“I was on the verge of being a Hollywood hack,” admits Australian director Phillip Noyce. This comes from the man behind the lens of some of the biggest box-office thrillers of the 90s.
After gaining fame as a young director back home in Australia in the 70s, Noyce turned his Hollywood debut, the 1989 thriller Dead Calm (starring Sam Neill, Nicole Kidman and Billy Zane) into an enduring, if predictable career.
The early nineties saw Noyce tapped to helm film adaptations of John Clancy’s bestselling Jack Ryan spy novels. Starring Harrison Ford as the spy in question, the films Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger propelled Noyce’s number to the top of many a studio rolodex. He shot Sharon Stone’s voyeuristic romp Sliver but, after being recruited to direct cop-and-spy dramas The Saint and The Bone Collector, he found that he was being “typecast” as a director. Understandably, as someone who had travelled all the way from down under to make a name for himself, Noyce was not content with this one-dimensional version of success.
“It was too easy. Whether the films were good or bad, or somewhere in between, the studios would let me make them,” lamented Noyce, when he sat down with The Varsity during the Toronto International Film Festival.
While freely admitting that getting frustrated with industry success might sound ridiculous, Noyce reached his breaking point when he was approached to direct the fourth installment of the Jack Ryan trilogy, 2002’s The Sum of All Fears. With Harrison Ford wary signing on to the script and Ben Affleck looking more and more likely as his replacement, Noyce dropped out of the project. Ford followed Noyce’s lead and Affleck, a full 30 years Ford’s junior, attempted to fill Ryan’s shoes. It didn’t work. The Sum of all Fears, a franchise “reboot” for the Jack Ryan saga received generally negative reviews, with the New York Post calling it “a moribund attempt to exhume the Jack Ryan techno-thriller franchise with a severely miscast Ben Affleck.” Nice move, Noyce.
After leaving the production of Sum to Affleck and director Phil Alden Robinson (Field of Dreams) in 2000, Noyce did something rather unexpected. The director cashed out, picked up and headed home for his native Australia, leaving behind his box office success and Hollywood cronies. Noyce says the decision was ultimately easy, because the films he was hired to direct always did reasonably well at the box-office, but never with critics.
“They seemed to make money,” Noyce says of his Hollywood projects, “and if they looked bad the studio would just buy the audience by spending thirty million dollars on publicity and advertising.”
Obviously, Noyce wasn’t really feeling the whole dollar-sign visionary thing, and his disaffection reached a new level: “eventually I realized that I was just the guy that was hired to come in and yell ‘action’ and ‘cut’. I just got sick of it.”
In 2002, the same year that Sum of all Fears was getting its half-hearted smackdown from critics, Noyce released not one, but two films to widespread acclaim: the runaway hit Rabbit-Proof Fence and the equally acclaimed The Quiet American, which bagged Michael Caine an Oscar nomination for best actor.
Now Noyce is back, doing promotional rounds for his latest film, Catch A Fire, an apartheid thriller based on the true story of African National Congress revolutionary Patrick Chamusso. Noyce says he was drawn to this film because it shined a light on what he describes as “the miracle of South Africa.” He further explains that “this one man’s story seems to be about evolution, and moving beyond division, moving beyond the differences between us all, moving past hate.”
The film tells the exciting tale of Chamusso’s transition from ordinary, apolitical worker to radical militant, and his mission to plant explosives in the Secunda Oil Refinery, an important asset of the apartheid government.
Speaking about South Africa’s transition from racial segregation to a culture of integration and reconciliation, Noyce notes that “as a nation South Africa has shown us the way towards conflict resolution, and has achieved that more successfully than any other country in the history of mankind.”
Noyce had no difficulties shooting on location in South Africa for this film. Vilifying the old regime went a long way when scouting for locations. He was even granted access to the refinery that the real Patrick Chamusso planted explosives in.
He explains that such unlimited cooperation “could only come in a country where former enemies of the state were now in charge. South Africans are proud of stories like this, and their achievement as a nation, which is actually an achievement in morality.”
Had Noyce not left Hollywood, would he ever have been given the opportunity to make a film like Catch a Fire, featuring a heroic terrorist (don’t they call those guys “freedom fighters?”) as the protagonist? He laughs at this suggestion, adding that he would most likely have been “investigated as a subversive” had he even tried.
Catch A Fire opens nation-wide October 27.
