Читать книгу The Vagabond - Frank Rautenbach - Страница 6

The first time I met Angus Buchan was the day before we started principal photography on the movie about his life. I didn’t know much about Angus other than what I had read in his book, Faith Like Potatoes, and what I had gleaned from the script.

That evening, Angus and his wife Jill joined us at our cast-and-crew dinner. I got to sit opposite Angus and was hoping to learn as much as I could about him, such as the way he spoke and some of his mannerisms. I wanted to get a feel for his character to help me decide how I was going to use my emotional brush strokes to paint an authentic picture of the real man.

I had hardly sat down when his booming voice stopped me dead in my artistic tracks.

‘My boy, if you’re going to play me in a movie, the Lord is going to take you through fire!’

It is quite a thing to hear when meeting someone for the first time.

He explained that he wanted me to know that he had been through many challenges in his life and that God had used those things to refine him. And, if it was like that for him, it was probably going to be like that for me.

I had got all the character assessment I needed.

Acting in a thirty-second commercial requires one to keep the screen alive for a second or two at a time, like flashing a smile or saying a line or two. In an ensemble-cast television show, that time extends to a few minutes. But, when playing the lead role in a feature film, you’ve got to keep things going for a whopping two hours of screen time.

I, therefore, needed to make sure I believed in my heart that I was the farmer who had moved from Zambia to start a new life for his family until God interrupted his mad pursuit and then took him on a journey he could never have anticipated.

I had done my best to prepare myself in the three weeks I had until the first cameras started rolling. It was the first time I had been given the responsibility of carrying a movie as the lead actor, so the pressure was on.

Even though I had done my homework, I still felt like I needed something more to bring it all together for me. That something turned out to be the leather hat that my character Angus would wear throughout the movie. Once I put on that hat, everything made sense and I was ready to be Angus Buchan.

When we started shooting, none of us knew what an impact this movie would have across the world one day. We were just trying to tell a heartfelt story of one man and his family and their faith journey.

For the producer, Frans Cronjé, it was a massive step of faith to venture into his first attempt at making a feature film, especially with no money on day one. He had incredible faith and determination: every Friday, when the money had to be in the bank for the payroll, it was there. While we shot the movie, he would travel around the country and find investors who believed in the project.

He was wise enough to give the creative reins of the movie to legendary South African director Regardt van den Bergh. Reg has a talent for seeing beauty in places where most don’t. He is an incredible storyteller with lots of heart and a mischievous sense of humour, which played a major part in connecting this incredible story to our audience’s hearts.

There is so much that can go wrong on a movie set and, every time I see an independent film, I know a lot of little miracles took place to get it to completion.

I will never forget our fourth day of the shoot. We were shooting a scene along a mountain pass – with me driving the actual diesel truck that Angus had driven down from Zambia way back in the 1970s.

It was a simple setup with some of the crew on the back of the truck getting shots from that angle, and a camera mounted on the side of the canopy to get some interior shots of the Buchan family. The truck was designed with a compression-release engine brake to lower and control the speed of the vehicle, especially on steep downhills. The engine brakes, however, are completely ineffective when the vehicle is not in gear and, with a heavy truck like that, the foot brakes are powerless to slow the vehicle on a steep descent.

Everything was going well until we reached a section of the pass that suddenly became very steep, with lots of turns. I had to gear down for the engine breaks to work more effectively because we were picking up too much speed. When I tried to get the gear lever slotted back into a lower gear, it would not go in. I am an experienced driver and had done many advanced driving courses, and shot high-speed driving and handling scenes … but now I was dealing with an ancient truck!

I stayed patient and tried again, but the truck kept picking up speed. I could hear the camera guys on the back shouting for me to slow down.

Next to me in the cabin was the actress who played Angus’s wife and three young locals who played their children. The danger of the situation suddenly escalated, and it dawned on me that, if I could not get the truck back into gear, I would only have a split second to decide a course of action. A runaway truck on a steep rural mountain pass, unfortunately, did not leave me with many options.

In that moment, the only possibility I could see was to turn the steering hard left and crash into the side of the mountain.

I couldn’t bear the thought of the impending disaster and I once more stomped on the clutch, attempting to hammer the gear lever as hard as I could into the lower gear. I could hear the gears grinding and saw smoke started coming out of the gearbox, but I kept releasing and jamming it in until at last it slipped back into gear. By now, the truck had picked up so much speed that I had no idea whether the engine brakes would slow us down enough to make the next turn.

It was with shocked relief that I heard the gurgling sound of the brakes as they fought, and then managed to slow down the truck.

My legs and hands were shaking as I pulled the truck over to the side of the road. The crew and I exchanged a wordless look, knowing how close we had come to a massive disaster and the sure end of the shoot. Lee Doig, our camera operator, told me afterward that he was busy releasing his harness from its carabiner, ready to jump when he heard the gears grind, and the beautiful sound of the compression brakes slowing down the truck.

It has been more than a decade since shooting that scene, but I still get cold chills when I think of what could’ve happened had that truck not slotted into gear.

Many people have asked me over the years if being involved with a movie like Faith Like Potatoes had a profound effect on my faith. I suspect that part of the reason people ask this question is that watching the movie probably had a profound effect on their faith, and that of many others. But it’s a hard one to answer directly because the experience of making the movie was vastly different to the experience of watching it.

It was incredibly fulfilling for me to pour my heart and soul into the story and to bring Angus to life on the big screen. I instinctively communicate through storytelling and that is what I tried to focus on throughout the shoot.

I would often rewrite my dialogue, especially in the scenes where Angus preached or spoke to a large group of people. I imagined myself speaking to the real people who would be watching the movie. In my performances, I drew heavily on my own faith journey to give heart and substance to those scenes.

In the end, I believe we managed to produce a movie with lots of heart, which resonated with our audiences’ own stories. This would explain why they received it with open arms.

The movie was a surprising runaway success. No one expected that. According to Sony Pictures in the US, hundreds of millions of people around the world have watched it. Millions of DVDs have been sold and it has been translated into 17 languages.

In reality, though, when we started shooting Faith Like Potatoes, we were just hoping that we could distribute it locally on DVD. It was only during the fifth week of the shoot, when we watched a rough 45-minute edit of some of the footage, that we started thinking that it might be something special and that we should try to secure a theatrical release.

Being involved in Faith Like Potatoes had a profound effect on me, especially when I saw how our work touched so many people’s lives. It left me in awe of God’s grace, and what He could do with the telling of a heartfelt story.

I remember about four weeks into the shoot asking Reg why they had only cast the starring role three weeks before the shoot. He said that they had held auditions for almost three months – they saw many good actors, but none of them felt right for the role of Angus.

So, shortly before shooting would begin, a very frustrated Reg found himself walking around his apartment, praying and asking God for help. And that’s when my name popped into the director’s head.

Even though God uses our talents for his purposes, let’s not forget it was his grace and favour that allowed Faith Like Potatoes to do what it did and continues to do. It profoundly affected my faith by demonstrating that God is sovereign. We get to be a part of what He is doing – not the other way around.

A lesson I would learn over the next few years as, ‘The Lord took me through the fire.’