To listen to Morgan Freeman tell it, he didn't do it. "I stayed out of the way," he says. "I just watched."
You'd think the 56-year old actor was denying culpability for some horrible deed. But he's talking about "Bopha!" the first movie he directed and a major success any way you look at it.Soon, a lot more people will be talking about "Bopha!"
But offer Freeman a heartfelt congratulations and he replies, "For what? My good looks?"
His movie about a black South African police officer, played by Danny Glover, opened last month.
After the gala world premiere here, executive producer Arsenio Hall said he got involved "because it was one of those scripts that you can't put down, one of those scripts that Whoopi Goldberg read and said, `Write me into it.' (She isn't in it.)
"And this man," Hall continued, gesturing toward Freeman, "made it better than it was. He brought something to it that wasn't on paper."
The story about the making of "Bopha!" is almost as stirring as the story of "Bopha!" And make no mistake: These are universal stories about struggle and spirit, about love and work.
As Freeman said, inimitably, "The world is made up of an awful lot of people. They're all one thing. They're all one organism. We're all hairs on one dog."
"Bopha!" began as a play by Percy Mtwa about a black South African police officer, like Mtwa's own father. Its title is the Zulu word for "arrest." The first grass-roots performances were in the townships of South Africa. But after a European premiere at the National Theatre in London and an American production at the Los Angeles Arts Festival in 1986, producer Larry Taubman was determined to make it a movie.
Taubman had credentials. A lawyer and Stanford alumnus, he'd opened his own theater in London and produced and directed the British premieres of plays by David Rabe and Terrence McNally. He'd started his own American multimedia production company, CineCity Pictures.
But it took Taubman seven years to get "Bopha!" to the screen.
"I went around to the American film market," says Taubman, "and I pitched this maybe 100 times. And I realized all they were really interested in were the action/adventure elements in it."
It didn't help that three earlier anti-apartheid films ("A Dry White Season," "Cry Freedom" and "A World Apart") did lackluster business at the box office. Taubman blames that on "the reluctance to tell the story from the point of view it needed to be told."
Cut to Freeman. "I hadn't been asked to direct before," he says. "This was an interesting story. I didn't have to do anything to get it. Larry Taubman brought it to me.
"I'd been thinking about directing, but it's like thinking about jumping out of an airplane. And then this came along and I said, `Think harder.' "
Freeman said he never saw himself in the movie. "I just kept seeing Danny." That was fortunate, because Freeman quickly found out the studio wouldn't make the movie unless Glover or one other (unnamed) actor played the role. "It's about putting butts in seats," says Freeman.
He also says, "It was suggested that I put in more violence."
He made a point of cutting away from the scenes of torture, allowing the horror to play in the mind's eye of the audience.
Understatement is Freeman's style. And he's got plenty of style, on screen, in person and now, behind the camera.
"I think having control is having kid gloves and a very light grip," he says. "The biggest task for a director is to stay out of the way as much as possible. I knew that because I was an actor. And because I'd worked with some directors who are masters of staying out of the way: Bruce Beresford, Walter Hill, Clint Eastwood."
Making "Unforgiven" with Eastwood was "a childhood dream come true: a kid who grew up riding a broomstick riding real horses with Clint Eastwood and Gene Hackman!"
Was he surprised at its success? "Surprised the hell out of me. I thought we had all the fun we were going to have in making it."
But he also says he's nothing if not capable of learning from what he observes.
"I always found the director's job a mysterious come-on," he says. "I always wanted to know how they were feeling, did they get any sleep last night, did they need any help, can I get you a cup of coffee?
"And then, I finally realized, having directed, there's not a whole lot to it." He ends with a laugh.
But later, when Freeman downplays his contribution in public, he's contradicted.
Says Taubman: "He doesn't tell you he spent three months going through all the scenes knowing everything he was going to do before he got to the set.'
And Alfre Woodard, who plays the police officer's wife, says Freeman is "too wise, creative and intelligent" ever to come across like a first-time director.
No less than Nelson Mandela has pronounced the film a success. Hall reports that the African leader, who saw it on the Paramount lot during a visit to the United States, called it "powerful" and "realistic."
Freeman has been around too long to get too excited about this turn of events, this new career, after almost 50 years in the business.
"I grew up going to movies. And found no representation of myself. I didn't wonder why not. It was a fact of life. Things come in their own time, and when they do, you seize it.
"The entertainment industry does not operate on the necessity of social relevance. It operates on what the buying public buys. They'll sell anything if it sells. People are buying entertainment. They're not buying education. That's free. The government provides that. They're not buying social relevance. That's your job. You want it, you go to the church or wherever you go. We can't lay too much social responsibility on the entertainment industry."
Freeman does acknowledge the audience's need for novelty, for new perspectives. "Nobody is going to continue buying the same old product," he says.
As someone who's been around a long time, whose agenda and style seems quite different from that of the young African Americans in the business, does that worry him?
"What?" he responds. "That you need new products? That's what I am! I'm the newest package of Ajax! Because I haven't directed anything before. I haven't tried to show my storytelling my way."
Nevertheless, he says, "I don't know if I want to direct. I'll always be an actor. That's what I am."