When Nelson Mandela was released from prison and won South Africa's free election, he began making profound inroads in the country's battle against Apartheid. The worldwide news may have covered the broad strokes of his efforts, but you might not know the details of how he did it.
One of Mandela's unorthodox initiatives was to rally behind the country's rugby team. The Springboks had been a symbol of racist Apartheid policies, but Mandela saw a political opportunity. If the black and white South African's could come together to support the team, it would be the first step toward a united nation.
The film Invictus portrays the 1995 World Cup. Morgan Freeman plays Mandela and Matt Damon plays Springboks captain Francois Pienaar. Clint Eastwood directed the film, showing how both players and fans slowly came around to each other over the season, while Mandela's advisors pleaded for him to focus on other affairs. Freeman has already been named Best Actor by the National Board of Review for his performance.
Freeman and Damon gave a press conference to support the film. For those who haven't read many Morgan Freeman interviews, you might be surprised by how playful he is. Perennially cast as the wise old sage, the real Freeman likes to mess with interviewers. The profound nature of this story didnt prevent him from joking around. Damon offered a little sarcasm too but otherwise stayed on point about the story of Pienaar and Mandela, often referred to as Madiba.
Q: Morgan, congratulations on the NBR Award.
Morgan Freeman: Thank you so much. Anybody know what NBR means?
Q: Of course. National Board of Review.
MF: Hey, hey, hey. And do you know why he's congratulating me?
Q: Well yes, you won.
MF: Hey, hey, hey.
Q: Is it true you've been considering playing Mandela since 1993? What took until now to find the right opportunity?
MF: This started out with Madiba naming me as his heir apparent so to speak when he was asked during the press conference at the publication of his book, Long Walk to Freedom, Mr. Mandela, if your book becomes a movie, who would you like to play you? He said, Morgan Freeman. So, from then on, it's like okay so Morgan Freeman is going to be Mandela somewhere down the line. We spent a lot of time, Lori [McCreary] and I, my producing partner at Revelations. We were trying all this time to develop Long Walk to Freedom into a script. Couldn't happen. Then, in 06 I believe, we got this book proposal from John Carlin and it was perfect. We bought it. We got a script written. And, this was the role to play to give the world an insight into who Mandela is and how he operates. It was perfect.
Q: Matt, what did you get from the real Francois Pienaar?
Matt Damon: Well, the first thing I did when I read the script was, I called Clint and I said, I can't believe this happened. I can't believe this is true. And he said, I couldn't either, but this is true. So, I went immediately and looked up Francois online and I said, Clint, this guy is huge. We've never met but I'm 5'10". I told him on the phone and he started laughing and he said, Oh hell, don't worry about that. I said, Alright. He said, You go worry about everything else. And I said, Alright, Ill worry about everything else. You worry about the fact that I need to grow 6 inches to play the guy. I had about 6 months to get ready. I worked hard on the accent and on training physically to build myself up to try to pull off the illusion of being the captain of a South African rugby team. Ultimately, I just try to look at every possible pitfall. When I'm way, way out, say 6 months away, I look at what could possibly blow this illusion? What are the things? And then, I start thinking about ways to solve those problems before I really get into it. So, I kind of made my little checklist of things I had to do and just planned it out and then I got to South Africa. The very first day, Francois invited me over to his house for a gourmet dinner that he was cooking. He invited me to meet his wife and two boys. Morgan and I went. I just remember I rang the doorbell and he opened the door and I looked up at him, and the first thing I ever said to Francois Pienaar in my life was, I look much bigger on film. And he laughed and laughed and he gave me a big hug and then took me into his house and that was it. We were off and running and he was just an invaluable resource for me the whole time. I was constantly asking him questions, everything from what color is your mouth piece to whats your philosophy on the captaincy and on leading a team and life in general. He just was incredibly available and a very articulate guy and he was incredibly helpful to me.
Q: In doing your research for it, did that include the accent?
