Oscar ® nominated foreign language film "Tsotsi" from South Africa

By Lee Shoquist

Forget the reckless bravado. It's the flashes of stillness that you notice most inside mercurial young Tsotsi, the troubled title character in Gavin Hood's Oscar-nominated South African feature, brought to life with great sensitivity by young actor Presley Chweneyagae. An impoverished, Johannesburg AIDS orphan with cunning street smarts, Tsotsi's narrow world is forever changed when an accidental kidnapping leads to an unexpected crisis of conscience.

Shot from the same cannon as Fernando Meirelles' modern Brazilian classic City of God and similar in its hothouse shantytown milieu life of crime, Tsotsi eschews the maverick thug ferocity and broad crime canvas of that film. Instead, Hood's beautifully etched character study is a classic tale of redemption told through the eyes of a drifting, feral man-child who comes to know himself and a world he does not yet trust--through an unlikely bond with a stolen baby.

I recently caught up with writer/director Gavin Hood to chat about his trek to bring Tsotsi to the screen with integrity intact-spoken in its native tongue, shot in intimate, widescreen glory and performed with sensitive subtlety by a remarkable young actor with an impressive hold on the camera-and us-right to the film's elegiac final scene.

Lee Shoquist, The Oscar Igloo: Let's talk about your background with this book and how you came to write and direct the film.

Gavin Hood: The script is based on a novel by Athol Fugard. The book is magnificent in terms of its theme and ideas but very much an inner journey of this character, written about what's going on in his mind. It's also quite episodic in the sense. The book is absolutely beautifully written, but a tough one to turn into a movie because the novelist is writing about what's going on the mind of the character, and in the movies you don't want voice over. Which is why it was so important to find someone like Presley, as an actor, who had the emotional range and the ability to create so much with so little.

I had read the novel years ago and loved it but was in no position at that stage to convince anybody to let me write or direct it. The book was optioned by various other people and I kind of forgot about it. My first work out of film school was working in the (South African) townships making what we called educational dramas, working for the Department of Health, making very low budget stories centered around needs to communicate information about HIV and teenaged prostitution issues-some pretty heavy stuff. So that was a distressing and very empowering and enlightening period of my life. I got to meet kids who were not unlike the characters in Tsotsi, either trying to raise themselves because they had lost their parents to HIV, or had parents who couldn't afford to take care of them. And these kids were behind masks of silence or anger. When I stripped the masks away and talked to them one on one, I discovered that they were very similar to everyone else in the world with the same basic need for human connection, for love, for understanding and for a sense of being worthwhile. This is the classic teenage identity struggle for affirmation, just in a rather extreme environment.

What attracted me to the movie is that on a certain level it is a fable; it is a myth. It's a classic, universal story about a young person who is ignorant of the world and ignorant of their own effect on the world, and has not yet had any kind of introspection. Now this is classically told in an inverted way, with stories like the Buddha, who is wealthy and ignorant and descends into a world beyond his safe home and returns wiser. Tostsi does that, it's just somebody who is deeply impoverished, who nevertheless has not looked inward. And through a series of encounters with various figures who traditionally, in classic myth might be the mentor figures, in this case it takes the form of a three month old baby and man in a wheelchair and then a woman who has got her own kid-a single mom-and then it ultimately takes the form of the father himself. But all of these people in some way are unintentionally mentoring him toward a greater self-awareness. When he emerges with self-awareness, that's the end of the story. He's moved from being a boy to a man.

LS: And when he gets there by the end of the film, we feel like we've actually seen it happen. The final scene of the film is really powerfully acted with little dialogue. It could have gone several different directions, but the choice Tsotsi makes seems exactly true.

GH: It's a tough one and the one I struggled with the most. That moment was my biggest worry--the final encounter between the father and Tsotsi, and what happens in that exchange where they say almost nothing verbally but a huge amount is exchanged. It was like, "How do we strike the right note here?" I didn't want Tsotsi to be too cool because then you don't experience the catharsis that he experiences. If he overplays it, we end up in melodrama. Presley's performance in that scene is when I thought, "I think we have it." It's just the way he is able to hold for a minute and a half. He doesn't move. He doesn't speak. It just builds and builds until that need to say, "I'm sorry," which he can't say but which we know he's feeling, and is generated to such an extent that redemption is possible. You can say the same thing about people on a universal level, which is that we want to forgive and we have the capacity for forgiveness, but we just can't if we don't sense that the other person is generally sorry. Don't say anything if you're going to give me a fake apology! Just leave it. We do this in our relationships all the time. It's like, "Don't say sorry if you don't mean it!" How many times has a woman said that to you?

