4 Mar 2009 – Clint Eastwood! Morgan Freeman!

Oh how I wish I could be telling this story in the first person. (And had pictures to back it up.)

Last night around 10 o’clock, Ben drove about five people from the house to a nearby restaurant to buy Magnum Ice Cream Bars. The circumstances were ordinary enough; no one thought much about jumping into the car and driving the five minutes down to Durban Rd for a late night dessert. As they were approaching Mowbray, however, just a few minutes from the house, they had to stop at a road block, where a security guard indicated something about “a shooting” up ahead. There were nervous whispers in the back seat, but Ben drove ahead to a second detour spot, where another guard expanded on the explanation, and the anxiety in the car turned to fits of unrestrained excitement. There was a movie being shot on the next block. A big movie. A Clint Eastwood picture starring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon – and two thirds of that famous trifecta were filming a scene just around the corner.

Within weeks of arriving in Cape Town, we’d heard about the upcoming film The Human Factor, based on a book about the pivotal 1995 Rugby World Cup victory by South Africa’s Springboks rugby team. The moment had been symbolically frozen in time, as the new president Nelson Mandela had handed over the world cup trophy to the Sprinkbok’s captain, representing the end of the racist sentiment that had plagued both the team and the nation for decades. We’d heard that the film would be shooting in Cape Town in March, and we all knew the big names behind the feature. So I’ll admit to having spent a good chunk of time trying to track down a shooting location schedule online over the past few weeks.

Reading a local news article a few days ago, I discovered that Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman had actually attended the same rugby game at Newlands Stadium that many of us had seen two weekends ago, and that fact alone seemed exciting… Then around 10:45 this evening, the house exploded with energy (intervening on a hair-raising run-in with a fist-sized cockroach in the pool house kitchen), when the car full of ice cream fetchers returned with their star-struck stories of suddenly running into Eastwood and Freeman on a random back road just a half mile from our house.

Through peels of wide-eyed laughter and squeals of disbelief, they relayed the following account of their encounter with these bastions of American cinema: after the roadblock, they’d decided to park the car around a corner and skulk down a dark street to the edge of the partitioned filming area. When they reached the shoot, the artificial “dawn” lighting prevented them from moving much further without being seen as a nuisance, but they watched as Morgan Freeman – playing Mandela – jogged down the street past a shop that had been reconstructed to resemble a window-front full of news headlines and pictures of Freeman-Mandela. During the scene, a van slows down by “Mandela”, and he and the two body guards jogging with him stop nervously. A second later, the van rolls on, and the three characters continue on their morning jog. Out of context, the scene seemed rather benign. It will probably be cut, one cynical person in our house complained as she recounted the night’s events. Regardless, they watched Eastwood instructing from behind the camera as Freeman enacted the scene a few times, running through the motions just feet from where they stood. We made eye-contact! They insisted. And he had such a swagger as he moved! Their exuberance in telling the story made the rest of us all the more jealous to have missed out.

According to the signs posted discretely around the shooting area, the crew was set to film in that location until 2AM. Some of us seriously contemplated calling a cab to drive us down there (we’d have walked if it weren’t too dangerous at night) so we could see it for ourselves. But our practical sense won out, and after a half hour of further discussion about star-sightings and movie shoots, many of us turned in for the night. The crew is supposed to be back in that location tomorrow night to film, as well, but of all nights, tomorrow we will be headed for Plettenberg.