MD: Yeah, well Francois's accent has changed quite a bit because he went and played in England for so many years. All of his closest friends and his wife, everybody says, Well, you know, his accent has changed quite a bit. Listening to any existing interviews from that day, you can hear how its changed, but there was a good key to that. Tim and I, the dialect coach, talked a lot about [how] a lot of people, when they do a South African accent, really overdo it and end up making somebody sound like Frankenstein. Its actually a quite beautiful accent. We talked about smoothing it out because Francois speaks quite smoothly and borrowing some of that and trying to make it so that its subtle, so that its not so over the top where you're just like "Wait a minute. Thats a little big."
Q: Morgan, I've had the privilege of interviewing you several times over the years.
MF: Yes, you have.
Q: You've always described acting as playing, which is nice to hear. I was wondering, when you play Nelson Mandela, does it become more than that?
MF: No. It might have become more than that were I playing or working with someone other than Clint Eastwood. He is so enabling. He is so out of your way as an actor and he likes to watch actors play. I don't think I do anything other than that when I'm working. I'm just playing. Work is something else. Work is maybe what you do.
Q: Matt, in 1990 when Nelson Mandela came to Boston and there were hundreds of thousands of people on the Common, do you remember that?
MD: Sure. I remember the Boston visit. I remember the whole world tour. I remember he just went all over the place. In fact, in my high school, we had the Free Nelson Mandela ribbons. Remember the black ribbon with the writing? Kids were wearing those before they knew who he was. In fact, I have an old scrapbook that I was looking through. This is the photo album that my mother put together for me to go to college. She gave me a photo album of pictures from my whole childhood that progressed. And, I saw recently that the Free Nelson Mandela ribbon was in there from 1986 or 1988, probably 1988 when I graduated high school and all the kids were wearing those ribbons. So I remember. It was very big. My freshman year at Harvard in Fall of 88, I remember the Divest Now marches and everything that was going on. College campuses are usually the places where a lot of that stuff is cooking and people are talking about that stuff. So yeah, it was a very, very big deal, the Boston visit, and really that whole kind of coming out tour that he did.
Q: As you became good friends with Francois, what did you pay attention to and incorporate into your performance from your observations of him?
MD: There are the more obvious physical things that I have to do to try to pull off that magic trick, and then, just talking to him philosophically about certain things, you know, leadership. That's really if you look at the structure of the script, its the greatest world leader of our time appealing to this other type of leader and forging a bond with him and basically saying, I need to use you to do this and the guy saying, I understand exactly why and his team exceeding its expectations. They've been asked to exceed their expectations and it's a metaphor for what the country needs to do because everybody is expecting them to not be able to heal. Those were the things. It was Francois's integrity and leadership, but those were the kind of things that I needed to get across with the role and then the obvious kind of attendant physical things, lifting weights and stuff.
Q: How does a fight scene in, say, The Bourne Ultimatum compare to playing rugby?
MD: Oh, I was in better shape for this movie. I mean, I was in the gym every day and with Francois who came with me to the gym a few times. This is his life. I don't want to embarrass him. I can't. If Jason Bourne looks a little flabby, thats on me. [Laughs] This is the fictionalization of somebody's actual life. I didn't want to let him down. It wasn't going to be for any lack of effort, which really was what that team was famous for actually. They were known for going the extra mile and for knowing themselves well enough to say okay, we might not be the most talented team, and the line is even in the movie. The coach says, We might not be the most talented team, but were going to be the fittest. Francois talked me through their training regimen. It was just unbelievable what those guys did, all of them, every single guy. Its that great thing about a great team. Its like when every single person commits to something and sublimates their own personality for the greater good of the whole team and thats basically again the metaphor for that whole country.
Q: Have you played rugby since you came back?
MD: Hell no!
Q: Did you do this film before or after The Informant!?
MD: After. So, I had a good time putting the weight on and then a tough time reshaping the weight.
Q: How much did each of you know about the sport of rugby and do you still know the rules?
MF: Nothing. I know American football. I know just a little bit about soccer. I know baseball. I know basketball. But rugby is foreign language.
MD: And you know golf.
MF: I know golf.
MD: Same. I'm with Morgan. I knew a little bit about rugby but very, very little. But I do think it helps in terms of an American audience, the game is enough like football in the sense that its a battle for field position and you score by running across, running into what looks like an end zone and putting the ball down. I think in terms of the nuance of the game, obviously Americans won't get that stuff but in terms of the peanut butter and jelly version of what you need to know, I think its pretty clear.
