Writer/Director/Actor Embeth Davidtz talks to The Inside Reel about psychology, environment and direction in regards to her new film from Sony Pictures Classics: "Don't Let's Go To The Dogs Tonight."
00:00These people know what we're doing, so you just better bloody watch yourself.
00:17I'll never leave here. You'll never leave me.
00:21This is how the story ends.
00:23All our lives, we are kissed with separation and loneliness.
00:30And longing.
00:35Capturing the nuance, especially of this kind of novel, which, you know, couldn't be done for so long, but you seem to crack the voice.
00:42Can you sort of talk about finding sort of the balance between the sort of psychological element and the sort of plot that needed to run?
00:52Because there's two different things going on there.
00:55It was a very complicated sort of thing to tease out and a very delicate balance to get, right?
01:01Because nobody wanted to produce it when I said, I love this book.
01:06I think there's something here.
01:07And everyone was like, we don't want to touch a race story from a white child's point of view.
01:11But I struggled with where the point of view was coming from in order to tackle these things and finally came up with the idea of if I put it into the child's perspective, the child's mouth, the child's point of view, even the child's bias and learned racism.
01:26Then I can actually tackle the problems, take them sort of head on, deal with the political as well as the sort of, you know, a household, a family, a mother sort of disintegrating within the house and the world outside disintegrating for them.
01:41So changing everything to the child's point of view is, I think, what saved me.
01:45I mean, some might say it's still not there yet.
01:48It's not perfect.
01:48But I felt like that was the only sort of peephole through which we could watch this world, look at this world.
01:57The country we live in was called Rhodesia.
02:00But then some Africans said they found a first and the euro stole from it.
02:04Twelve whites were murdered with a slavery.
02:06But then those Africans turned into terrorists and that's how the war started.
02:10I keep a lookout for terrorists.
02:14Watch out!
02:16Big storm is coming!
02:18It's better, hold on!
02:25Sorry about the mess.
02:27Can you have to take a brew of my tea, please?
02:29But it's also your background, you know, having you, even though you were born here in the States, you spent a lot of your younger years in South Africa.
02:37Can you talk about, because reflecting the environment and it's 1980, you capture it, but it's a very specific feel and tone.
02:44It's definitely a very specific thing.
02:45So I, that's why I loved Alexandra Fuller's book.
02:49So she wrote about Zimbabwe, this specific moment in time with Zimbabwe.
02:53But the parallels between Zimbabwe and South Africa was so vivid.
02:56I thought I had only been to Zimbabwe briefly as a child, but after all, after independence.
03:02And I could not believe the music that she describes in the book, the characters, the way people spoke, the sense of humor, all those things so similar to that similar time that I existed at that age as a child in South Africa.
03:15And I think that's the thing that grabbed me.
03:18And when I've, over the years, I've lived out of South Africa for 35 years now.
03:23But when I would go back, I'm always met with the familiarity of that.
03:29It's changed.
03:30Obviously, the country's changed a lot in a lot of ways, so much for the better.
03:33But there is a nostalgia and there is a kind of a triggering thing that happens at the same time to me because I'm put back to the time when I was a child experiencing and watching.
03:46Even though the same politics aren't at play, there's a memory of it that's in play in me.
03:51And I think that's also why I could capture it.
03:53I know what it sounds and smells like.
03:55I know what that kind of dirt looks like.
03:57I know what those sorts of white, drunk people behave like.
04:01And so I felt like I knew how to bring that to life.
04:05But I do like the fact that you used a very specific visual language.
04:08You know, the fact that you use, I read you use the lenses that sort of, you know, fade out a little bit at the sides and really gives a sense of that.
04:16The water, you can smell the picture if that makes sense.
04:20Yeah, that was really important to me because if it didn't have that, if it felt sanitized, if you didn't get a sense of that, you wouldn't get a sense.
04:26It was very important to show the white decay in the middle of the colonialism decaying with the grabby child being the eyes that look out at the world around her.
04:40It really needed to be that.
04:42You couldn't have a, you could, it would be a different film telling a pristine white child's point of view.
