PROJECT HISTORY by Anthony Fabian 

How it all began
I  first heard  the story of Sandra Laing  in July 2000 on BBC's Radio 4. British  journalist Peter White  had  gone  to  South  Africa  to  interview  Sandra  and  her  testimony  left me stunned. For days afterwards, I had a lump in my throat when I thought about her story and  realised  it had  the potential  to  touch people around  the world as a  feature  film.  I also  felt  a  tremendous  sense  of  outrage  that,  after  all  she  had  been  through,  Sandra was still living in abject poverty, while her white family had prospered. I felt compelled to make some kind of reparation, and thought a film might help provide her with long-term financial security. 

Development
The first step was to secure Sandra's life rights. With the help of a couple of journalists in South Africa - Karien van der Merwe and Karen Le Roux - I managed to get Sandra's neighbour's  telephone number  in Tsakane  township, East Rand (Sandra herself did not have a phone). I explained what I hoped to do, and asked whether she would consider assigning  her  life-rights  to  me.  She  would  be  paid  option  fees,  and  eventually  a reasonable  sum  of money  if  the  film were made.  She  agreed  to meet me.  Six weeks after  I  had  heard  her  interview  on  the  radio,  I  was  on  a  plane  to  South  Africa  -  a country  I  had  never  visited  before.  My  trip  was  brief  and  the  goal  simple:  to  gain Sandra's  trust  and  hope  that  she might  allow me  to  dramatise  her  story  for  the  big screen.  I met her  family - her husband, her  five children - and her mother, Sannie - who was still alive  then (I  took Sandra  to see her,  in a nursing home outside Pretoria; she hadn't been for several months because she couldn't afford the transport). When I boarded  the  plane  back  to  London,  armed  with  the  rights  to  bring  her  story  to  the widest possible public,  I knew  this was  the start of a very exciting adventure.   What  I could  never  have  imagined was  how  long  it would  take  to  develop  the  script  -  how many writers and stages we would have to go through to get it right - such a complex story, spanning so many years and begging so many questions. 
Around this time, I also conceived the notion of selling the publication rights to Sandra's story: people kept asking me,  "Is  there a book?" and  I  realised  there probably  should be.  I  was  very  lucky  to  have  got  the  book  commissioned  from  the  first  publisher  I approached: Talk Miramax Books. Miramax Films had  just  set up an  imprint  for books they thought might make interesting films, so it seemed a natural port of call. The writer of  the  book,  Judith  Stone  -  an  American  journalist  based  in  New  York,  contributing editor to Oprah Magazine - was chosen to give an 'outsider's perspective' on the story - which was primarily intended for an American readership, unfamiliar with South African history.
The job of the book and the film is very different - one being factual, the other dramatic - and Judith Stone proved a very determined, hard working biographer, whose book,  'When She Was White' was  finally published  in April 2007,  to excellent  reviews.
The other happy outcome of the book's publication is that the contract I negotiated gave Sandra a generous advance and enabled her to buy her  first home,  in a peaceful suburb  of  Johannesburg.  I  also  encouraged  her  to  start  her  own  business  -  a  spaza shop in her converted garage - something sustainable. (Running a shop is in her blood, as her parents were shopkeepers.) So part of the dream was coming true: Sandra was better off, much happier and more confident in herself. 
Meanwhile  work  began  on  the  screenplay  which  was  developed  over  several  drafts written  consecutively by   Helena Kriel,  Jessie Keyt, Helen Crawley and myself.    In  the meantime,  I  had  been  joined  by  Margaret  Matheson  of  Bard  Entertainments  and Genevieve Hofmeyr of Moonlighting Films in South Africa as co-producers. 
Although  by  then  I  had  been  to  South  Africa  several  times,  had  shot  a  one-hour documentary  in Stellenbosch about  the Spier Music Festival  (Township Opera) - which told  the story of  the company  that eventually made  the Golden Bear  - winning  feature film, U-Carmen -  I  still  felt  the need  to have  substantial  input  from South Africans,  in order to do the story justice. So Margaret and I persuaded the UK Film Council to fund a three  week  period  of  casting  and  script  development  workshops  -  using  actors  to improvise  scenes  based  on  a  draft  of  the  script  I'd  prepared  before  heading  off  to Johannesburg  -  so  that  we  could  test  every  scene  and  create  new  material. 
Moonlighting  Films  arranged  the  entire  workshop  process  on  the  ground,  with  their usual, steadfast efficiency. We auditioned over ninety actors, chose fifteen, and it was a tremendously exciting and creative process - as well as wonderful  to  see  the material finally coming alive. The workshops were very emotional and very cathartic - confirming the power of the story and emerging script.   

