The Sean Connery movie the director wanted to delete from history: “God, that was horrible”
It only took director Bruce Beresford two days to realise the literary adaptation he had been passionate about bringing to the big screen was destined to be a disaster. The Australian helmer’s cast and crew, including the legendary Sean Connery, were on location in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Beresford began to get a sinking feeling on the shoot’s second day that the film wasn’t going to work, from both a narrative perspective and a logistical one.
For Beresford, the man behind Driving Miss Daisy, it all started with such promise and excitement. He had been a fan of William Boyd’s 1981 novel A Good Man in Africa for years and felt it was a prime candidate for making the jump to the silver screen. The book was a comedy about a feckless, hard-drinking British diplomat stuck in the fictional West African country of Kinjanja, and Beresford always felt the humour was the perfect vessel to interrogate colonialism like never before on-screen.
“I just thought it was a terribly funny book,” Beresford told the Los Angeles Times in 1993. “And I thought it was about time someone made a movie about post-colonial Africa. That is something that hasn’t been dealt with in a major film.”
Beresford assembled a cast including Connery as a morally upright Scottish doctor, John Lithgow as a racist British ambassador, Louis Gossett Jr as a corrupt African foreign minister, and Joanne Whalley-Kilmer (then still married to Val) as Gossett Jr’s unhappy British wife. These names enabled Beresford to cast a fairly unknown Aussie actor called Colin Friels in the lead, and A Good Man in Africa was off to the races.
It didn’t take long for the wheels to come off, though. Beresford’s day two crisis of confidence was brought about when he “realised that although the novel that it’s based on is terribly funny, it was very anecdotal. It had no narrative”. He became convinced that it would never work as a motion picture because the disparate scenes didn’t link seamlessly, and a terrifying thought settled in his head: “I’m sunk! I’m never gonna get out.”
To make matters worse, while Beresford struggled with wrangling A Good Man in Africa into something resembling a coherent story, shooting in South Africa proved incredibly stressful. At that time, the country was still suffering under Apartheid, which meant the political and economic climate was frighteningly uncertain, and it affected the production in unexpected ways.
For instance, national political protests shut the movie down for two days at one point, which caused a divide among the film’s South African crew. The Black members wanted to join the strike, while the White ones preferred to keep working. In the end, the producers had to pay the production’s insurance company $120,000 for this lost time, which was yet another financial strain on a production that was already forced to purchase its Kodak film at an exorbitant fee through an intermediary because South Africa was still facing economic sanctions.
Worst of all, though, was when Beresford had to keep shooting while ten days of nationwide riots and protests erupted following the assassination of a Black political leader at the hands of a White man, and the frightening incident when three Black thieves were killed at a grocery store right next to the Sandton Sun hotel, where most of the crew was holed up.
At the time, Beresford admitted, “It’s all been a bit of a worry. It might’ve been better, with all the tension here, to have shot the film elsewhere.” However, over the next 20 years, the director must have lost any desire to be diplomatic about his experience on A Good Man in Africa. In 2015, he told Vulture, “God, that was horrible. That was the worst film experience I ever had. It was cast wrong; the crew was all strange.”
Amazingly, Beresford also confessed that the entire production was a farce from the beginning, because they shouldn’t have even been shooting in South Africa. The country was a political and social powder keg, yes, but the book was also set in West Africa, which looks startlingly different in terms of its terrain and geography. “We were filming in the wrong place,” he lamented. “We filmed in South Africa, it was set in West Africa, which is like shooting in Alaska when it’s set in New Orleans.”