04:48It needed to sort of be this family that was in decay in that world around them being in decay.
04:55Do you think yours can have coming back babies?
04:58I hope I'm not a coming back baby.
05:00Yours are different to Africans.
05:03Africans have eyes to see what the whites cannot see.
05:06No.
05:07I can see everything.
05:08I can see your eyes.
05:10I can see your face.
05:12I can see your hands.
05:15Hey, Jacob, where's my porridge?
05:18There's no fourth talent.
05:19I'm sure I broke your pants.
05:21Exactly when she was a girl.
05:23Could this be a gentleman?
05:24I'm not worried.
05:25I'm not worried.
05:27I'm not dead enough.
05:30Now directing this, because obviously your words and then obviously you're there on set, you know, as an actor as well.
05:38But can you sort of talk about directing, finding those finite points?
05:41Obviously over the years, all your experience, you've seen some of the best work.
05:45What did you find that your directing style reflected as?
05:50Interesting.
05:50For me, I have no technical skill.
05:53I'm not somebody who studied film.
05:55I didn't learn, not in the books or in the practical sense.
05:58The way I learned, I think, by just osmosis was just by being on the set.
06:03I didn't even realize I was taking it in.
06:05So Altman moves his camera, always moved his camera and followed.
06:09And I knew I've got a seven-year-old.
06:11I've got dogs.
06:12I've got a feeling that I wanted to be present and very direct and in the moment.
06:18A camera, those lenses that make it look sort of like the 80s, the late 70s, early 80s, the way a photograph would look.
06:26But also the way I remember it looking and at the same time, the same feeling of following this child in movement and how do you create tension and how does the camera.
06:37And I just knew with the amount of time I had with the child every day, a child who was a non-actor trying to capture that, that it was important for that to move.
06:44And obviously, you know, the specificity of character, the way that Alexandra Fuller wrote that book, gave me real characters.
06:51And then I could string along, how do you populate a real character?
06:56How do you give her the quirks and the ways in which she thinks that little girl?
07:00And then I could do that in the writing and then execute it in the filming.
07:03Mom, am I African?
07:05No, Papa.
07:06Is it because we don't have brown skin?
07:08There's still Radesia in my eyes.
07:20Bring on the bloodshed if that's what they want.
07:22I've got enough ammo for a world war.
07:28Mom says she'll die for the slam.
07:30Who said you could come on this farm?
07:31This is my farm.
07:33So much was done in the edit.
07:34You know, I just adore that little girl and she has this magical cinematic face that's so wonderful.
07:41But she's not an actor.
07:43She hadn't acted before.
07:44She might now.
07:46And so my most important task was to keep her just as busy as possible in the world of a child behaviorally.
07:54I wanted to, when she's got a wedgie and she's pulling her shorts out of them, grab that moment.
07:58When she's yawning and got the hiccups, grab that moment.
08:01So I always had two cameras going on her, one very tight.
08:05And, you know, I was go closer, go closer, get a closer lens on.
08:08You've got to get tighter.
08:09And when she's not aware of her behavior, when she's laughing, when she's giggling,
08:13when someone's tickling her, grab that, sew it together with voiceover, pick things out,
08:18stitch it together with an eerie piece of music.
08:21You know, it's much more silent, quiet work that I was doing on the side.
08:27And particularly after the fact, you know, teaching, giving her a line at a time and her recording it
08:32so that I could then stitch that together for that voiceover, which tells a lot about things.
08:36And then she's just a glorious little free creature that I could have running through the fields with the dogs
08:42or feeding the dogs, or I could throw a line off stage.
08:45But if I gave her script to learn, if I gave her a scene to learn,
08:48it would come out parroted and then it wouldn't be real.
08:51And that did not work in this film.
08:52So I had to cut anything that was learned and just do stuff on the cuff with her,
08:57but in a really controlled way.
08:59Very, very, I don't want to do that again.
09:02It was very hard.
09:03I believe her.
09:09Are we racist?
09:10What?
09:11Certainly not.
09:12What sort of people are we then?
09:13Africans have eyes to see what the whites cannot see.