Packaging
Casting director Susie  Figgis has  a  strong  relationship with South Africa  (her husband was  born  and  brought  up  there  )  and  she  agreed  to  help  us  cast  the  stars,  and eventually led us to Sophie Okonedo, who committed to playing the adult Sandra in July 2005. Sophie had just been nominated for an Oscar for Hotel Rwanda and it was quite a coup to have her attached to Skin.   Not long afterwards, I met with Alice Krige - born in Uppington  of Afrikaner  parents  and  brought  up  in  Port  Elizabeth, who  had made  a career for herself in Hollywood. From the moment I met Alice, I felt I had come home: she fully embodied the role and I knew there was no need to look further. 
In September 2006,  the UK Film Council agreed  to  fund a  'Pilot' -  three  short  scenes from  the  film  - which we  could  then  use  as  a  promotional  tool  to  attract  financiers, distributors  and  a  sales  agent.  Preproduction  lasted  three  weeks  and  production  two days - and Moonlighting pulled out all  the stops  to ensure we had maximum bang  for our minimal bucks. The Pilot, which was post-produced in the UK, proved a very useful tool in attracting more stars and finance to the project. 
In  November  2006,  Margaret  Matheson  approached  the  LA-based  international  sales agent Robbie  Little, who  had  very  successfully  sold  the Oscar-winning  film  'Tsotsi',  to sell  SKIN.  Robbie  took  the  project  to  the  Berlin  Film  Festival  and  achieved  an encouraging  number  of  presales,  including  a  cornerstone  sale  to  France's  UGC  PH (Philippe Hellmann). All this arose from the strength of the script and Sophie Okonedo's commitment to the project. The other stars - including Sam Neill - had not yet come on board.  The  presales  subsequently  gave  confidence  to  investors  such  as  the  IDC  and Aramid, who eventually financed the film. 

Production
We started production  in September 2007 with  the usual  indie movie  fears of  too  little time, not enough money. 
Our aim was to create a moving human drama that would also have an epic quality, as SKIN - the story spans the turbulent final thirty years of apartheid. 
The  first  task was  to  find a  location  that could serve as a unit base  for  the majority of the shoot. We had over fifty locations to cover in just forty-two days - so keeping those sets within a relatively contained area was critical if we were to have a fighting chance of shooting to schedule. 
Things began well: I was taken to Remhoogte - the Laing Compound, as we renamed it - by the production designer, Billy Keam, on the first day of location scouting. Northeast of Johannesburg, about fifteen minutes from the Hartebeespoort Dam, which serves as a weekend retreat for townies, we travelled down a long, rutted road, leaving clouds of red dust in our wake. We reached the crest of a hill, at the bottom of which sat a grove of pine and eucalyptus trees surrounding a complex of single-storey buildings. The hairs went up  on  the back  of my neck:  it  looked  exactly  like  the  original  Laing  farm,  three hundred kilometres away  in Mpumalanga (then known as  the Eastern Transvaal) - but this location was infinitely more practical, as our crew and equipment would be coming from the big city.   
What I didn't know was that this area (where we ended up basing ourselves for the first five weeks of the shoot) has a freakish micro-climate that attracts the greatest number of  electrical  storms  in  the world.  (The  amount  of metal  in  the  earth  is  a  contributing factor; a few of us were staying near a platinum mine, and our roads were paved with ore.) Thankfully, the first week of production we were spared the lightning and the rain.
Then  summer  decided  to make  an  early  visit. The  heavens  opened  and  it  seemed  as though they would never stop. The Laing Compound became mired in mud, many cars got  stuck,  and  the  cast  and  crew  had  to  be  rescued  by  the  Unit  Manager  (the redoubtable  Beatle  van  Graan)  in  his  four-by-four  -  and  I  was  beginning  to  fear  we would never have enough dry hours  to shoot our exteriors. (The  film consists of equal numbers of  interior and exterior sets.) You can make a  lot of contingency plans when making a movie - but once you have shot all your interiors, there is nothing you can do but pray to the god of thunder to give you a break. 
It wasn't all bad. Often,  the weather would hold until  just after our  last  shot - or not come until  the end of  the day. At  the end of our second week,  there was an electrical storm so violent, with so many flashes of lightning practically licking our vehicles as we drove  through  in  convoy,  that  I  became  convinced  I'd  be  struck  before  reaching  the hotel. For most of this  journey, I racked my brain, trying to assign my successor - not that I would have been able to communicate my choice, had I fried to death in the car. (I was later told that one of the safest places to be in an electrical storm is a car. True or false, it was reassuring). 
On another occasion, as we were attempting to finish a scene in a township, a dust and windstorm the like of which I've never seen began to kick up. The crew began to wrap, but our second cameraman, George Loxton, saw the sun setting magnificently over the mountains and couldn't bear to let it disappear unrecorded: he put the camera high on the sticks, wrapped himself in a plastic sheet and, held down by his assistant, captured the massive lightning bolt that forked across the blood-red sky - a stunning bonus shot that made it into the film, before Sandra packs her belongings to leave Petrus. 
Another  massive  challenge  for  the  production  was  the  sheer  number  of  people  on SKIN -screen: seventy-seven speaking parts, babies of various ages (and colours), including a newborn, only twelve days old, and the hundreds - on one occasion nearly a thousand - extras  we  had  to  call  on  an  ad  hoc  basis.  Somehow,  the  production  and  assistant director team managed to bring, costume (and feed) all these people - including some of  the  finest actors South Africa has  to offer -  to  the set every day, so  that we  rarely had to recast a role. 
The most daunting scene for me, as a first-time feature director, was the forced removal scene, which  involved  hundreds  of  extras,  animals  (goats,  dogs  and  chickens)  period bulldozers, general mayhem and destruction, and a collapsible set…. But the skill of the cameraman,  Dewald  Aukema  - who  suggested we  use  as much  special  fx  smoke  as possible, to add to the confusion - and the efficiency of the highly experienced First AD, Mary  Soan,  who  marshalled  the  extras  -  made  it  possible  for  us  to  film  the  entire sequence  in  just  a  day  and  a  half.  (It was  scheduled  for  one  day,  but  naturally  the heavens opened in the middle of the afternoon, and we had to complete the scene the following day).  It now feels like something of a miracle that, despite all the challenges posed by the number of locations, the large cast and the crazy weather, we managed to  finish the film pretty much on time and on budget - and survived to tell the tale.   