LS: It's more like, "Okay, you said you were sorry. Now do you even know what you apologized for?"

GH: Exactly! We all have a need to be forgiven, we all want to forgive, we all want to accept an apology, but we want that apology to feel sincere. And so it was striking that balance. And at the end of the movie, once you've felt a sincere apology, you're still left to decide what to do with it. Do you want him to sit in jail for twenty years? Maybe he should. Do you want to take him home and give him tea or a candy bar? I don't know. It's up to you. It's an exercise in asking what it means to be asked to forgive once you've understood. So those are the kinds of universal themes that appealed to me about the book, and then the specifics of it being set in the city I grew up in, Johannesburg, this crazy mad place. But it's full of tremendous creative energy and mutli-cultures. All of these different groups come from different parts of the country to the city and it's an amazing creative pulse.

LS: And a place that gave you this unbelievable young actor.

GH: Presley was a true person. It's one thing to decided to do a film in a local language and use local actors and not do it in English. It's another thing to actually find the actor that can deliver at the level that is required. You audition and you audition. Then at a certain point, in comes a young man who has never made a film before, has grown up in these kinds of areas. He has never made a film before, but has been doing theater since he was six years old and has played Hamlet in the State Theater. Therefore has an extraordinary understanding of character development and a willingness to explore.

LS: He's listening through the whole film. There's a stillness in him.

GH: Thank you for saying that. Oh man, he's listening with his eyes, his ears, his smell. That's one of the things that we worked very hard on with the actors, was to help them move from theater to film. Theater is so much about words and lines. Film is about what happens between lines and in the spaces where there are no lines.

LS: There are many moments like this. For example, the way he watches Miriam (Terry Pheto) breastfeed and then looks away.

GH: Yes, or even the moment in the alley when he says goodbye to her. It's three lines on the page and someone might say, "There's not enough going on here!" These little words are just floating on a huge river of emotional stuff that's going on underneath that has to be exchanged. Young actors will say, "How long do I pause for before I speak?" How long is a pause? Well, it depends entirely on the stimulus that has hit you which is not just the line, but the way the line is said, the body language, the look, what you and I are doing right now. And when you've absorbed that you'll be ready to speak. I know that those pauses are required, but a pause that is empty is boring. Any moment that is empty is boring. Rule number one--don't bore your audience. So you've got to earn those moments. I play games with the actors. I'll suddenly turn around and say, "What was the name of your last lover?" (long pause between us as he stares directly into my eyes) Do you see how long your pause is? You started- I'm not going to make you answer, but you might at some point, in the quiet- you would have had to say something.

LS: I would have said I can't remember that far back.

GH: (laughs) But what was going through your brain was, "Is he f**king serious? It's none of his business. I'm not going to answer this question." If I were filming you, every one of those things was going through your eyes. There was a whole lot of stuff going on! If I say "nice jacket," you'll say "thanks." You don't need f**king fifteen seconds to absorb that stimulus. They key with actors is to say, "Know your lines perfectly, but don't work out how you're going to say them, because it depends what comes at you. We have to get into this game of tennis. We'll get you to the right emotional place when you come into the scene. The top of the scene we'll work on together. I'm never going to tell you how to say a line. I'm going to make sure the other actor is in the right place, wherever they are, whatever has just happened to them in the last scene. So you arrive from shooting Butcher and she's trying to sleep. She's just gone to bed. She opens the door. You try to pretend you're okay. And if you concentrate on each other instead of on yourself, you watch her and she watches you, and see what comes. And the lines are the safety net. Watch the other actor." So the irony is improvising from an emotional point of view. And they got it.

LS: The musical score is very effective here and functions as a pronounced character in the story.

