Instead Clint Eastwood is to direct a film about the 1995 Rugby World Cup final.
The South Africans’ captain Francois Pienaar has on occasion told the media: ‘No one could have written a better script.’ It’s like he anticipated a call from Hollywood.
Anyway, that World Cup Final took on a mystical quality. Most people can’t remember the score (it was 15-12), but can tell you about its supposed impact. And the media still plays that aspect up. According to Variety, for example, that World Cup victory ‘… helped heal post-apartheid race relations in South Africa.’
Maybe for a weekend at best.
Of course the new film’s storyline will be based on a foreign journalist’s impressions (that of John Carlin, former UK Independent’s correspondent in South Africa for a long while) and two American actors will play the principal roles: Morgan Freeman will play Mandela and Matt Damon as Pienaar.
The way every old English actor eventually plays Lear, each African-American actor eventually plays Mandela.
As for actual African actors…wait, they have actors in Africa?
(Having seen what Clint Eastwood did with “Letters from Iwo Jima,” I think there should be a restraining order on him where non-American material is concerned.)
John Carlin?
Big time Independent reporter in SA during the early 1990s. Made an excellent documentary on apartheid’s proxy war (via Inkatha) in KZN against the ANC. One of the best on that conflict I saw. Now lives in Spain and writes about football mainly (very good stuff; see the Observer Sports Monthly). With El Pais I think. I think his recent Mbeki is the ‘worst president in the world’ op-ed in the Guardian, I bogged about was merely him doing PR work for this film.