In time for the holiday season, Leon Schuster has made another candid camera movie, testing people’s patience and swindling them in shops, all in the name of raising a laugh.
AT 62 YEARS OLD, Leon Schuster has become the master of the selfie. He is constantly approached by little old ladies who love his work and simply have to get a photo with South Africa’s candid camera king. It’s just they’re not sure how their phone’s camera works.
The polite, obliging man that he is, of course he will help, and since he is usually the tallest one around...
For his latest project, Schuks Your Country Needs You, he has again returned to the candid camera style, despite a yearning to work on more narrative-driven stories..
“If people didn’t nag me like this to do candid camera, I wouldn’t do it any more because let’s face it, to take the knocks that I took and the pressure at my age now, it’s getting a bit risky,” Schuster said in an interview in Cape Town last week.
“I mean, this knee of mine was 30 percent better before this movie, but with all the physicality and running around and running away and being smacked and falling…”
Schuster was nursing his right knee, courtesy of an old rugby injury and exacerbated by working on Schuks Your Country Needs You, so maybe this is the last candid camera film he’ll feature in – even if he continues making films.
His film career goes back to 1986 when he made You Must Be Joking with Johan Scholtz and Elmo de Witt, starting him on the prank road and he’s built up a huge audience that cuts across race, age and gender.
Not only has he added to everyday language with sayings like “gatta pattata” or “there’s a (insert your version here) on my stoep”, but nowadays when a situation gets downright absurd, people wonder where the candid camera is hidden.
While the genre has gone out of style in most parts of the world (barring Canada), South Africans still love the set-up, fright, release sequence of pranking and the humour of Schuster’s films is one thing that people can bond over around the braai.
“For some reason, South Africa is a pranking nation.
“I studied a book, I actually wanted to make a movie of this book because I think it will be a very interesting movie, it was called Die Kommandolewe Tydens Die Anglo-Boere Oorlog (by Fransjohan Pretorius).
“It’s about those guys and what they did to entertain themselves. Half of it was playing pranks on each other, hiding snakes under the blankets and stuff like that. So, it’s part of our heritage to love pranking.”
Schuster notices it when he goes camping with his brother – “the pranks the guys play on each other is never-ending”.
He is also one of the few South Africans to have made multiple millions of rand at the box office, even if they don’t always translate into multimillions in his own pockets.
“Many people think I’m rich, which is not true. No one, except maybe Boet Troskie, in the South African film industry is rich. It’s too small.”
Schuster is also amazed at how far some of the films have travelled, despite a lack of subtitles. “I get to the liquor store and buy myself a bottle of whisky and there’s a new owner now, from America. I walk in there and he says, ‘Oh, you’re the one who makes the mo-o-vies. We lurve your movies’,” he says affecting a fake “American” accent.
“‘How can you love my movies, I say, when you come from America?”
“‘Naaaaa, it’s great, it’s great’,” he drawls the response.
“I couldn’t believe that.”
For the latest one he worked with long-time collaborator Alfred Ntombela, who creates the trouble, and called on Rob van Vuuren to “play” his son and take the knocks.
Van Vuuren will go down in South African film history as the one person who managed to pull one over on the master himself in Schuks Tshabalala’s Survival Guide to South Africa in 2010 when, to Schuster’s horror, he went totally off script in an “interview”.
“There was the seriousness of the interview, the madness of him attacking the guy who broke the kombi’s window with the brick and the third thing was he got comp-letely mad. That’s when I got a fright.”
Van Vuuren and the “vandal” were in on the joke, as was the show’s producer – but not Schuster, who then broke character and explained that he was trying to pull a prank on the comedian.
“And then he started saying things like ‘I’ve just been hijacked and you come and eff with my emotions. You think you’re funny in your fatsuit, you’re an unfunny bastard and I hate you.’
“And I was just going ‘Sorry, Rob, sorry, Rob’ and I started undressing myself because the bloody wetsuit was so warm and I thought I was going to die because my heart was pounding.
“When the producer finally walked up to me and said ‘Leon, you’ve been Schucked’, I couldn’t believe it.
“I was so cross, but I couldn’t show I was cross because I have to tolerate it because I do that to so many people. That was a perfect gag.”
In all the years that Schuster has been pulling pranks on people, there have only been a handful who have refused permission for the filmed sequences to be publically aired.
Most people in more recent years have seen the funny side of being in a Schuster movie and see it as being something to brag about. On the downside it has become harder to find a disguise that people do not immediately see through, which is another reason for drafting in Van Vuuren.