Recreating the ‘spirit of Madiba’ in film
Director Justin Chadwick tells Tymon Smith how he approached his assignment
IT has been a long day for Justin Chadwick by the time I am ushered into a room at 54 on Bath in Rosebank, Johannesburg, to have my 15 minutes with the Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom director. The Lancashire-born actor and director is at the end of a day-long press junket to promote the film following a lavish red-carpet premiere the night before, and he is looking tired but happy.
I begin by asking how it came to be that, after a reasonably successful career directing television adaptations of Dickens and only two feature films under his belt, the 44-year-old landed the job at the helm of producer Anant Singh’s long-awaited, much talked about, lavish adaptation of the story of one of the world’s most iconic and bestloved figures.
At first, Chadwick was reluctant to accept the job because he could not see “how you could even begin to think about reducing the story into one experience”.
After working with Singh on The First Grader, a film set in Kenya and starring Naomie Harris (who plays the role of Winnie Mandela in their latest film), Chadwick was introduced to members of the Mandela family and struggle comrades who had been on Robben Island and whom he “basically got to spend time with”.
“I saw a way of making it that could be personal. There was a through-line to the story in that it could be a story about love and forgiveness as much as it is about a man and the frailty of man. It’s also a story of a man who’s a husband, a father and just like any of us, really.”
Drawing on his television experience, Chadwick decided that the most important thing was to “create a visceral, 360-degree world that we just drop the audience into. So I wanted to do that with this — get the detail right, make sure it’s truthful and then drop the camera into that world and use real people as much as I could.”
Of course, a film that tries to incorporate as much of a life as full as Mandela’s into two-and-a-half hours cannot fit in everything, and Chadwick acknowledges that “there are people we’ve missed out and events that we’ve missed out — of course, there are, but all of us hope it rings true to South Africans”.
A week before shooting began, Chadwick got to meet Madiba just before his 94th birthday, a moment he cherishes and that lights up his face as he describes it to me. “People talk about the Madiba effect and it’s true. I walked in and there is just something electric about him. He was completely sharp in terms of his intellect, but this aura that comes off him I will remember for the rest of my days. It was completely inspiring, and it took me into the film with a great spirit. I can’t even put it into words.”
I saw a way of making it that could be personal. There was a through-line to the story in that it could be a story about love and forgiveness as much as it is about a man and the frailty of man
Chadwick had taken the great man a gift of an iPad with images from the preproduction of the film on it and, holding his hand, helped him to swipe through the images. The question is: How do you recreate this mystical Madiba effect in a film? To that, Chadwick answers that he hopes the final film “catches some of that spirit. It certainly felt that everybody involved in the film gave their level best to make it true and honest, and that’s all we can do as filmmakers: to be honest and true to the people that we’re representing.”