‘Catch a Fire’ tells South African activist’s true story

DALLAS—The new film “Catch a Fire” is set in the brutal world of South African apartheid and based on the life of Patrick Chamusso, a black activist who spent much of the ‘80s in prison. But, as pleased as Chamusso is that his story of survival is getting the big-time Hollywood treatment (it opens Friday on 1,400 North American screens), he can’t sit through the movie.

“I just watch it from the beginning to the wedding,” he says, reflecting on the film’s happy opening moments—the scenes before a policeman roughs him up on the side of the road. “But it’s painful to see those things happen to you. Other people, they can go and watch it but, to me, I still have pain.”

In 1980, Chamusso was a mild-mannered, apolitical foreman at South Africa’s Secunda plant, a key facility in the country’s drive to derive oil from coal. The outlawed African National Congress (ANC), which, at the time, was waging a war of insurgency against the white government, bombed Secunda, and authorities wrongly implicated Chamusso in the attack.

He was arrested, tortured—and radicalized. After release, Chamusso sought out the ANC, which was based in neighboring Mozambique, and, in 1981, he did exactly what the government had accused him of: He bombed Secunda.

This time, he spent nine years behind bars, at Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was also imprisoned. Chamusso not only had to endure more torture but the collapse of his first marriage, as well. He was finally released in 1991, with the fall of apartheid.

As dramatic as his story is, Chamusso didn’t think anyone outside his family would be interested. Shawn Slovo, a writer and the daughter of one of the ANC’s rare white leaders, Joe Slovo, begged to differ.

“About 16 years ago, when I came out of Robben Island, Joe called me and said that his daughter wanted to write something about me,” Chamusso, 56, recalls, during a recent interview at Dallas’ Hotel Crescent Court. “I went to see Shawn, and we sat for about three days and I told all of my story. She was the first woman to take me to lunch after I got out of prison. It was just like a dream.”

He wasn’t surprised when he didn’t hear back. “I’m an ordinary man,” says Chamusso, who today runs an orphanage in a rural area on the border of Mozambique, about 300 miles north of Johannesburg. “They never write anything good about an ordinary man,” he sums up. “They always write about famous people.”

As it turned out, Slovo hadn’t forgotten about Chamusso, at all. A couple of years ago, she got in touch with him again—this time with a script she’d written and a filmmaker she wanted him to meet: Australian Phillip Noyce, the director of blockbusters like “Patriot Games” and more nuanced indies like “Rabbit-Proof Fence,” a story of racial intolerance.

Her script had been making the rounds and had landed in Noyce’s lap. “I was sitting in a restaurant in Los Angeles, having lunch with a friend,” remembers Noyce, “(and) they pulled out this script and gave it to me. I read it on the plane back to Australia. I knew I wanted to do it. I liked the characters. I liked the setting ... And I liked the fact that it allowed me access to tumultuous events that I followed from afar. ‘Now,’ I thought, ‘maybe I can really be inside these events from a black-and-white point of view.’”

At first, there was concern that Noyce’s status as an outsider—and as a white outsider—would be an impediment to telling Chamusso’s story. But both think it actually helped.

“I had a lot of thoughts about that,” Noyce says now. “I mentioned it to Patrick and said, ‘You know what? White South Africans could hardly tell this story, and black South Africans might see it with too much bitterness.’”

“I was sure about (Noyce) because he came with Shawn,” Chamusso explains. “She was the daughter of Joe Slovo and Slovo was in the struggle with me. Joe Slovo was the first white man I trusted in my life. So, I’m thinking he’s Australian, but he’ll be guided by Shawn.”

With powerhouse directors Anthony Minghella (“The English Patient”) and Sydney Pollack (“Out of Africa”) on board as producers, “Catch a Fire” became a reality.

Chamusso assumed they’d cast someone well-known to play him.

“I was expecting something like Denzel Washington,” he says with a laugh. “Maybe Samuel Jackson or Danny Glover, because they’ve been in South Africa.”

So he wasn’t too sure about this Derek Luke guy, the young actor best known for his title performance in “Antwone Fisher.” Luke made a pilgrimage to Chamusso’s orphanage to make his case.

“After 15 minutes of talking with (him),” says Chamusso, “I realized that he wanted to play me. ... We have some things in common—he’s a Christian, I’m a Christian, and he loves children and played with the orphans. I said, ‘This man really wants to do it. So let me just open my heart for him to get in.’”

Then there was the casting of Tim Robbins. Chamusso wasn’t too sure about him, either. His character—Nic Vos, a South African head of security and Chamusso’s arch nemesis, accuser and torturer—is an amalgam of two real-life figures, neither of whom agreed to participate in or help with the movie.

“When I met Tim, he’s nice, gentle and handsome, and those people were vicious,” Chamusso says. “But then I saw him at the plant the first time, acting his part. He’s a professional actor who can change from good to bad, and I started to trust him.”

Chamusso smiles.

“Even now, we’re very good friends. Last Saturday (in New York), we went to a (Mets) baseball game and he told me how baseball goes.”

The scenes of Chamusso planting a bomb at Secunda might be discomfiting to some Americans. After all, they’re being asked to sympathize with a terrorist.

“We must have screened the film 20 times and very few people have commented on the terrorism aspect,” Noyce explains. “There were more comments about the (film’s depiction) of detention without due process, and the use of torture in an investigation. There are no parallels between the struggle for freedom in South Africa and today’s war on terror. They are two different eras, two different sets of motives and circumstances.”

Chamusso says the ANC had specific targets that didn’t involve taking human life. When Chamusso set off the explosive at Secunda, he made sure the building was empty. “If you watch the movie, you see that the policy of the ANC was that no one must die.”

“Catch a Fire”—which was shot in South Africa and cost a relatively paltry $15 million to make—is hitting theaters while there seems to be a small wave of interest in films about Africa. In the past couple of years, “Hotel Rwanda,” “The Constant Gardener,” “Yesterday,” “Cape of Good Hope,” “Tsotsi” (the 2006 foreign-language Oscar winner) and the just-released “The Last King of Scotland,” starring Forest Whitaker as the raging dictator Idi Amin, have thrown a cinematic light on an often-forgotten continent.

“I don’t think this film would be released so widely if it weren’t for two factors: the success of other movies set in Africa and (the fact that) post-colonial Africa is a place of extreme conflict,” Noyce says, “and filmmakers will turn to areas of conflict because that’s what makes drama.”

Chamusso would like to see African-American directors try their hand at telling African stories. “Now, we want directors like Spike Lee to come and invest in South Africa. He explores everything and isn’t afraid to show the real things.”

He laughs.

“Come home, man, come home.”