So the mainly good reviews are mostly in, and the midnight e-mails of congratulations from Harvey Weinstein have flooded to our team, the only thing left now - is for the US audience to weigh in on whether The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, "No Sex, New City" (as coined by the Wall Street Journal), is a hit or not, or whether US audiences will embrace a traditionally built detective from Botswana or not.
My bet is on the sangoma's prediction.
On Anthony Minghella's second (of three) trips with me to Botswana to prepare for the movie and to finish the screenplay that he was co-writing with Richard Curtis, we took along a few significant members of our future crew. At one point on this trip, we met a sangoma way up in the North of Botswana, on the edge of the Pans, just out side of Gweta. I "rolled the bones," the way one asks a traditional healer for a divination. It was May, 2006 and I had been working on the project for 6 years already. I had had my ups and downs, and six years already felt too long to have done anything, unless it was walk a young child to his/her first day of class in first grade. I asked if the project was going to be successful, and tossed away. Through a translator, the sangoma answered that "it was going to be a very long journey, but a very successful journey." He spoke in metaphors about trapping our elephant, but added that the journey was going to be longer. As an occasional New Yorker, I wanted to leap off my haunches and strangle the old grizzled man. Long? Longer than six years? And in fact, another slow year passed, and we still did not have our "green light."
It has been close to 9 years since I first read a small sparsely published novel entitled, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, on a cold Winter's day in August in Johannesburg, South Africa. I read the book in one sitting, falling immediately in love with Mma Ramotswe, and knew that I wanted to make a movie of the book when I read and relished page 225, JLB Matekoni's description of Mma Ramotswe (found on page 234 of most editions now.) (By the way, the photo above is of Lucian, all thumbs up, who plays JLB Matekoni.) I sent the book to Anthony Minghella in early 2001, contrary to what Alexander McCall-Smith claims, I did not throw the book over his fence and into his yard! I had met Anthony about a year previous with my friend, Joan Chen, who was in London doing the music for Autumn in New York.
Anthony, his incredible wife Carolyn, and I had one last trip to Botswana together, February 2007, in which Anthony took leaps and bounds with the screenplay, and made it sing. I had followed and given notes on every draft, but there was a moment that his genius left me, and I did not know where he was channeling these rewrites from. And so, we started to build up pre-production that Winter in Botswana, around May, 2007, but we still had not found our Mma Ramotswe. Anthony had scoured the earth to discover the strength and vulnerability of Mma Ramotswe, perfectly rendered by Jill Scott, who at the time, was better known for her feminist poetry and her singing, than her acting yet. (I sense that will change after this evening.)
We finally started shooting the movie in July, 2007, the day after Sydney Pollack found out he had cancer. We had the movie in the can by September, and Anthony had everything completed, the edit, the music, the mix - - everything -- by the time he found out about his health issues in January, 2008. Anthony died unexpectedly on the morning of our BBC Premiere, March 18, and Sydney followed him shortly thereafter. My last telephone conversation with Anthony, a two hour bonanza, involved all issues around the series, of life, of the joy of HBO's joining us. Anthony and I had fought from the get-go about whether this should be made into a movie or a television series. He insisted tv series, for then audiences could get to know the characters. I insisted film. I wanted to see the sweeping beauty of Botswana. Anthony was right: it was perfect for a good television series, and he managed to get the beauty in there too. Now we have a lasting testimony to his vision, to his spirit, to all things African.
To Tim Bricknell's credit, and to everyone's determination, we dug in hard to get the series up and running in 2008. We took the leap with Botswana again, after promises and encouragement. We started shooting episodes 2-7 by September, 2008. And finished barely in time for Christmas, 2008 with our families. (At one point, there had been a lot of jockeying on set, claims that we would be eating our turkey under the blue craft service awnings ... if we didn't make our days.)
The journey has certainly been long. And it has been full, and rich, difficult and joyous. I don't know how US audiences will receive our offering this evening. I'll be watching with a few jaded New York friends, munching through home-made deviled eggs, and listening to gauge their East Coast reactions.
At this point, I don't worry about whether this will be a "successful journey." It already has been. It has changed my life, added new friendships into the mix, forced me to confront demons, called upon me to build patience (that probably will never really ever happen), tested my courage, made me laugh, gave me hope, and taught me many things "Africa."
It could not have happened without my original partners, sadly now ancestors, Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack. To both men, I will always be indebted to their fortitude, beliefs, and genius.
In ending, below is the letter Anthony Minghella wrote to Richard Curtis after our May 2006 trip, where Anthony and Richard faced the challenges of writing the adaptation, and where the sangoma predicted it would be a "very long, but a very successful journey." It strikes me, after re-reading Anthony's description below, that this single 10-day trip was a "long journey" in and of itself. Imagine, all nine years of it ..... though, after tonight .... I hope the journey gets even longer than predicted ....