Q: Why is this an important film?
MD: I'd say the film is telling a story that I think is a wonderful thing to remind everybody of, in South Africa and all over the world. If we listen to the better angels of our nature, there are creative and good solutions to serious problems. It's just an incredibly uplifting movie, and from the moment I read it, I was excited about just being a part of the ensemble that told this story. I think its a good thing to put out there, particularly now. There's not a lot of good news so this is a nice thing to put out for the holidays.
Q: Morgan, If you'd been contemplating this since 1993, what was the most important thing you wanted to get across in portraying Nelson Mandela?
MF: When he said that he would prefer that I be the one to play him in 1990 or whenever that was, I had to start then preparing myself to do it. So, I met him not long after that and I said to him, If Im going to play you, Im going to have to have access to you. Im going to have to be close enough to hold your hand. And, over the years, while we were trying to develop Long Walk to Freedom, that is what happened. Whenever we were in proximity, like a city away for instance, I would know about it and I would go to him and have lunch, have dinner, or sit with him while he's waiting to go on stage for whatever, and during that time, I would sit and hold Madibas hand. Now that's not for camaraderie. I find that if I hold your hand, I get your energy, it transfers, and I have a sense of how you feel. That's important to me trying to become another person. I have a lot of pressure to bring a character like that to life in any kind of real sense. The danger, of course, is always at caricature, sort of indicating what the person is like. The biggest challenge I had, of course, was to sound like him. Everything else is kind of easy to do: to walk like him, he has a few tics and things that I noticed and I picked those up. I didn't have any agenda as it were in playing the role other than to bring it as close to reality as I possibly could. The agenda is incorporated in the script and all I had to do was learn my lines.
Q: Matt, you do a number of films that have some kind of social consciousness to them, and you also have The People Speak on TV next week. Can you talk about doing projects that have some kind of social value and what that means to you?
MD: Sure. I think actors, we react to the material that's out there and I probably just react more strongly to things that I feel will have some social value. I think this movie is a great example. I think this is a really wonderful message to put out. It's a completely non-partisan message incidentally. This is about healing and coming together and it's an incredibly uplifting story. I think thats why it appealed to me. It wasn't that I went and said, I want to make a movie that's about this. It's that I read this terrific script and it was about the greatest world leader of the past 50 years and he was being played by Morgan Freeman and Clint Eastwood was directing. It was a pretty easy decision for me. And The People Speak, Im really proud of. It came out really well. It's going to air on the History Channel on the 13th and that we just stumbled on a way to tell history that I think is great because it's factual. It's just the actual documents. It's the speeches and diaries and journal entries, all of these great speeches. In fact, there was the anniversary of John Brown's execution I saw a couple days ago and the Times did a whole thing and we have that David Strathairn reading John Brown in The People Speak, the last thing he said on the public record before they executed him. He was just 150 years ahead of his time. Its just incredible to read his words. There's a whole movement to pardon him that I saw in the paper the other day.
MF: Not too late, they say.
MD: Yeah, exactly. It's never too late. Because look, I mean, he ends up getting arrested by Robert E. Lee who leads the Secession force two years later over this issue of slavery and John Brown predicted. He said, This is only going to be solved with blood. This is the only way. This is a slave nation and we can't permit it anymore. So there are these great inspirational speeches and have a website where teachers are going to be able to access them. If you're teaching about Frederick Douglass and you can bring a reading by Morgan Freeman into your classroom, I have a feeling high school kids are going to be much more interested and be able to connect to these voices and that was the thing, looking at all of these readings, you connect to them much more than when you read them on the page, when you see these actors speaking the words. There's just something very powerful about it.
Q: Thank you both.
MF: Before you go, let me just say this. In a movie like this, in a project like this, actors, directors, producers, we all get so much attention and so much credit but I want you to see, whatever happened to Tony, I want you to see the young, unassuming man who actually wrote this script. Because no word on the page, nothing happens. Tony Peckham, that is the man who gets kudos from all of us. Thank you all so much.
