![]() ![]() This meant constantly blocking people from coming through,” says Sheppard. ![]() “One problem we had was the multiple access points to the street. They did such a convincing job that a South African woman living in Adelaide felt like she’d been transported home. This included putting in coin operated parking meters, old cars with South African number plates, changing the street signs and shop fronts. “We took possession of the main street in Adelaide at 6pm the night before our shoot date, and set about transforming it into Cape Town,” Jackie Sheppard, Blaney’s partner at Footprint Films, tells KFTV. With the invaluable support of Arclight, they got to work. “On our recce there in November 2018, our production designer Scott Bird showed us a picture of Cape Town in the 1970s, it looked exactly like Adelaide now,” enthuses Blaney. Its old colonial architecture was perfect. So they moved to Adelaide instead, which had actually doubled for South Africa before. “Having a first time feature director put pressure on what financiers would stretch to and eventually, although there was a huge amount of enthusiasm there, we just couldn’t get the budget together to make Escape viable to the production value that we thought it deserved,” says Blaney. ![]() Unfortunately, despite securing approval for the local rebate and looking at the builds, they faced difficulties getting all the funding together for the whole project in South Africa. So excited were they by the place that they thought it was worth investing a bit of the development money into having drawings done for the existing backlot set adapted into Pretoria prison.Ĭape Town Film Studios' Robben Island set. They were assured by the guys at the studio that they could do anything they wanted with the set. “I’ve done a film there before using one side of the façade, turning it into a diner (and its been used by other films), but the main quadrangle of the prison and the cells remain the same.”ĭespite initial scepticism as to whether it could look like Pretoria, Blaney and director Francis completely fell in love with the place on the spot. “It’s an incredible site,” Auret adds to KFTV. “Our location manager in South Africa, Michael Auret, insisted we should also look at the backlot of Cape Town Studios where they had a set of Robben Island prison, which was used for the film Long Walk to Freedom.” We also met potential financiers, cast and crew,” Blaney explains to KFTV. “We originally intended to film Escape from Pretoria in South Africa, and went out in 2017 to look at locations, including paying a visit to the (still functioning) Pretoria prison itself. Once they’d secured the rights, Annan took on the directing reins and co-wrote the adapted script with L.H. Mark sent Annan, an unknown British director, Jenkin’s book back in 2012 (even though they didn’t have the rights at the time) and he loved it. That is until 2003 when Mark Blaney of UK outfit Footprint Films met with Tim over dinner and knew after talking to him that they had to make the film.īlaney and his partner at Footprint Films, Jackie Sheppard, joined forces with Harry Potter producer David Barron at Beagle Pug Films and Gary Hamilton and Michelle Krumm at Arclight Films, based in Australia and the US, who are the movie’s sales agent. Other producers had shown interest in adapting Jenkin’s book Inside Out: Escape from Pretoria prison, which was published in the late 1980s, but no project came to anything. The film tells the true-life story of political prisoners Tim Jenkin (Radcliffe) and Stephen Lee (Daniel Webber), two white South Africans who, along with other prisoners, hatched a plot to break out of Pretoria Central Prison in 1979 using handcrafted wooden keys, after being convicted of campaigning with the African National Congress (ANC). British director Francis Annan’s forthcoming film, Escape from Pretoria, set in the notorious South African prison during Apartheid, filmed entirely in the South Australian city of Adelaide. ![]()
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