DAY TWO  November 4, 2005
One Man and a Baby: Director Gavin Hood Talks about TSOTSI, Humanity
by Todd Gilchrist
There are many reasons why writer/director Gavin Hood decided to make TSOTSI--including a long-standing affection for the works of novelist Athol Fugard and an intimate familiarity with the shanty towns of Johannesburg, South Africa. But Hood says that a much more deeply personal reason made Fugard's work a story that he not only wanted, but needed, to tell: "I have sort of direct experience of these carjackings," he confesses during a recent interview. "My mother has been carjacked twice, I've been mugged myself, my dad has been carjacked."
All of which makes it that much stranger that Hood sees little distinction between himself and the black male who adopts the title of his film as a pseudonym, borrowed from the Zulu word for thug. "I personally would never claim to have grown up in the shanty towns; I had a very fortunate upbringing and I've been very privileged," he acknowledges. "[But] you cannot live in South Africa... peacefully while there is this excessive gap between the rich and the poor."
A film student who caught his first big break via commissioned work for the South African government ("I was hired out of film school by the department of health to write what we called 'educational dramas,'" he explains), Hood soon discovered that the only novel written by one of his favorite authors held far more in common with his own life than he ever expected.
"I've always been a fan of Athol Fugard's work, but what I really love is that his characters are profoundly human--character is always at the forefront of his work." TSOTSI follows a young street thug (played by newcomer Presley Chweneyagae) who inadvertently kidnaps a baby when he steals a woman's car. Unexpectedly accepting responsibility for the child, Tsotsi soon begins to rediscover the humanity he lost years ago as a child himself. Hood says that in Fugard's source material, the underpinnings of the character take a back seat to his basic human drives. "A socioeconomic and political situation is brought to your attention not because it is at the forefront of the work, but because it is a background upon which an extraordinary, strong human story plays out."
"Because these human stories are powerful," Hood continues, "he brings to life the political or social circumstances in which these people find themselves so incredibly powerfully, and that's what I think is so amazing about TSOTSI."
Hood says that during the development of the film, he faced pressure even from his producers to conform to a more familiar cinematic pattern of sordid gangster stories, a la the Brazilian crime saga CITY OF GOD. "Even before I was going to make the movie, because it was a 'ghetto movie,' the automatic assumption was it would be like CITY OF GOD," Hood remembers. "I have the most enormous respect for CITY OF GOD, and think [director Fernando] Meirelles did an outstanding job, but it puts certain pressure on me because the last thing I wanted to do was imitate CITY OF GOD."
This debate led to Hood's decision to shoot the film in a leaner, more elegant style, removing TSOTSI's story from the visceral immediacy of its contemporaries. "My argument was that CITY OF GOD was like a roller coaster ride of crazy violence, and an ensemble piece," he observes. "To shoot it 16mm handheld, where you barely keep up with these characters, seems entirely appropriate. I think the big difference to me is that TSOTSI is a much more intimate film; it's very much one-on-one. It starts off with this gang thing, but it very quickly becomes this story about a boy and a baby and a boy and a girl, so the shooting style for me was [more about] how to capture that intimacy."
Hood explains that his intent was to create a sympathetic story from Tsotsi's travails--even for those who ordinarily might have trouble relating to the character. "I didn't want to impose myself directorially on the picture; what I really wanted you to be doing as the audience is having the opportunity to just look into the characters' eyes. I wanted to see if, by the end of the movie, the audience might feel that this could have been them--rather than their watching someone's life, they're actually immersed in that life, and with a little flip and a different roll of the dice, you or I could have been born into that world and lived that life. Hopefully, I think that might be why people seem to be moved by the movie."
That said, Hood acknowledges that his source material offered him all of the foundations for this universal tale, and all he wanted was to preserve and present it on screen. "In Tsotsi you've got a brilliant character, which I do not take credit for," he demurs. "That is Athol Fugard's creation--this extraordinary young teenager in a world of extreme, urban deprivation struggling to find his way in the world."
Boiled down to its most basic elements, Hood continues, "you could almost describe it as a coming-of-age story in an extreme environment." Extreme, perhaps, but still extremely, universally relatable.
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