One of Mandela's unorthodox initiatives was to rally behind the country's rugby team. The Springboks had been a symbol of racist Apartheid policies, but Mandela saw a political opportunity. If the black and white South African's could come together to support the team, it would be the first step toward a united nation.
The film Invictus portrays the 1995 World Cup. Morgan Freeman plays Mandela and Matt Damon plays Springboks captain Francois Pienaar. Clint Eastwood directed the film, showing how both players and fans slowly came around to each other over the season, while Mandela's advisors pleaded for him to focus on other affairs. Freeman has already been named Best Actor by the National Board of Review for his performance.
Freeman and Damon gave a press conference to support the film. For those who haven't read many Morgan Freeman interviews, you might be surprised by how playful he is. Perennially cast as the wise old sage, the real Freeman likes to mess with interviewers. The profound nature of this story didnt prevent him from joking around. Damon offered a little sarcasm too but otherwise stayed on point about the story of Pienaar and Mandela, often referred to as Madiba.
Q: Morgan, congratulations on the NBR Award.
Morgan Freeman: Thank you so much. Anybody know what NBR means?
Q: Of course. National Board of Review.
MF: Hey, hey, hey. And do you know why he's congratulating me?
Q: Well yes, you won.
MF: Hey, hey, hey.
Q: Is it true you've been considering playing Mandela since 1993? What took until now to find the right opportunity?
MF: This started out with Madiba naming me as his heir apparent so to speak when he was asked during the press conference at the publication of his book, Long Walk to Freedom, Mr. Mandela, if your book becomes a movie, who would you like to play you? He said, Morgan Freeman. So, from then on, it's like okay so Morgan Freeman is going to be Mandela somewhere down the line. We spent a lot of time, Lori [McCreary] and I, my producing partner at Revelations. We were trying all this time to develop Long Walk to Freedom into a script. Couldn't happen. Then, in 06 I believe, we got this book proposal from John Carlin and it was perfect. We bought it. We got a script written. And, this was the role to play to give the world an insight into who Mandela is and how he operates. It was perfect.
Q: Matt, what did you get from the real Francois Pienaar?
Matt Damon: Well, the first thing I did when I read the script was, I called Clint and I said, I can't believe this happened. I can't believe this is true. And he said, I couldn't either, but this is true. So, I went immediately and looked up Francois online and I said, Clint, this guy is huge. We've never met but I'm 5'10". I told him on the phone and he started laughing and he said, Oh hell, don't worry about that. I said, Alright. He said, You go worry about everything else. And I said, Alright, Ill worry about everything else. You worry about the fact that I need to grow 6 inches to play the guy. I had about 6 months to get ready. I worked hard on the accent and on training physically to build myself up to try to pull off the illusion of being the captain of a South African rugby team. Ultimately, I just try to look at every possible pitfall. When I'm way, way out, say 6 months away, I look at what could possibly blow this illusion? What are the things? And then, I start thinking about ways to solve those problems before I really get into it. So, I kind of made my little checklist of things I had to do and just planned it out and then I got to South Africa. The very first day, Francois invited me over to his house for a gourmet dinner that he was cooking. He invited me to meet his wife and two boys. Morgan and I went. I just remember I rang the doorbell and he opened the door and I looked up at him, and the first thing I ever said to Francois Pienaar in my life was, I look much bigger on film. And he laughed and laughed and he gave me a big hug and then took me into his house and that was it. We were off and running and he was just an invaluable resource for me the whole time. I was constantly asking him questions, everything from what color is your mouth piece to whats your philosophy on the captaincy and on leading a team and life in general. He just was incredibly available and a very articulate guy and he was incredibly helpful to me.
Q: In doing your research for it, did that include the accent?
MD: Yeah, well Francois's accent has changed quite a bit because he went and played in England for so many years. All of his closest friends and his wife, everybody says, Well, you know, his accent has changed quite a bit. Listening to any existing interviews from that day, you can hear how its changed, but there was a good key to that. Tim and I, the dialect coach, talked a lot about [how] a lot of people, when they do a South African accent, really overdo it and end up making somebody sound like Frankenstein. Its actually a quite beautiful accent. We talked about smoothing it out because Francois speaks quite smoothly and borrowing some of that and trying to make it so that its subtle, so that its not so over the top where you're just like "Wait a minute. Thats a little big."