GH: The music was like a gift. This is the music that is coming out of the townships right now. It was like, "Here is your soundtrack." What the music really helped with was to give the film an energy and pace and drive. It grabs the audience by the throat in the first ten minutes and says, "I promise I will not bore you." This then helps me earn those more silent moments that counterpoint. So you can find the rhythm of the picture and this music helps you to earn the stillness. And then Zola, eighty percent of the songs are his, and thank God he was just hugely supportive of the movie. He played the cameo role of the slick gangster in the purple jacket. He's an amazing artist. He works within the community and has a show once a week called Zola 7. He goes and visits kids in jail and tough schools, and talks to them. He's not like the guy in the fur coat and hat trying to show everyone how they can be wealthy. He hates that. He's like, "Let's just stay in touch with kids. Music should be a voice of passion and protest. But it shouldn't be just to shock." So you don't find "bitches" in his lyrics. It's angry at times, and closer to Eminem and guys who have f**king something to say rather than those who are trying to be cool. So he's a wonderful guy to work with.

LS: You mentioned the option to shoot the film in English. Explain the decision to shoot in the native tongue. How many languages do you speak? Was there serious consideration to shoot this film in English?

GH: I speak Zulu badly, I speak Afrikaans okay and I speak English. We have eleven official languages and the movie is an amalgamation of all of them. The families have come from all over the country in search of a better life, so the kids on the street sometimes speak five or six languages. It's all evolved into this Tsotsital, which means gangster language.

It was a risk and I'm very grateful to my producer to have the vision to want to do it this way. Because of course it was mentioned that we should do it in English with international names. It's not a smart move not to have an international name, because you need all you can get to help market a movie. We're extremely lucky the film has won the awards it has, otherwise I wouldn't be sitting here. In a perfect world you want a name that is also right for the role. Don Cheadle is right for Hotel Rwanda. Works perfectly. But some movies you can't do that. If you think of films like Central Station and City of God, you cannot imagine these films working commercially, never mind creatively, if they had been done in English with an international cast. Who? What? Which role? Audiences feel like they're being manipulated.

One of the things that Mexican and Brazilian films have is this incredible raw energy that comes from all performances because the actors are working in their own language. It's not just about the lead. The supporting actors, if they are in English, are not working in their home language. Given that this movie so requires really finely tuned emotional moments, anything that gets in the way of that is unhelpful. Mainly language or for me in this particular case, wanting to shoot it in a much more intimate way. I needed for you to see what was going on behind the actors' eyes. I didn't want flashy camera moves. There's this sort of sense that everything has been composed and color-designed to draw your attention to that actor's face. So let him speak in his own language. The movie doesn't have a lot of dialogue. The language of emotion is universal. The audience gets immersed not just in a visual world, but an aural world that is exciting and has flavor and energy, and feels like I've taken you by the hand and walked you down that street.

LS: I was looking yesterday at Julie Taymor's Frida, which is such a visionary film in many ways and accomplished visually and aurally as well. But the cast speaks in English when they are Mexican, together, living in Mexico. It completely takes me out of the film. Most Mexican people living in the US don't even speak English together. They sure don't speak it within their families during that time and place.

GH: It's true. It kind of works in that film because it's a beautifully made film. There's not actually a rule here. Schindler's List works because the accents are so consistently good. And you don't feel that they're disconnected. They're such talented actors that you don't feel the accent is getting in the way of the emotions. But how many obstacles do you want to put in the way of your film working? When you're working with film actors that have never done a film before, letting them work in their own language helps for them to be very connected emotionally. I'm looking for that emotional truth, which is universal. It would be the same if a movie was made in Moscow or Rio or Chicago or South Central L.A. This is a movie that I think, with simple background shifts, could be set anywhere in the world. But the flavor comes from it being set in Johannesburg, which is not often seen onscreen.

LS: You mentioned the cinematography-it's a widescreen picture that's very controlled and the space is used to heighten the drama. We often think of it as a format for epics, and I suppose this is a different kind of epic, actually. Why this format?

GH: Thank you for asking that. There was a pressure to shoot this film handheld on 16mm grainy, gritty film stock because City of God did it brilliantly.

LS: Did you have to use that film as a model for your pitch?

GH: No, but it was the obvious model so everybody was raising it. And it was a good model because it made money and it worked and it was excellent. The panic you immediately have is that you're going to look like you're imitating.

