What is a superstar, a living legend like John Cleese doing in a mining town like Jo’burg? This is the question that Cleese dryly poses to the audience gathered for a premiere of his new movie Spud at Montecasino in Johannesburg last Saturday night.
The following morning when I meet the Monty Python and Fawlty Towers star for an interview at the Palazzo Hotel at Tuscany-On-Bushveld, I find a man who is far more serious and unassuming than his public persona suggests. Cleese opens the interview by apologising profusely for keeping me waiting for a whole five minutes while he finished reading his Sunday paper and ate his breakfast.
He was running a bit late, he explains, because he wanted to talk to Spud’s producer regarding a minute and half of the film he wasn’t entirely happy with. Those 90 seconds aside, the film is “extraordinarily good”, he says.
Based on John van de Ruit’s popular novel about the growing pains of a teenage boy at an exclusive Natal Midlands boarding school, Spud is one of the biggest SA film productions of recent years and one of the few funded entirely by private investors.
Spud is a breezy and likeable adaptation of the novel that is sure to be a hit when it releases in SA on 3 December. It’s a slick production with great acting, warm humour and a nostalgic soundtrack featuring 1980s SA pop bands like eVoid, Bright Blue and Psycho Reptiles.
Cleese’s part as The Guv is one of the film’s highlights. He colours the character with a depth and poignancy that hints that his acting range extends far beyond the comedic upper-class toffs and bad-tempered bunglers for which he is famous.
Getting Cleese on board for the film was a major coup for director Donovan Marsh and the SA production team. Cleese says he signed up simply because he liked the script, though film industry talk has it that he was also well paid for his role, at least by SA standards.
“It was a very, very good script and I get sent very few, very good scripts,” Cleese says. Over the past 25 years, he has seen only six or seven scripts that he has thought were “very good” and only two of those offered him a major role, he adds.
Clockwise, the other script with a starring role that qualified as “good” by Cleese’s standards, also had him starring as a schoolmaster. Cleese says he felt comfortable with the role of the Guv because he was a schoolmaster at a prep school for two years early in his career.
He concedes, however, that he is better known for “fast” comedic acting rather than the “slow” acting that Spud demands in key parts of the script. Cleese plays his part – which includes a number of scenes of drunkenness and melancholy — relatively straight.
I ask him if he hopes this role will lead to more dramatic parts in the future. “Twenty-five years ago I would’ve said yes, but what I have discovered is that every now and again I do a straighter role. I did the Taming of the Shrew for the BBC in the 1980s – it led to nothing,” he shrugs. “Then I did a very good role in Kenneth Branagh’s Frankenstein which people were quite startled by — it led to nothing. At my old age of 71, this is not likely to lead to anything except a sequel.”
And having seen the final cut of the film with the rest of the audience at Montecasino, Cleese believes that the film could do well enough in the international market to warrant a sequel. Cleese’s presence will help to make the film more marketable in countries such as the UK and Australia. But will audiences outside SA warm to the film?
“I think people will like it, but can we get people to pay attention to it?” Cleese says. “The problem for many years has been that there are far too many movies out there and everyone is clamouring for attention. You see absolutely marvellous films that are completely missed.”
Cleese’s time on set filming Spud at Michaelhouse wasn’t his first visit to SA — he came to the country near the end of apartheid and holidayed at Camps Bay two Christmases ago. “There didn’t seem to be a single decent-sized swimming pool anywhere in Cape Town. Do Springboks not swim?”
He didn’t get much time during the filming of Spud to get to know SA, preferring to spend his spare time on location doing crosswords and jigsaw puzzles.
In recent years it has become increasingly rare to see Cleese in front of the camera. Instead, he has kept himself busy doing voice acting in animated films like the Shrek series and videogames like Fable 3. The reason for this is simply that there are few interesting roles for 70-year old actors in the US, especially with the rise of reality TV, Cleese says. He has a great fondness for voice acting because it’s a lot like working in his favourite medium, radio.
Apart from movies, business speeches and television, Cleese is touring the world with his one-man comedy show. He hopes to bring the act to SA in early 2012. He is working on new material that he describes as more satirical and thoughtful than his older sketches and routines.
Cleese, described by his good friend Michael Winner as a serious and intellectual man, is alarmed by what he sees as the dumbing down of society. He is proud of his university education and the fact he has friends who have “tried to read a more difficult book”.
“Though I still love to make people laugh, I find as I start to get older, I like to make them laugh with a social purpose in mind, in other words to draw their attention to something that is absurd,” Cleese says.
What does Cleese find absurd? Well, practically everything, but especially American and British politics. “When I look at the Republican Party, I have never seen such an awful, unscrupulous, selfish, half-witted rabble in my entire life. America is going downhill incredibly rapidly and I can’t see what will reverse it since it has become a completely trivial society,” he says.
“The United States of America has gone completely mad. It has always been a mixture of the best and the worst in the world, but now there’s an enormous amount of the very worst. I’m talking about people like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin,” Cleese says.
“It’s inconceivable to me that anyone thinks they could be qualified to run a country. Maybe [their supporters] feel threatened by the idea of people who are more intelligent and educated than them running the country because it makes them feel inferior.”
Spud (official trailer):
Cleese, who has lived in California for many years, is as tough on the country of his birth as he is on his adopted homeland. Apart from his friends, the art, the theatre and a “thin veneer of decency”, he dismisses everything else in the UK as “crap”.
Apart from politics, the other sore point in Cleese’s life is a bitter divorce from Alyce Faye Eichelberger, his third wife. The settlement cost him an £8m lump sum, followed by yearly payments of £612 000.
One of the reasons he took up live comedy again in 2008 was to finance the alimony settlement. His life philosophy? “Get the alimony paid and then do something interesting.” — Lance Harris, TechCentral
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