Q: Morgan, I've had the privilege of interviewing you several times over the years.
MF: Yes, you have.
Q: You've always described acting as playing, which is nice to hear. I was wondering, when you play Nelson Mandela, does it become more than that?
MF: No. It might have become more than that were I playing or working with someone other than Clint Eastwood. He is so enabling. He is so out of your way as an actor and he likes to watch actors play. I don't think I do anything other than that when I'm working. I'm just playing. Work is something else. Work is maybe what you do.
Q: Matt, in 1990 when Nelson Mandela came to Boston and there were hundreds of thousands of people on the Common, do you remember that?
MD: Sure. I remember the Boston visit. I remember the whole world tour. I remember he just went all over the place. In fact, in my high school, we had the Free Nelson Mandela ribbons. Remember the black ribbon with the writing? Kids were wearing those before they knew who he was. In fact, I have an old scrapbook that I was looking through. This is the photo album that my mother put together for me to go to college. She gave me a photo album of pictures from my whole childhood that progressed. And, I saw recently that the Free Nelson Mandela ribbon was in there from 1986 or 1988, probably 1988 when I graduated high school and all the kids were wearing those ribbons. So I remember. It was very big. My freshman year at Harvard in Fall of 88, I remember the Divest Now marches and everything that was going on. College campuses are usually the places where a lot of that stuff is cooking and people are talking about that stuff. So yeah, it was a very, very big deal, the Boston visit, and really that whole kind of coming out tour that he did.
Q: As you became good friends with Francois, what did you pay attention to and incorporate into your performance from your observations of him?
MD: There are the more obvious physical things that I have to do to try to pull off that magic trick, and then, just talking to him philosophically about certain things, you know, leadership. That's really if you look at the structure of the script, its the greatest world leader of our time appealing to this other type of leader and forging a bond with him and basically saying, I need to use you to do this and the guy saying, I understand exactly why and his team exceeding its expectations. They've been asked to exceed their expectations and it's a metaphor for what the country needs to do because everybody is expecting them to not be able to heal. Those were the things. It was Francois's integrity and leadership, but those were the kind of things that I needed to get across with the role and then the obvious kind of attendant physical things, lifting weights and stuff.
Q: How does a fight scene in, say, The Bourne Ultimatum compare to playing rugby?
MD: Oh, I was in better shape for this movie. I mean, I was in the gym every day and with Francois who came with me to the gym a few times. This is his life. I don't want to embarrass him. I can't. If Jason Bourne looks a little flabby, thats on me. [Laughs] This is the fictionalization of somebody's actual life. I didn't want to let him down. It wasn't going to be for any lack of effort, which really was what that team was famous for actually. They were known for going the extra mile and for knowing themselves well enough to say okay, we might not be the most talented team, and the line is even in the movie. The coach says, We might not be the most talented team, but were going to be the fittest. Francois talked me through their training regimen. It was just unbelievable what those guys did, all of them, every single guy. Its that great thing about a great team. Its like when every single person commits to something and sublimates their own personality for the greater good of the whole team and thats basically again the metaphor for that whole country.
Q: Have you played rugby since you came back?
MD: Hell no!
Q: Did you do this film before or after The Informant!?
MD: After. So, I had a good time putting the weight on and then a tough time reshaping the weight.
Q: How much did each of you know about the sport of rugby and do you still know the rules?
MF: Nothing. I know American football. I know just a little bit about soccer. I know baseball. I know basketball. But rugby is foreign language.
MD: And you know golf.
MF: I know golf.
MD: Same. I'm with Morgan. I knew a little bit about rugby but very, very little. But I do think it helps in terms of an American audience, the game is enough like football in the sense that its a battle for field position and you score by running across, running into what looks like an end zone and putting the ball down. I think in terms of the nuance of the game, obviously Americans won't get that stuff but in terms of the peanut butter and jelly version of what you need to know, I think its pretty clear.
Q: Why is this an important film?