June 1, 2006
I’m writing this on the plane flying back from South Africa, after our ten days of scouting and research. If I say too much it is also because I want to keep a record of my thoughts as a kind of aide-memoir, but also because I want to share everything I know right now about the project.
Botswana was disappointing and thrilling in equal measure. Our first days, in Gabarone, were bewildering, even though I’d been there only a couple of years ago. Revisiting the real locations of the books is a pungent reminder of the difference between their fictional characteristics and what Gabarone actually is today. Anything remotely quaint or picturesque is fast being swallowed and overwhelmed by new and assertive skyscrapers, testimony to Botswana’s recent prosperity. It’s like an ugly midlands city with wonderfully exotic aberrations. Clean, westernised, a little grim. Close by, though, there were some excellent areas, where traditional Africa sits on the edge of the town, complete with donkey carts, mud huts, shabeens, and drunken dreadlocked guys in Arsenal shirts. One of them lifted Tim’s Blackberry in about three minutes. Mochudi, currently featured in our first scene (although much too close, I think, to be right) is an interesting place, more African, looser and without the tall buildings of the capital. It’s very small and without the western architecture to use for Gaborone; Gabarone is too big and ugly to easily use for Sandy’s Gabarone (although a week later, looking at our photographs, this might be the opinion of the roving human eye rather than the camera’s selective eye). The physical landscape seemed to state powerfully what a later conversation reinforced –we met a guy who runs a theatre company in Gabarone (this year’s highlight The Pirates of Penzance with Mma Ramotswe!) who said that Sandy had written a book which wasn’t really set in Botswana, but in his mind. In any case, my anxieties grew about being in a chain of middle-aged white men commenting on and presenting black culture through some rose-tinted lens. Disneyland, Africa-style.
Certainly, at the end of our second day I was ready to curtail the trip and hurry to South Africa to see what we could build and invent in Johannesburg.
One thing which struck me forcefully, as I listened to various people we met and engaged with (including, most randomly and rewarding, a guy we took to lunch in Mochudi having asked him directions), was the distance between parts of the book and an interesting reality. I say that because all good works of fiction are different to reality, largely because they slough away a lot of what’s dull or not useful about the daily drudge or what doesn’t feed their narrative imperatives or themes. And, evidently, Sandy is writing about a world that might have as much to do with a Scottish childhood as it does with visiting Botswana as an adult. Similarly, I think that a lot of the reader appreciation of the books says a great deal about their own nostalgia for community, for a clear value system, for a powerful sense of right and wrong; most of us imagine that existed in our childhood and has been eroded. We could call this the David Kelly syndrome. It’s the America that never was, or the Isle of Wight that never was. Sandy has brilliantly achieved a world in which African values, their profound sense of family and responsibility and superstition, coupled with the invention of one and possibly more wonderful characters work in some alchemy of humour and decency and compassion. Things Africa might teach us, rather than what we want to teach Africa [Minghella's emphasis] about their debt, their disease, their taste for rampant dictatorships and bouts of genocide. All good. And I know you agree.
On the other hand, many of the solutions seem more familiar than they need be. In the novels, births, deaths, marriages, the law, all seem strongly western. In actual fact, around these life events, a Botswana exists which seems more complex and more rich for our drama. Most Batswana go to Church, are Protestants or Charismatic Christians. But they are also Animists, with strong and culturally deep relationships with their ancestors and with animals and the land. They go to doctors, to hospitals, but they also all use muti, traditional medicine, dispensed by the medicine men, the Sangoma. They go to lawyers, some of them, but mostly and wonderfully, they go to the kgotla, open-aired meeting areas where the chiefs and elders hang out, smoking and chatting, and hearing grievances in a semi-formal environment, where a problem can be resolved with discussion, a stick, or up to half a dozen years in jail. These powerful ambiguities seem to me to be largely missing from our current screenplay, missing from the books. Our friend, Billy, the direction-giver, who turned out, ironically, to be a satirical cartoonist, and Rusette, our white batswana driver, both very well-informed, told us many things. Funerals, for instance, are currently a big problem in Botswana. They’ve become grander and grander affairs, a kind of status symbol, where the more people who attend the more respect you’re seen to show to the one who has passed. As a result half the village can show up for several days and literally eat the mourners out of house and home. Lomala (sp?), the payment exacted by the father for the marriage of his daughter – a reverse dowry – still exists, particularly in rural areas, and results in what is effectively a purchase. So when I met an actress in South Africa yesterday, who told me a scalding story about how her husband, Note-like, had repeatedly abused her, eventually breaking both her arms and locking her in her house alone for two days, I was also told that when a white friend intervened and got her out of the township and into a safe house, the girl’s mother had told her to keep her nose out of things, that her daughter had been sold to her husband and that he could do what he liked to her.
I’d love to understand these things in our screenplay.
