"INVICTUS" BACK STORY: MANDELA, RUGBY AND SOUTH AFRICAN RACE RECONCILIATION

THE BOSTON GLOBE
December 10, 2009
By Todd Longwell,
The Boston Globe

Growing up in South Africa, screenwriter Anthony Peckham hated playing rugby.

That changed in 2006, when producer Mace Neufeld gave Peckham the proposal for John Carlin's book, Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation. The author outlined how Mandela, newly elected as the first black president of South Africa, put aside any bitterness he might have felt after being imprisoned for 27 years by the white minority government and used the 1995 Rugby World Cup Finals as a catalyst to reconcile post-apartheid race relations.

"Halfway through reading it, I found myself in tears," says Peckham, who immigrated to the United States in 1981 to study film at San Francisco State University. "I thought, 'I have to write this. This has everything.' "

But before Invictus, which opens Friday at Dallas' Angelika, could get to awards season, a key hurdle needed to be jumped: securing Morgan Freeman to play Mandela.

So Neufeld set up a meeting with Lori McCreary, CEO of Freeman's production company, Revelations Entertainment. Impressed, she asked Peckham to pitch Freeman personally.

"Morgan said, 'How soon can you start writing the script?' " Neufeld recalls. Freeman had been developing a film adaptation of Mandela's autobiography, Long Road to Freedom, but condensing the sprawling story into a two-hour movie had proved problematic.

The Carlin book, though, "encapsulated the spirit of who Mandela is in pretty much a one-year period," McCreary says.

Neufeld and Revelations developed the project together; then it fell to Peckham to turn his pitch into an actual script.

Peckham hewed closely to events involving Mandela and the national rugby team, the Springboks, focusing on the months leading up to its World Cup Championship match against the New Zealand All Blacks (named because of their uniforms) in Johannesburg. But he also inserted several supporting characters: He created the character of Sipo, a boy in the township slums who shifts from a Springboks hater to a fan, illustrating how black South Africans went from viewing the nearly all-white team as symbols of the oppressor to national heroes. He added the parents of Springboks captain Francois Pienaar (played by Matt Damon) to serve as the typical white South African attitudes of the time.

The first draft was completed in early 2007. After a round of notes, Freeman suggested sending it to Clint Eastwood, with whom he had worked on 2004's Million Dollar Baby, in which Freeman earned an Oscar for best supporting actor.

"I was just entranced," Eastwood says. "They were on the verge of civil war; with the slightest bit of encouragement, [Mandela] could have pulled the trigger. It took a very creative person to come to grips with this. And it shows how creative even a politician could be."

Todd Longwell, The Boston Globe