This article originally appeared in the March 2006 issue of Venice Magazine. I did the interview with Gavin a week or so before he won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film for Tsotsi. He's currently directing X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the solo feature film spin-off of the popular X-Men character. He's a thoughtful director with an eye on character. An interesting choice to be sure. I have a good feeling about Wolverine.
by Terry Keefe
"That's me!" Filmmaker Gavin Hood recalls those words being shouted by a young audience member watching Hood's feature Tsotsi, which centers around a young thug growing up in a shantytown near Johannesburg, South Africa, at a screening which Hood had organized for some of the kids from the shantytowns. Reflecting on that young man's moment of self-recognition, Hood hypothesizes, "There's something about feeling validated, that you exist. That you're not just on the sidelines. That your story is being told." The quest for self-identity is at the heart of Tsotsi's themes as a story, but it also is part of Hood's goals as a filmmaker working to tell South African stories. Like many a future film director, Hood spent much of his childhood going to films, but rarely saw stories about his own experiences on the screen. That's because the cinemas were dominated by the American and British films, almost exclusively. South Africa is not a nation with a huge film industry, but Hood does recollect seeing a film when he was 9 years old that spoke to his own life. It was entitled e'Lollipop (released in the U.S. as Forever Young, Forever Free) and was about two young friends, one white and the other black, torn apart by Apartheid. Says Hood of that moviegoing experience, "I remember being profoundly affected because it was the first time I saw a story about someone like me. I remember feeling quite a shock that movie weren't just about us watching other people. They could be about us watching ourselves. It's hard to say the moment you decided to make movies, but I think subliminally that was [it]."
The term "tsotsi" essentially means "thug" or "gangster" in the street language of the ghetto, but it also is the name taken by the lead character of Hood's film, played by Presley Chweneyagae. Tsotsi lost his parents at an early age and has been bringing himself up, like so many other children in the ghettos. He refuses to reflect on his past or even the name he once had, choosing to live only in a very violent today. That all starts to change when he carjacks a woman's vehicle in the suburbs and discovers that her baby is in the backseat. Rather than abandoning the child, Tsotsi attempts to take care of the child himself and this provides the catalyst for a change for the better within him. The film is based on a novel by famed South African writer Athol Fugard, which Hood recalled reading in college. He wanted to make a film of it then but knew that no one would finance the endeavour with his limited experience. But the job that Hood took after film school, making educational films for the Department of Health, would eventually provide him with strong knowledge of the townships, as that is where he often shot these health films about topics such as HIV. Hood came in contact with many young men like Tsotsi, gaining great insight into their characters. Says Hood, "You find that these kids are pretty tough when they're together. But when you get them one-on-one, mostly, but not all, they're just kids like everywhere else. Trying to put up a mask in order to prevent themselves from being vulnerable. Some people say about Tsotsi, 'You have this really tough kid [in the film] who gets a heart.' And my answer is, 'He's a kid who had a heart, who became tough to survive, but the heart's always there. You've just got to strip away the survival mechanism and get back to the heart.'"
The term "tsotsi" essentially means "thug" or "gangster" in the street language of the ghetto, but it also is the name taken by the lead character of Hood's film, played by Presley Chweneyagae. Tsotsi lost his parents at an early age and has been bringing himself up, like so many other children in the ghettos. He refuses to reflect on his past or even the name he once had, choosing to live only in a very violent today. That all starts to change when he carjacks a woman's vehicle in the suburbs and discovers that her baby is in the backseat. Rather than abandoning the child, Tsotsi attempts to take care of the child himself and this provides the catalyst for a change for the better within him. The film is based on a novel by famed South African writer Athol Fugard, which Hood recalled reading in college. He wanted to make a film of it then but knew that no one would finance the endeavour with his limited experience. But the job that Hood took after film school, making educational films for the Department of Health, would eventually provide him with strong knowledge of the townships, as that is where he often shot these health films about topics such as HIV. Hood came in contact with many young men like Tsotsi, gaining great insight into their characters. Says Hood, "You find that these kids are pretty tough when they're together. But when you get them one-on-one, mostly, but not all, they're just kids like everywhere else. Trying to put up a mask in order to prevent themselves from being vulnerable. Some people say about Tsotsi, 'You have this really tough kid [in the film] who gets a heart.' And my answer is, 'He's a kid who had a heart, who became tough to survive, but the heart's always there. You've just got to strip away the survival mechanism and get back to the heart.'"
Hugh Jackman in Hood's upcoming Wolverine.
With Tsotsi receiving both Oscar and Golden Globe nominations in the Foreign Film category, Hood is being flooded by studio offers which he is strongly considering. But he's also intending to dedicate the next month at least to the promotion of Tsotsi, which Miramax is releasing in theaters all over the world. The filmmaker definitely feels the responsibility of being at the vanguard of a new South African cinema. He says, "In America, people take it so for granted, and I don't know if you realize it, but almost every aspect of your lives has been examined on film. We don't do that in South Africa. We're starting to do that, and it's really exciting, being a part of that. We need more films and then I think we'll feel a greater sense of our own national identity."
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