by SARAH ROWLAND

During the late ’70s in Johannesburg, getting robbed by Andre Stander was worth more in future bragging rights than bagging a rock star. Bank tellers would get weak in the knees as they handed over stacks of cash, not because they had a gun pointed in their general direction, but because the man holding them up was South Africa’s notorious leader of the Stander Gang.

It all started when the youngest police captain in the city’s history wanted to test his theory that the legal system was so busy oppressing black people that white criminals could get away with murder. Well, the lady-killer with Starsky and Hutch good looks never did kill anyone, but he did rob a couple dozen banks when he was a cop before his best friend turned him in. Then, after he escaped prison with two other inmates, he robbed another 20 or so. In the process, he became a folk hero to Afrikaners.

Remarkably, this true story has never been given a cinematic treatment in his native land, partly because South Africa’s undeveloped film industry isn’t big enough to handle a narrative this epic.

Canadian connection

In the end, though, it took someone from a country with a film industry almost as anaemic to get the movie made. Canadian filmmaker Bronwen Hughes only had an indie-budget to work with, but she packed up her star Thomas Jane (The Punisher) and headed to Johannesburg to start filming the rock ’n’ roll, ’70s-cop-show-style Stander. It was an endeavour that wasn’t immediately appreciated by the locals.

“We were totally under the microscope while we were there,” says Hughes from Toronto. “People were saying, ‘These American actors will never get the accent right. They’re going to bulldoze their American culture into our movie.’ And Thomas was the only American, but as far as they were concerned we were all damn Yankees.” Her critics were partially right. Shortly after she landed in Johannesburg and talked to people who were closest to Stander, including the only living member of the Stander Gang, Allan Heyl, she scrapped her original script.

“I realized so much of it was an Americanized idea of what a bank robber is,” she says. “I had them talking in a clichéd sub-dialogue like ‘You motherfucker this’ and ‘You you motherfucker that,’ and when they would go into the banks they would spray bullets and scream, ‘Everyone, get down on the floor!’” In reality Stander’s posse would coolly walk in and cruise past security virtually unnoticed by anyone, save for the star-struck teller.

Toyi-Toyi!

Once she rewrote her script, she set out to execute the most challenging part of the production: the depiction of an uprising where a young Stander, working on the riot squad, shoots an unarmed protester. The incident ultimately turned the ambitious career cop from police work to a life of crime. However, all her painstaking attention to detail ended up being slightly derailed. As hundreds of extras shout the freedom chant “Toyi-Toyi,” throngs of locals spilled out from the surrounding Townships into the scene. “They were the most emotional shoot days for me,” she recalls. “Plus there was the added responsibility of going into a place as an outsider and looking into the eyes of the people who lived it and saying, ‘Okay, this is how it’s going to be,’ and they’re like, ‘Naha, that’s not how it was for me.’” The result of the added and unexpected input resulted in the most powerful scene in the film.

As far as her development of the lead character—which will likely be Jane’s breakthrough role—Hughes presents a noncommittal image of Stander, almost to a fault. His motives are never fully explored and hence, the viewer isn’t asked to invest an opinion in the man behind the legend. But she wouldn’t have done it any other way. “Well, he ain’t no saint or Robin Hood, which everyone likes to think he was, and I am not about advocating bank robbery as an appropriate reaction to the system,” she says. “But at the same time I can’t make a movie about a character that I hate and just paint a despicable portrait from the first frame to the last. If I had felt nothing for his plight then there would not have been a movie there for me. The whole thing was a balancing act.”

Stander opens Friday, Dec. 3

>> Movie Listings