MD: I'd say the film is telling a story that I think is a wonderful thing to remind everybody of, in South Africa and all over the world. If we listen to the better angels of our nature, there are creative and good solutions to serious problems. It's just an incredibly uplifting movie, and from the moment I read it, I was excited about just being a part of the ensemble that told this story. I think its a good thing to put out there, particularly now. There's not a lot of good news so this is a nice thing to put out for the holidays.
Q: Morgan, If you'd been contemplating this since 1993, what was the most important thing you wanted to get across in portraying Nelson Mandela?
MF: When he said that he would prefer that I be the one to play him in 1990 or whenever that was, I had to start then preparing myself to do it. So, I met him not long after that and I said to him, If Im going to play you, Im going to have to have access to you. Im going to have to be close enough to hold your hand. And, over the years, while we were trying to develop Long Walk to Freedom, that is what happened. Whenever we were in proximity, like a city away for instance, I would know about it and I would go to him and have lunch, have dinner, or sit with him while he's waiting to go on stage for whatever, and during that time, I would sit and hold Madibas hand. Now that's not for camaraderie. I find that if I hold your hand, I get your energy, it transfers, and I have a sense of how you feel. That's important to me trying to become another person. I have a lot of pressure to bring a character like that to life in any kind of real sense. The danger, of course, is always at caricature, sort of indicating what the person is like. The biggest challenge I had, of course, was to sound like him. Everything else is kind of easy to do: to walk like him, he has a few tics and things that I noticed and I picked those up. I didn't have any agenda as it were in playing the role other than to bring it as close to reality as I possibly could. The agenda is incorporated in the script and all I had to do was learn my lines.
Q: Matt, you do a number of films that have some kind of social consciousness to them, and you also have The People Speak on TV next week. Can you talk about doing projects that have some kind of social value and what that means to you?
MD: Sure. I think actors, we react to the material that's out there and I probably just react more strongly to things that I feel will have some social value. I think this movie is a great example. I think this is a really wonderful message to put out. It's a completely non-partisan message incidentally. This is about healing and coming together and it's an incredibly uplifting story. I think thats why it appealed to me. It wasn't that I went and said, I want to make a movie that's about this. It's that I read this terrific script and it was about the greatest world leader of the past 50 years and he was being played by Morgan Freeman and Clint Eastwood was directing. It was a pretty easy decision for me. And The People Speak, Im really proud of. It came out really well. It's going to air on the History Channel on the 13th and that we just stumbled on a way to tell history that I think is great because it's factual. It's just the actual documents. It's the speeches and diaries and journal entries, all of these great speeches. In fact, there was the anniversary of John Brown's execution I saw a couple days ago and the Times did a whole thing and we have that David Strathairn reading John Brown in The People Speak, the last thing he said on the public record before they executed him. He was just 150 years ahead of his time. Its just incredible to read his words. There's a whole movement to pardon him that I saw in the paper the other day.
MF: Not too late, they say.
MD: Yeah, exactly. It's never too late. Because look, I mean, he ends up getting arrested by Robert E. Lee who leads the Secession force two years later over this issue of slavery and John Brown predicted. He said, This is only going to be solved with blood. This is the only way. This is a slave nation and we can't permit it anymore. So there are these great inspirational speeches and have a website where teachers are going to be able to access them. If you're teaching about Frederick Douglass and you can bring a reading by Morgan Freeman into your classroom, I have a feeling high school kids are going to be much more interested and be able to connect to these voices and that was the thing, looking at all of these readings, you connect to them much more than when you read them on the page, when you see these actors speaking the words. There's just something very powerful about it.
Q: Thank you both.
MF: Before you go, let me just say this. In a movie like this, in a project like this, actors, directors, producers, we all get so much attention and so much credit but I want you to see, whatever happened to Tony, I want you to see the young, unassuming man who actually wrote this script. Because no word on the page, nothing happens. Tony Peckham, that is the man who gets kudos from all of us. Thank you all so much.
missy:
When Nelson Mandela was released from prison and won South Africa's free election, he began making profound inroads in the country's battle against Apartheid. The worldwide news may have covered the broad strokes of his efforts, but you might not know the details...