What made you undertake this movie project?
Our company, Global Creative, exists to tell stories that inspire. We want to inspire people to become better. Our primary passion is community transformation, it is to help communities and societies become better. And I have realized that telling stories is a very powerful way to do that.
So in 2002, I started my own company to make movies. Hansie died in 2002, but before that, I used to tell him we needed to make a documentary of his life, because there is so much to learn. And that is the primary purpose of this movie, so that people can learn from his life, from the good things, and from the mistakes he made.
You've spent what, two years researching the project, putting it all together - that is two years spent exploring a life you thought you knew and then learnt you didn't. So what have you learnt about your brother, what has the work on the documentary taught you about him?
A lot. It has been three years since we started the project, actually. We first did a biography that we released two years ago. We interviewed over 50 people for the biography, and for the movie we interviewed even more people.
We realized that Hansie had an ability to make different people feel good. Almost everybody we interviewed felt that Hansie was their best friend, yet no one really knew him that well. He had the ability to be close to people and yet keep some kind of distance, he could also relate to kings and servants, to rich and poor and black and white and that I think is why he became a role model in South Africa, and also why it became so controversial when he admitted to being involved in match fixing.
No, there were no major surprises, but there were some really amazing, touching incidents that we encountered that we didn't know about.
Image: Frans Cronje with his actors on the sets of the movie Hansie -- A True Story in Mumbai
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