By Tonisha Johnson

With the film set in the early 1980s Apartheid, Catch a Fire tells the heroic story of Patrick Chamusso’ charge to freedom.

Academy Award Winner Tim Robbins is no stranger to extreme dramatic roles. Even in brief moments of terror such as ‘War of the Worlds’ Robbins creates an impressive and believable character. In Catch a Fire, Tim plays Nic Vos, a colonel in the country’s police security branch. Vos’ job is to secure peace with in the turbulent times of Apartheid. The violence that has now plagued this once beautiful country has spilled over into seats of authority; as personal vendettas reveal themselves with Vos and his frustration turns to a higher power that includes torture and mind games.

How did you go about preparing for this role?

Tim Robbins: I did a little research on the history. But it wasn’t until I was there and I could surround myself to get it. I never really got the whole picture [Apartheid] until I was in South Africa. Including both sides of how specific the laws were and how oppressive it was. I didn’t realize you couldn’t be in the city of Johannesburg after 8pm if you were black. I didn’t realize the laws that they have regarding education… and at the same time I didn’t realize to an extent was the defecation in their brains… I didn’t have a clue on that. My job in this movie was to find humanity in this man.

Talk about how you did that and how you discovered defecation because that was something you really had to find.

Tim Robbins: Yeah. My advisor on the film was one of these guys. He tortured people. He’s mentioned in a couple of books I had been reading. One of the bad guys. And that was difficult. I had to put my own views aside and I had to put my own personal beliefs aside and not judge. I had to find out had this man had love and compassion in his heart for his family and his country. And how, from his point of view, he thought he was doing his duty and serving his country and trying to keep it away from communism and anarchy that had already by example, had been shown in other countries in the North of Africa where they had been taken over.

It seems like it is different in Africa from the states but when you look at the racism and Jim Crowism, you see the parallels. But what was the difference?

Tim Robbins: I saw the parallels to when I was growing up in the 1960s. Being a kid in New York City the supposedly progressive north. I was exposed to racism early on. I went to catholic school were nuns saying derogatory things about the one black kid in the class. The size of his ears and that he couldn’t learn because his ears were small. I had a German friend who had pictures of Hitler and Nazi flags on his wall in his apartment. Second, third generation Italian Irish immigrants sons using the word ‘nigger’ liberally.

But your parents were so progressive?

Tim Robbins: And this is Greenwich Village too. It’s a cross … a mixture of the most progressive iconoclastic people in the world; people behind the civil rights movement, peace movement, gay movements; all cohabitating with this racism.

What preconceptions did you have when going into this film and what has changed? We saw a movie that was very uplifting but we know that it doesn’t change overnight or over a decade.

Tim Robbins: Imagine the Civil Rights Movement… Imagine coming out of that darkness and electing Martin Luther King Jr. as President. I had some catching up to do with South Africa. One of the tapes I watched was ‘Truth and Reconciliation’. Bishop Tutu had proposed this as an idea; moving forward. And there is footage of a guy who’s tortured asking the police to describe to the assembled audience, exactly how he tortured him. And he would start talking and they said ‘no. I want you to physically show everyone what you did’… right, so, he’s taking him through this thing and by the end of it, their both in tears and there’ this hint of intensity in the room. If not forgiveness, its reconciliation. The idea that their able to move past that hatred. To not seek revenge. That is so unique. In the history of war to the end of it and to say, to have a leader that says were not going to settle the score, we’re going to forgive and move on. We’re not going to make the whites give up their land, give up their farms. They have as much right to be here as we do. They’ve been settling here for hundreds of years. That was from Mandela and from Tutu. And that allowed the country to move forward. It allowed the country to move forward.