Anthony Fabian,  July 2008

COMPOSER'S STATEMENT
Director Anthony Fabian and  I have  collaborated on a  range of projects over  the past ten years, from short films to documentaries. When he invited me to write the score of SKIN, we talked about creating a soundworld that would reflect the nature and emotion of  the  story  and  give  a  clear  sense  of  time  and  place.  Using  Western  and  African instruments  (and  devising  a musical  language  that  embraced  both  traditions)  allowed me to explore a variety of styles and come up with a unique, 'world music' hybrid. 
It is a luxury to work with a director who creates so many opportunities for music to be featured and for the key themes to evolve through the movie. These themes or motifs - usually  relating  to  certain  characters  or  inter-relationships,  such  as  the  Sannie/Sandra theme - reappear  in various arrangements and are orchestrated  in a variety of ways - sometimes with strings (cello and violin) other times with clarinet or piano - alongside a range  of  African  instruments,  such  as  the  birambau  (a  single-string,  percussive instrument), kalimba (thumb piano) and talking drum.
When it came to recording some of the instruments, I thought it would be interesting to challenge some of  the stereotypical associations people have about musicians and skin colour. So,  for example, we used a black string section  (BUSKAID - a string orchestra based  in  Soweto,  consisting  of  mainly  young  student  musicians)  and  white percussionists (experienced players based in LA - Richard Nash and Steve Barnes). I met Sabina Sandoval,  from Colombia, at Motherland,  the African music store  in Culver City, Los Angeles. We hired one of every African instrument in the music shop; Sabina turned up at my studio in a VW camper van packed full of drums and we were off! 
One of my favourite sessions involved recording the "talking drums". These drums have to  be  squeezed  under  your  arm  so  that  the  skin  can  be  tightened  or  relaxed, which alters its pitch - and were used in the scene where Sandra sneaks out of the window to join Petrus  in his  township  for  the  first  time. We all had a go and soon  realised  it was very hard work on the squeezing arm! So we divided into teams - Steve and Sabina on one and Richard and I on the other, and started to have a "conversation" between these two  talking drums. The conversation often got quite heated between  the  teams, but  it usually took just one solitary and perfectly-timed hit from Richard for us to dissolve into hysterics. We had only just met Sabina but the amazing thing about music is how easy it is to communicate and play with complete strangers because the language is universal.
Another  inspirational  collaborator  was  the  singer  Miriam  Stockley.  I  had  previously worked with her in London and knew that she had all the qualities we were looking for.
Her unique talent allows her to sing in an amazing variety of styles; she was brought up in South Africa, speaks Zulu and although she  is white, she can confound even African musicians into thinking she is black (which, once again, chimed with the themes of the film and our approach to the score). Sadly, the budget did not allow for us to be in the same  place  at  the  same  time,  but  with  the  wonders  of modern  technology,  I  would email her a track and the brief and she would record and send back lots of great ideas to choose from, so it all went very smoothly.
When recording of the score, I "travelled" from LA to South Africa (Buskaid and DDK - our African choir), Florida (Miriam), Prague (a larger, Western orchestra) - all from the SKIN - comfort  of  my  studio,  listening  in  on  the  sessions  via  the  internet  -  so  my  carbon footprint for this movie is impressively low!
