(Top) Mandela: Larger than life; Bachchan: On-screen tribute

You can’t possibly leave India out of any bid to bring Nelson Mandela to the big screen.

After the South African icon became President, there was a flurry of documentaries on him. But when the film rights of his biography were sold, it was Indian director Shekhar Kapoor who was chosen to get behind the camera.

Now, years after Long Walk to Freedom was announced, another feature film is set to take off with financial — more than creative — muscle from India.

The Mandela Project will focus on a plot to assassinate the African National Congress leader on the steps of the City Hall in Cape Town just as he was about to address the world on February 11, 1990, the day he was released from prison.

Johannesberg-based writer-director Bryan Deuchar, a former director of photography at South African Broadcasting Corporation, was recently in India to finalise a co-production deal with financiers here.

“My film will be a faction — fiction based on facts — as detailed in the unpublished manuscript of J.J. Johnson, Mandela’s security officer who was on duty on the fateful day,” says Deuchar, during his stay in Calcutta last week.

The film, to be shot entirely on location in South Africa, has been budgeted at US $8 million, minus the international cast. And it is Calcutta-based Overseas Consultants which has pledged $4 million. “We are talking to financiers in Mumbai and the money should soon reach the London-based solicitor who is holding the film’s assets,” says co-producer Ashish Pandit.

The Indian connection does not end there. “I plan to cast an Indian actor in one of the two lead roles. Since it is a Portuguese businessman, physical resemblance should not be a problem,” says Deuchar.

And the name figuring first on his wish list is Amitabh Bachchan, whom he spotted on the streetside posters of Aetbaar as “the right face”. The script is being sent to him. But if the Big B declines, the second choice is Bollywood baddie Sadashiv Amrapurkar.

South Africa and Mandela are known to be an abiding inspiration and interest for Bachchan who had earlier publicly announced his willingness to play “any role” in Shekhar Kapoor’s film on “the great man”, even if it lasted “for a few seconds only”.

With Kapoor busy with another big-budget bilingual film, Paani, the Mandela film has failed to take off, six years after it was announced at the Cannes Film Festival. Time will tell if Deuchar’s film gets off the block and whether Bachchan does agree to slip into the shoes of Snow Wolf, an international assassin.

But the plot sure has all the ingredients of an action-packed 110 minutes. As Mandela walks up the City Hall steps, inching closer to him is Zulu sergeant Patrick Khumalo, instructed to take him out, while on the ninth floor of a highrise on the opposite pavement is Snow Wolf, training his gun on Mandela’s temple. Another pair of killers, meanwhile, is ready to finish off the assassins.

“It is a thrilling story with two anti-climaxes at the end, which convinced me about its potential for the screen. Of course, Mandela does not die as he was pushed back at the right moment.” Deuchar plans to give it a JFK feel, with existing TV news footage being intercut with the 35 mm film, diffusing the line between actuality and creativity.