“It was so close to my story. I wasn’t a gangster, but I was surrounded by it. I connected to this story. I could see it.” - Daryne Joshua
|||FILM director Daryne Joshua (pictured) had a long debate with his brother about whether their mother should watch his debut feature film, Noem My Skollie. “Because my mom loves musicals and this is an intense movie. My brother kept on saying she had to watch it because it’s my first. Plus, I promised I would make a musical,” Joshua admitted via a telephone interview.
Talking to his mother about the biographic drama, he had to justify why it was necessary to show “all the stuff”, meaning scenes like a teenage boy being sexually abused and heaps of violence perpetrated by gangsters.
“They didn’t want me to tiptoe around the truth,” he explained, meaning the producers of the film, especially scriptwriter John W Fredericks whose life’s story is delved into in the film.“ This is John’s story. He lived this and fought for many years to tell the world what happened to him. It is my responsibility as the director to get as close to the truth as possible.
Or at least, that’s what I tried to do,” said Joshua.The 25-year-old didn’t want to make the film just because it was about coloured people and was perturbed by how few scripts about coloured people he could find: “I wanted something that would make an impact. ”Reading the script, he was immediately struck by the first part of the story, because this was his story.
Growing up, he had three best friends and one’s dad was a drug dealer: “It was so close to my story. I wasn’t a gangster, but I was surrounded by it. I connected to this story. I could see it.”
At the time, when he agreed to make the film, and even when they did the prep work, casting and shot it over the month of August last year, he didn’t think about the broader perspective of how the story talked about coloured identity, the main thing for him was that he connected to it on a personal level.
“People have asked, why another gangster story? But, for me it’s the story of a man who persevered. He got out.” The film is set in 1960s Cape Town and they used Ocean View to stand in for Kewtown which has been modernised somewhat since it was first built. They also struck a “fantastic deal” with Cape Town Studios to use sets from the Long Walk to Freedom shoot, like the Robben Island prison set and Observatory doubled up as 1960s Long Street.
“That was a nightmare. We couldn’t close down the streets,” he remembers.While doing his research, Joshua figured out that the word skollie goes back to probably the ‘50s: “There’s an article in Time magazine on the skollies of the Cape Flats and the actual translation is ‘scallywag’.
”But, Call Me Thief became the eventual translated film title because saying Call Me Gangster would simply reinforce the wrong notion that this is a gangster movie. Joshua had watched Dann-Jaques Mouton in Jans Rautenbach’s Abraham, and when he read the script he did kind of see Mouton in the role.
But he did his due diligence, auditioning several possibilities. Eventually he had to travel to Joburg for auditions, where he watched Mouton nail the asked forrequired scene – telling a story to gangsters in prison.
“He looks hard on the outside, but he is just such a sensitive soul and I thought that was wonderful for the role. Plus, the cheekbones and the gaunt look, he’s a bit like John.”