Apart  from  the  talking  drums,  I  had  to  teach  myself  to  play  a  number  of  African instruments, in particular the Kora (a cross between a harp and a guitar - very difficult to tune) and the Udu pots. The Udu pots actually became very important to the score.
They  are  the  percussion  instrument  that was  used  on  the  end  title  song,  and  for  the scene when Sandra and Sannie are by the river holding the new baby. I was struggling to get a soft sound on them, and my friend Joe Conlon, who provided a lot of feedback throughout, suggested I take off my rings.   I wasn't wearing any rings, so realised my fingers are obviously very boney! In the end I had to wear gloves to dampen the sound.
Playing  the  birambau was  another  huge  challenge.  Even  the most  experienced  player can  usually  only  get  two  notes  from  it  and  I wanted  to  get more  -  but, without  the talent or the time to learn, it was up to my friends Richard and Steve to help out (again) - one of us would play  the  sticks, one of use would use  the  stone  to  tune  it and  the other would  take  care of doing  the wah wah on  the bowl.  If aliens had  landed  in my studio, we would surely have been abducted for novelty value.
Flimibi Buana is another brilliant musician who played all the woodwind and ethnic flutes (including antelope horn). When we were recording one of the more emotional cues, he looked up at the end of a take and was shocked to find me in tears. His playing was so beautiful  -  and  the  commitment  of  all  the  musicians  who  worked  on  the  score  so absolute - it was hard not to be swept away in the moment.
The  score  of  SKIN  proved  to  be  a  great  adventure  -  spiritually,  emotionally  and  of course musically. Writing  for and performing so many new and exotic  instruments was ultimately as testing as it was fulfilling.

Hélène Muddiman - Composer
Having  recently  completed  the  score  for  the  feature  film  Skin,  Hélène's  first  film commission  as  composer was  for  the  short  film Candy  starring Oliver  Tobias, Miriam Margolyes and Brook Kinsella. This  film was  the beginning of a  long-term collaboration with Director Anthony Fabian. 
Their second collaboration on the film Jean - a film with no dialogue starring Suzannah York - was awarded 1st  prize in the Best Short Film Drama category at the I-film Festival in Los Angeles. 
Hélène is a Sony songwriter who has written a number of hit songs and received a gold disk for the songs she wrote on Emma Bunton's album including the title track Free Me, which reached no. 5 in the UK charts in June 2003, and I'll Be There, which reached no. 7 in the UK charts in February 2004. Her songs have also featured on Pop Idol winners' albums throughout the world.
As an artist, Hélène was first signed to EMI Records and Music Publishing at the age of 18. She is classically trained and plays a range of instruments. Her singing has featured on many of Hans Zimmer's film scores, as well as several television series. 
Her  TV  composer  credits  are  numerous  and  include  the  BAFTA  nominated  animation series for Cartoon Network The Cramp Twins, which is shown in 50 countries around the world.
Other  collaborators  include high profile musicians  such as Elvis Costello, Gary Numan, King,  and  Alison  Limerick.  At  present  she  is  working  with  Pam  Sheyne  (Genie  In  A Bottle, Christina Aguilera) Tim Palmer  (U2), Yak Bondy  (Craig David), Marcella Detroit (Shakespeare's Sister; Eric Clapton), The Lewinson Brothers (Eurythmics), Ronnie Wilson (Eternal) and Shelly Poole (Alicia's Attic).
Hélène  currently  lives  and works  in  LA.  For more  information  please  visit  her website  www.helenemuddiman.com

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