Awaiting Invictus

Hitting the big screens soon around the world will be Invictus (the unconquered), the story of the Springbok rugby team of 1995 which championed the world.

Seldom has a film been so anticipated, not only for its stars - Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela, Matt Damon as captain Francois Pienaar, directed by Clint Eastwood - but for the taste, again, of South Africa's world-beating, Rainbow Nation narrative.

Murray Williams asked the author of the book Playing the Enemy, now renamed Invictus, John Carlin:



Where were you on June 24, 1995?

In a big bar in Washington DC commandeered by the SA Embassy, which did a fine service to all South Africans (and South Africa-lovers) in town by paying for the satellite link to the game. It was weird to walk out of the bar at the end to discover we were not, after all, in SA but in hot, mid-summer Washington, a city oblivious to our euphoria.



Have you been happy with the conversion of your book into a film thus far, through the filming, casting, etc?

Could not possibly be more happy. A fine, sensitive script, written by a South African. A magnificent director. The best possible Hollywood actors to play Mandela and Pienaar.

We've heard that the film-shooting process, not just the finished product, was a rich, authentic "1995" rugby environment. Were you happy with all the input?

The authenticity derived from the fact that the whole shoot was conducted in SA; 90 percent of the people working on the film production were South Africans.



Do South Africans, in general, grasp how momentus an event June 1995 was in our history, the sporting victory aside?

I think those who were around at the time and had a certain political awareness, realising how easily the country could have gone violently to the dogs, yes. Younger types may learn something new from the film - and even the book, should younger types still read books.



Does the release of the film offer a genuine opportunity to recapture some of that unified spirit?

I think it offers all South Africans, whatever their station, an opportunity to recall just how great South Africa at its best - which in this case is also the human species at its best - can be.



Is it inevitable that accents and rugby screenplay will be particularly carefully scrutinised by local audiences, possibly detracting from the narrative?

South Africans obsess on this point, or, at any rate, white South Africans do, when one of their own is represented in a Hollywood movie. Matt Damon does a great job.

We won the Rugby World Cup again in 2007. From what you could see, did the sport show its power as a uniting force as strongly?

As strongly, maybe. As significantly, no. By 2007 a lot of the fears and doubts in the country had gone away. I mean regarding the prospect of fundamental instability, of far right terrorism, of the country falling violently apart. Mandela's chief job in the government was to cement the foundations of the new democracy, and this he accomplished. So in 2007, the political issues were different: important and tricky, yes; but not so life or death.