Catch a Fire
About the Production

Apartheid ended 15 years ago in South Africa, but there are still heroes’ stories to be told from those times that the world has not yet heard. Patrick Chamusso’s life is one such story.

Catch a Fire director Phillip Noyce states, “Patrick Chamusso is a remarkable man, and an inspiration to us all. He’s a man who goes beyond prejudice and beyond hatred to realize that as humans, if we ever want to be free, we have to learn to forgive.”

The true story dramatized in the new film has deep roots in South Africa’s history – and in the filmmakers’. For, Catch a Fire screenwriter Shawn Slovo was given the idea to write the movie over two decades ago by her late father Joe Slovo. Joe was formerly head of the military wing (MK) of the African National Congress (ANC), and later a Cabinet member in Nelson Mandela’s first (post-apartheid) government.

Joe told Shawn that if she ever wanted to write a story about the ANC’s armed struggle against apartheid, then she should tell the story of one of the movement’s heroes, Patrick Chamusso. In 1981, Patrick had attacked the Secunda Oil Refinery. This coal-to-oil refinery was a symbol of South Africa’s self-sufficiency at a time when the much of the rest of the world was instituting economic sanctions and boycotts against the apartheid regime. It was also a symbol of the wealth and riches of South Africa, earned in part by the exploitation of cheap black labor. Joe had strategized the mission with Chamusso, who carried it out single-handedly, earning himself the codename “Hotstuff.”

Chamusso was sentenced to 24 years in prison for the attack, and was still imprisoned when Shawn first heard the story. “I thought the idea of getting to tell it was pie-in-the-sky,” she remembers. But within the decade, change finally came to South Africa as apartheid was dismantled and free elections were held. In late 1991, when Chamusso was released as part of the amnesty granted to all political prisoners, Joe put Shawn in touch with him. Just two weeks after his release from prison, Shawn spent several days with Chamusso as the newly freed hero told her his story. Those conversations would form the foundation of Catch a Fire.

Shawn remembers, “I recognized in him someone who audiences all over the world could identify with. He’s not a typical hero of South Africa’s struggle, in that he is a man who had no political history, education, or background before joining the ANC. He is an ordinary man who loved his family, had a good job, and was passionate about football [in the U.S., “soccer”]. But when things went wrong, instead of giving in or being immobilized, he decided to take control. That, to me, is extremely heroic.”

Although Shawn was extremely moved after meeting Chamusso, she points out, “I didn’t feel like there was a perspective in place yet to tell the story; things had not settled.” So she put her tapes away in a drawer and waited.

By the turn of the century, the world had had time to reflect on what had happened in the previous century – and particularly the previous decade – in South Africa. Shawn brought the idea for the film to Working Title, which had previously made the movie of her first feature script, the autobiographical South African story A World Apart.

Visual Hollywood contents