Uys: a life so big it befits the big screen
|||Theresa Smith
While working on PR at the Theatre on the Bay in Cape Town two years ago, Willem Oelofsen entered Pieter-Dirk Uys’s dressing room to discuss the production. “As I walked in, he was sitting all alone, like he must have been sitting around dressing rooms for years. And it looked like a shot to me,” Oelofsen remembers.
The conversation soon turned to the fact that Uys would turn 70 the next year, “and I suddenly thought, ‘that’s a nice hook to why make the movie now’,” and Oelofsen started trying to persuade the notoriously private actor/director/theatremaker/ philanthropist and, it turns out, nice guy, that a documentary needed to be made.
It took some persuading, but Oelofsen felt Uys’s story is worth highlighting because of the influence the satirist has exerted over the years.: “Ten years before that I was at Evita’s 70th birthday. That evening I realised this is an incredible story and wanted to do something and it’s been with me for 10 years, this incredible story of this man. I think the timing was just right.”
Oelofsen counts his inexperience in the film world, having only made short promo films for theatrical productions before, as a bonus when making his first feature, Nobody’s Died Laughing: “I think that’s why a lot of people agreed to be in it; because I wasn’t some big filmmaker,” he said.
Oelofsen spent a week in Darling doing research in Uys’s archives as executive producer Herman Binge tried to secure funding (Kyknet and private funders came through), so by the time they started principle shooting he had an iron-clad shooting script.
They started with pick-up shots in July, 2014 in London and interviews commenced with Desmond Tutu on March 18 last year and ended at Bishops as Uys gave an Aids prevention talk to pupils. Editor and co-director, Geoffrey Butler was at every interview so the two edited the film in less than three months.
“The film is first and foremost about the work, it is not a Huisgenoot story, it is not a mockumentary. Pieter’s life is so big, it should be on the big screen. In the scripting there are enough laughs, but it’s not a show, it’s not one of his performances.
“After the screening in Durban a lot of the younger black activists came up to him and said ‘thank you for inspiring us’ and that’s what I want. I hope this film will inspire people, the way he inspired me.
“It’s also what he wants, because he is always asking: ‘Where are the next generation of people asking those questions, poking that fun?’ If we don’t do it with humour, no one is going to listen, that’s what Pieter-Dirk has taught us. If we start shouting, no one listens, but if you laugh, people hear you.
“There are so many films about the Kurt Cobains and the Amy Winehouses, and it’s sad and they’re really good films, but what about those who bothered to stay alive to do the work?”