Martin Cuff Consulting

I liked Chronicle. Set in Seattle but filmed in Cape Town, it tells the low-key tale of three high school kids who are exposed to something alien that gives them super-human powers. The difference here is that not all of the three are particularly well-balanced human beings and they therefore deal with their ‘gifts” in [...]

Action-thriller Safe House was originally set in Brazil. Famously, the producers were so impressed by the stand-in capability of Cape Town that the entire movie was relocated to South Africa, with the Mother City playing her gorgeous, beautiful self. Plot-wise, it stars teary-eyed Ryan Reynolds as a CIA operative stuck in a dead end job [...]

Consider me impressed. Safe House, the Lip-Licky-Denzel / Ryan Reynolds movie that screwed up traffic on Cape Town’s Western Boulevard over several weekends earlier this year looks like it was totally worth the disruption. Allegedly the producers had such a great experience filming in the Mother City, that they re-wrote the script allowing Cape Town [...]

Still on a SethEffriken theme (will this joy know no abatement?) the new Judge Dredd film – with the understated if unimaginative working title Dredd – is currently shooting in Cape Town, starring the groovy Karl Urban (who so impressed in Red). Dredd is Africa’s first 3-D movie production and the first to use the [...]

In The Last House on the Left, a group of typical Hollywood villains stumble into the isolated lakeside property of a group of typical Hollywood good guys. What follows next is arguably an astute treatise on the universal immorality of violence, reinforcing a message that violence, even when wielded for the purposes of good, still [...]

A couple of years ago, in the middle of the night, we were woken by the sounds of shouting in the streets outside our loft. Sounded unnervingly like a riot – which would be unusual but not entirely unheard of in South Africa, after all. It turned out to be a movie production, featuring people [...]

A completely arbitrary on-location posting: Snow Patrol in my home town. [youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OwczjuRsW8;=1 500 500] I wonder if they got permits??

As a Film Commissioner, I only ever went on set about three times (always too busy, and besides, you’re kind of in the way……) and when I did it was usually part of the whole dog-and-pony show, trying to impress upon legislators just how many jobs were being created by the production. One of those set visits [...]

My second Made in Cape Town movie of the weekend was Rendition, the first Hollywood production of South African director Gavin Hood, who won a Best Foreign Language Oscar for Tsotsi. Cinematography was by another high flying South African, Dion Beebe. “Rendition” refers to the ability of the CIA to detain anyone suspected of terrorist dealings, [...]

Cape Town has had a decade-long reputation as a thriving film hub with a “can do” attitude. However, this season, the sector has been hit by a number of locations management issues that industry insiders are calling a “crisis”. Following an Industry Locations meeting called on 6th December 2007, the Cape Film Commission has responded swiftly and positively: [...]