By: Izumi Hasegawa

In their new film Invictus, Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon bring us the story of Nelson Mandela’s relationship with the national rugby team. They both took some time to sit down with Buzzine to discuss the difficulties and enjoyment of portraying these real-life characters.

Izumi Hasegawa: Morgan, I understand, since 1993, you felt you were the perfect person to play Nelson Mandela and it’s taken this long to find the right way to do it. Can you talk about that journey?

Morgan Freeman: 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. Lori [McCreary] and I, my producing partner at Revelations, spent a lot of time trying 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.

IH: Matt, can you talk about having a real life sports hero that’s unknown maybe outside of South Africa — at least in America — and taking on the challenge of doing that role?

Matt Damon: The first thing I did when I read the script was I called Clint [Eastwood] 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 [Pienaar] online and I said, “Clint, this guy is huge. We’ve never met, but I’m 5′10″.” 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, I’ll worry about everything else. You worry about the fact that I need to grow six inches to play the guy.” I had about six 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. I 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.” I was constantly asking him questions — everything from “what color is your mouth piece?” to “what’s 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.

IH: In doing your research for it, did that include the accent?

MD: Francois’s accent has changed quite a bit because he played in England for so many years, and all of his closest friends and his wife say his accent has changed quite a bit. Listening to any existing interviews from that day, you can hear how it’s changed, but there was a good key to that. Tim [Monich], the dialect coach, and I 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. It’s 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 it’s subtle, so that it’s not so over-the-top where you’re just like, “Wait a minute. That’s a little big.”

IH: Matt, 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 — leadership. If you look at the structure of the script, it’s 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. It was Francois’s integrity and leadership, but those were the kinds of things I needed to get across with the role, and then the obvious attendant physical things — lifting weights and stuff.

IH: Morgan, Mandela is one of the most revered people in the world. How did you go about developing a plan and preparing to play him? 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 preparing myself to do it. So I met him not long after that, and I said to him, “If I’m going to play you, I’m going to have to have access to you. I’m 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 Madiba’s hand. 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.

IH: Matt, will you explain to us why this is an important film?

MD: 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 being a part of the ensemble that told this story. I think it’s 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.

IH: Morgan, back at the time of Unforgiven, you said that Clint ran a very good set, a comfortable set. You keep coming back to him, so I wonder if you can amplify on that. And Matt, how was your experience working on an Eastwood film?

MD: Morgan and I were saying yesterday, maybe if we sit out the next few years and let Clint get some more experience, he’s really going to be a good director. [Laughs] We’re going to let him get some more films under his belt.

MF: I think about three more.

MD: Three more, he’ll be solid.  Both of us having been on, between us, probably 100 different film sets, it doesn’t get any better than the way he runs it. As Morgan was saying earlier about him enabling and allowing things to happen, Clint says, “Look, I hire the best people I can and I put them in a position to do their best work, and I get out of the way and take credit for all their stuff.” [Laughs] He’s got this crew that just is the top flight crew.

MF: Phenomenal.

MD: You walk on some movie sets and it’s like walking into an emergency room and you’re like, “We’re just making a movie here.” But that tension bleeds into the performances and into the film itself. Clint just runs an incredibly tight ship. It’s just very easy. We’ve been entrusted to do our jobs. And then he’ll come over occasionally and give a little bit of direction, but it’s not a lot of chatter.

MF: Matt says it’s a tight ship, I think it’s a well-oiled machine. Try to imagine yourself as the captain of a ship that really runs well. You don’t do anything. You just get credit for the fact that it runs well. The engine room does their job, the steering does their job, the deck crew do their job… It’s all done and done well. “Well, Captain, you run a very nice ship.” “Thank you very much.” So that’s what Clint says he does, and it’s wonderful. And everybody who works with him has this very same reaction to him. “Can I stay with you?”