A documentary film about the South African neo-Nazi leader Eugene Terreblanche, and Nick Broomfield's attempts to get an interview with him.
Nick Broomfield
Nick Broomfield/Rita Oord
John Mister
Barry Ackroyd
Nick Broomfield
South Africa
COMMENTWhen Nick Broomfield attempts to interview Eugene Terreblanche, the leader of the far-right AWB, he passes the time with Terreblanche's driver and the driver's wife.
The film exposes Terreblanche and his henchmen as thuggish racists.
Seen as one of Nick Broomfield's best films, The Leader is one of his first using the documentary style where the story is as much about his quest to get close to the subject as it is about the subject itself.
Nick Broomfield admits that he carefully engineered some situations during filming. For example, when an interview with Terreblanche is finally granted, Broomfield deliberately arrives late and explains his tardiness by saying he'd stopped for tea. "I wanted to do something that would reveal his temper and his bullying and the fact that he was just a thug. And so I set an elephant trap. Elephant traps are such fun because the are all to do with your knowledge of people, which becomes so intimate that you know exactly how they are going to react when you do something; so you find the simplest thing to trigger that reaction." It's fair to say that Terreblanche never recovered from this film.
Nick is currently shooting a follow-up.
