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Johannesburg – Speaking to Channel24 at the premiere of Five Fingers for Marseilles in Johannesburg on Wednesday, the film’s director Michael Matthews highlighted some of the challenges he faced in getting the movie to the big screen.
"The main challenge making the film was trying to finance it and trying to find the money," Michael says, adding: "I think we had a lot of people excited about it. The cast and people wanted to get involved and knew it would be a great film."
He continues: "But trying to find the finance for a movie that’s got very little English in it, an all local cast, and that we wanted to do it on a budget where the production values would really stand out and appeal to the world as well as South Africa and with it hopefully take a new step in South African cinema, that was the hard part.”
With the project having taken over eight years to complete and reach SA cinemas, Michael says there were easier ways of completing the film and getting to the audience faster, but that would have altered the way in which they chose to tell the story.
“There were many times when we could have made the movie if we had made it mostly in English or if we put a couple of American stars with South African accents in and that sort of stuff. We just always knew that would just make, not only a weird film, but also not the film we were trying to make and sort of take away all the integrity of what’s cool about it in the first place.”
Set as a Western, Five Fingers For Marseilles follows the story of a group of friends who work to keep their small village safe from corrupt officials.
Watch the trailer here:
The film hits SA cinemas on Friday, 6 April.