The bush, on the other hand, was extraordinary. We went up country by charter plane to the Delta – reminiscent of the American South - endless serpentine waterways with a tropical feel, stocked with wildlife and, because of the recent rainfall, lushly carpeted with green. Driven in flat bottomed motor boats by our guide Matt, we shot through the area at high speed, negotiating a bewildering labyrinth of corners, left here, right there, arriving at Chief’s Island – a wildlife sanctuary, with birds of all colours, hippos, buffalo, giraffe, crocs. Beautiful and slightly absurd, with a huge animal at every turn. Africa from the documentaries and children’s literature.
Next we flew to Kasane and hooked up with Ralph Bathfield [sic], a real English Patient (you’ve met him, I think, in London) who was to prove, in almost every respect, the hit of the scout. He is so ludicrously well-informed, so native, so much the stuff of legend, son of the famous crocodile hunter Jack (who is credited with having killed over 50, 000 crocodiles and was one of the original White Hunters). Ralph who runs several camps, including Jack’s, San and Planet Baobab (our first port of call) is handsome, rugged, curious, passionate about the land and its creatures, in love with the austere life of paraffin lamps, and cold water, trekking with the bushmen, promoting his own enthusiasm for research, scarred by tragedy, not least a plane accident in which the plane he was piloting crashlanded, caught fire and killed his father, despite Ralph going back into the burning cockpit to pull him out and, as a result, suffering massive and scarring burns of his own. He spent the next few days with us, teaching, guiding, opening our eyes to the mysteries and miracles of the Kalahari.
Baobab, with oversized playful sculptures conjuring The Little Prince, hosts several trees which are thousands of years old, massive and improbable, dwarfing the rest of the vegetation. The biggest in the area, closer to Jack’s, was used as a post office by Livingstone and other explorers, who left letters for each other in the house-sized trunk. We arrived here late, in time to eat, catch the dusk, then sleep in our wonderfully eccentric houses, homage to the Spanish architect Gaudi, all curves of concrete echoing tribal huts, but with modern conveniences.
The next day, described elsewhere, was the best of our trip, enjoyed in two parts. One took us to the local town where, with the guidance of Bones, born and schooled there, we were able to get a taste of the lives lived, with visits to the school, to a sorghum beer bar, to the kgotla, to a retired hunter and wiseman, who threw wooden signs to predict the success of our project (long journey but with a bull elephant as prize) and then to a local cattle post for lunch, where we ate a flyblown meal of traditional fare – beans, greens, sorghum porridge, tripe - with our fingers and some of us tasted worm for the first and only time. This felt like a real insight into a world that Mma Ramotswe might have experienced as a child. Later we flew across to the pans, the salt lakes to the east, vast and lunar. And our experience there was personal, romantic, indelible. And currently not much to do with the Number One Ladies.
In short, scouting was largely dispiriting; exploring the bush was a thrill. What is in our script might be the least interesting part of this country, or so it seemed to me on those days. I wanted to be there with my family and not with a film crew.
But returning to this document some days after returning to London, I have a slightly different perspective. I am still concerned, but also beginning to see that what we love about these stories and characters remains the core reason to make filmed drama from them; the fact that they contain some universal truth is why they might become universal on film. There is no Gabarone like the Gabarone of Sandy’s books. Botswana is a complex modern African country. Our work cannot take on the burden of this complexity or of the complexity of Southern Africa, let alone the continent of Africa. At the same time, I do think we have to nudge the material to make it closer to what seems most distinctive about Botswana now or, rather, when there are aspects of contemporary Botswana which might give us more than we have, or the books know, we should incorporate them. I also want to feel that the cultural map we describe, with all of its contradictions of old and new, should feel familiar to somebody who lives in or knows Botswana, even if we can’t tell the whole story, even though we’re not documentarians. Steal more from what’s there, is my point. Jettison some of the stuff which seems too western. Again, we need to create material where it’s imperative that we shoot in Botswana not in Burbank. Otherwise, why go? Of course, whether Botswana is best placed to represent Botswana is another story and one which needs to be explored more thoroughly with a designer and from more scouting. Right now I need persuading that South Africa has any of the locations we found in Botswana.
For me the next step is to return to the screenplay and see whats needs to change and develop, and what, if anything, we need do to properly locate the Detective Agency, both in a geographical sense, but also in its cultural landscape. And to explore further the casting opportunities. One of the richest experiences I had on the trip was sitting for many hours talking with actresses in Johannesburg. It made me think there are great women’s stories to tell in this project. It also unnerved me in terms of casting. The cruelty of western images of female beauty (starved for fashion and not from famine) is increasingly pervasive in Southern Africa. The heavier actresses I met had all recently lost considerable amounts of weight. If the Big Mama is still alive and sexually alluring in the realities of the townships, the media images are closer to Western silhouettes. Our choices will be limited and, if we’re going to find an African Mma Ramotswe there’s a lot of searching to do. Hmm.
