Why Invictus? Why now?
I'm not an objective party. But the world needs this kind of story nowadays. It's just&everybody's so screwed up. Nobody knows where they're heading. It seems like our country's in kind of a morbid mood, because of the recession or whatever. I think our politicians could learn a lot from Mandela.
What do you think they could learn?
About racial relationships and such. It just seems like we're making a lot of mistakes on this whole calling everybody racist. Everybody's calling everybody morons and nuts. We're becoming more juvenile as a nation. The guys who won World War II and that whole generation have disappeared, and now we have a bunch of teenage twits. People 50 years old acting like that. In Gran Torino, I play a guy who's racially offensive. But he learned. It shows that you're never too old to learn and embrace people that you don't understand to begin with. It seems like nobody else got that message, I guess.
Invictus is set in South Africa in 1995, but I think it's impossible not to see it as a metaphor for America in 2009. For instance, there's a scene where some white guys are protesting against Mandela at a rugby game. They may as well be yelling, "We want our country back!"
Mandela was so different from where we are. I mean, Mandela invites his jailer to his inauguration. But Mandela, he's in prison twenty-seven years, he had a lot of time to think. He philosophized. He came out almost as this perception, or taught perception, of what Christ would be like if he existed: a guy who would forgive.
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