Financing a Film That Has an All-South African Cast Was a Huge Challenge, Says Director of ‘Five Fingers for Marseilles’

The South African movie Five Fingers for Marseilleswill hit cinemas in April. Five Fingers is a Wild West-style flick that stars an all-South African cast.

According to the movie's director, Michael Matthews, the movie was a huge challenge to make. It was eight years in the making, and finance was the biggest challenge.

Matthews told channel 24:

"But trying to find the finance for a movie that's got very little English in it, an all local cast, and that we wanted to do it on a budget where the production values would really stand out and appeal to the world as well as South Africa and with it hopefully take a new step in South African cinema, that was the hard part."

But the director feels the challenge was worth it, and him and his crew could have reached for the lowest hanging fruit of getting Hollywood stars to give the movie more clout.

"There were many times when we could have made the movie if we had made it mostly in English or if we put a couple of American stars with South African accents in and that sort of stuff. We just always knew that would just make, not only a weird film, but also not the film we were trying to make and sort of take away all the integrity of what's cool about it in the first place."

Five Fingers for Marseilles will hit South African cinemas on the 6^th of April.