The actors give the nod to Mark Middlewick’s movie The Mascot, a winner in the Jameson First Shot film festival that premiered in LA over the weekend, writes Stefanie Jason.
“I was born to play the role, I was always that guy,” says award-winning actor Adrien Brody half-jokingly about being the lead in South African director Mark Middlewick’s short film, The Mascot.
Watch of Mark talking about the Mascot
Sitting next to the up-and-coming director at the London West Hollywood Hotel last Saturday, the two share laughs and thoughts as if they were old friends, instead of two professionals who spent just two days together in June making a short movie.
Selected as one of three winners of this year’s Jameson First Shot film festival, The Mascot is about a man (played by Brody) who loses his long-standing job as a mascot for a basketball team.
Asked how he prepared for the role, Brody says: “There are a lot of parallels with the role [of the mascot] and the life of an actor, and the aspect of rejection that exists. So the circumstances and the characters’ reactions to those things may be extreme, but within that it illustrates the indifference of life and how harsh it can be, and how we must move on after loss.”
Vision to excel
The Mascot, which premiered at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles last Saturday night, contains a stark and simple aesthetic, while it’s less than 10-minute plot journeys through raging emotions of passion, loss and anger.
Middlewick, a graduate of the University of the Witwatersrand, was a nominee for Best Short Film at the South African Film and Television 2015 awards for Security, and the music video he made for local musician Nakhane Touré landed him a Best Object of South Africa award at last year’s Design Indaba in Cape Town.
Spacey adds: “As a team, including Adrien, we look at where they [the directors] will be in 10 years, so we’re looking at someone’s potential and not just where they are right now.”
See full report by Stefanie Jason in the Mail & Guardian