LS: I could see Tsotsi himself as one of the street kids in City of God, for instance, in the scene where the gang leader Lil' Ze shoots the child in the foot. The difference seems to be that Tsotsi is living this way in spite of himself and those characters are doing it because it is their identity.

GH: They are more like the character of Butcher, whereas the character Tsotsi is a kid who has a memory of love and a mother who raised him, which he's lost at the age of nine, and in a sense has learned to put up a mask of silence probably because he's a lot smarter innately than most of the other people around him, which is why he wants that Boston character in his gang. He doesn't really know it, but there's a craving to communicate on his own intellectual level, which Butcher doesn't provide. And yet there's something about this guy that also pisses him off, he's educated and he's asking him questions he doesn't want to answer to. The only person who he really, apart from Miriam, begins to have a relationship with, the only member of his gang who he truly has an honest moment with, one on one as equals, is Boston when he apologizes to him, and Boston gets it, and he's like, "I know you." That is a craving for a connection of equals.

I looked back at myself and said well, first of all, my background as a kid growing up with my dad was that he was an actor when I was young, then a very successful architect. I also grew up around my dad's love of still photography and wildlife photography, which he still at seventy-eight-years-old has a passion for. I was used to looking through a still camera where composition, lighting and then one little emotional moment happen to make the image. There's nowhere to hide-there it is. I tend to come at the work like that. I come at the work from an acting point of view because I grew around actors. Then I want to record that emotion. I want to be seen as the observer. I don't want you to feel my presence in the room as the director, watching me, moving around.

LS: That is City of God, however. I love the film, but it is a directorially powerful exercise.

GH: Yes. I think it works in City of God because it's an out of control group of kids that you're trying to keep up with as an ensemble. But I think Tostsi is closer to Central Station. Walter Salles' style is widescreen in that movie, and yet it's an intimate story. It is epic. Why? It's an epic story of the heart. That sounds cliché, but the city is a big, brooding personality in the movie that is partly why he is what he is. To be able to do a shot like Tsotsi walking on the railway line towards you, a very rigid composition with that huge city behind him, very classically composed composition of the railway line coming right at you and this figure who is just one story in millions, while he's trying to think. And then you back off and go, "Wow, there are a lot of kids." Then boom, you can come straight in. But the widescreen, when I'm in the close-up, still allows me to have distance between you and other person that's over your shoulder. I've got him and Miriam sitting at a table, and I can have him in close-up and her over shoulder. If it's in 1.85, I've got to close that gap. But with this widescreen, they're intimate, she's in the frame, and there's still a journey to cross that you desperately want them to reach out across. So from a thematic point of view, it was just a nice choice. It made sense to me to break the mold of imitating anyone else. Why, just because I'm making a ghetto movie, do I have to grainy up the film stock? Let's shoot really cool film stock, and the grain--is in the environment. Rather than pretend that we have to make it look edgy, it is edgy. Show it and you'll see it.

The challenge of this movie for me was that it is a myth and a fable, and how to combine reality with mythology so that the film has a style. When you're in the shack, the color palette is very controlled. And then Miriam's shack is pretty controlled because of the wall, but there are lots of pictures and posters. She could have stripped them all out. Then there's the mobiles. That's the information we really need. The rest is cluttering them which distracts the eye. And I just want you to quickly observe those mobiles, and then you're back to Presley. Everything is about getting inside his head. And that goes to the shooting style where you want to shoot not in a handheld crazy pattern, but more, dare one say, in a more static way where you allow the audience to really observe him and his eyeline is very tight to camera, so that you are looking right into his eyes.

LS: Because it's a character study. It's not a kinetic, on the streets crime film.

GH: You said it, I'm happy. It's not a kinetic, on the streets crime film. I'm going to steal that. Exactly right. It's very much a character study, but it's cloaked in the gangster, ghetto genre.

LS: I guess I have to sneak in something about your Oscar nomination. How does it feel to be you right now?

GH: Oh, God, I'll tell you what. You're beside yourself! I'm beside myself with joy. I'm beside myself because it feels like it's happening to someone else and it actually is happening to us. But what's more important is that I'm extremely relieved because a lot of people took a lot of risks and it seems to be paying off. My investors are happy. My distributor is happy. It's a relief that they're all happy and I can stop stressing! But the real stress is still coming-will the film do any business?

Thank you to Gavin Hood for this interview.

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