says the odd word here and there. On screen, as in the book, there's not an awful lot of dialogue in these scenes. The city, complete with jacaranda trees, was briefly transformed into apartheid-era Johannesburg.Īs for Jenkin, he's pretty happy with Radcliffe's portrayal of his younger self, especially in the prison scenes. He remembered the 1980 Bruce Beresford film Breaker Morant about the Boer War, which was shot in Adelaide in South Australia. As an actor, when you get a chance to be a part of spreading a story you feel is really valuable to a wider audience, it's what you live for."Īnnan intended to shoot the entire film in SA but due to clashes between the timelines of local film production facilities and the production's schedule, it became necessary to look elsewhere to shoot.Īnnan needed to find a location that had similar geography and architecture to 1970s SA. It's such an amazing, ingenious escape and the fact that it was pulled off so elegantly and beautifully - it deserves to be in the cannon of great prison escape stories. When he was approached to play Jenkin, Radcliffe says he was struck by this thought: "It's crazy that I've never heard this story before. In prison break stories you don't usually tend to have true-life characters who are virtuous and not criminals." They were also Caucasian, middle-class men in the '70s who could have had a job in a bank, for instance, but decided to do this instead. They also don't just dig a tunnel or bop a guard over the head and run - they make something to open their cell door. "This film is a prison escape movie, which is slightly different from a prison movie. He said that in searching for a story to make his major feature debut he was looking for something familiar but also unique. For Jenkin that was the sign that this time the film would get made, after all.Īnnan, a British television and theatre director, thought the book was made to be a movie. It also didn't hurt that former Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe was attached to the project. That was until in 2017, when, at his second attempt, producer Mark Blaney managed to get the project off the ground, thanks to a script by director Francis Annan. Since then, every five years Jenkin signed contracts for the option to adapt his book to screen but each time circumstances seemed to be against him. Soon after its publication, the first attempt to film it began to look successful in 1988, but in the darkest days of apartheid, Jenkin firmly believed that the film needed to be political, and the producers wanted to cut out all the politics. Jenkin says that he'd always thought his book was "good movie material" and he wasn't wrong. He escaped with fellow activists Stephen Lee and Alex Moumbaris. In 1987 Tim Jenkin published Escape from Pretoria, a memoir of his anti-apartheid activism, arrest by the security police, imprisonment and sensational escape in 1979. SPOILER ALERT! This article contains spoilers for the film Escape from Pretoria.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |