Tsotsi Q&A

Trevor Johnston catches up with 'Tsotsi' director Gavin Hood to discuss his Oscar-winning movie.

Mar 17 2006

Dateline: Edinburgh International Film Festival, August 2005, and your valiant correspondent experiences a twinge of trepidation before the international premiere of the British-South African co-production 'Tsotsi'.

So the story's about a young township thug who comes across a baby in the back seat of the car he's just nicked, and somehow becomes a nice person? Hmmm… And it's directed by a white South African? More worthy liberal hand-wringing in store then?

Cut to the end credits, and such preconceptions are already a distant memory as the entire audience acclaims visiting filmmaker Gavin Hood. A model of imaginative compassion, the emotional potency of 'Tsotsi' comes from its ability to see within its gun-toting tearaway the frightened kid who grew up fending for himself on the streets.

Fernando Meirelles' 'City of God' would be the easy reference point, but this is a more intimate piece about the destructive anger caused by social injustice – if anything its classical restraint echoes Roberto Rossellini. In the highly charged Q&A session that followed, one white South African girl choked back the tears as she described how she left the country when her best friend's mum was shot dead by a carjacker, but that 'Tsotsi' had helped her to begin the process of understanding.

Meeting up with Hood the next day, he's still blown away by the reaction: 'We thought we'd come here as the little foreign film, and maybe they'd quite like us. But to have that response? I'm still pinching myself.'

Presumably, he's black and blue from pinching himself by now, since the film's Michael Powell Award at Edinburgh was just the start of a gong frenzy, including the Audience Award at Toronto, Best Foreign Film nominations at both the Golden Globes and BAFTAs, and culminating in the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.

None of which, of course, invalidates one's initial gut instinct, that whatever the movie's obvious qualities, the one-line synopsis still sounds suspiciously like sentimental hogwash.

'You mean the "bad guy finds baby, becomes good" one-liner?' sighs Hood, who started out as a Johannesburg lawyer before turning to writing. 'Well, I always knew I was treading a fine line between sincere sentiment, and being sentimental. I mean I could have made the film where he hijacks the mother, the baby gets killed, life is miserable and it's all dark and gritty. That's probably more often the case, naturally. But do I want to tell stories that you can see on the news? No, I want to offer something that says we can all have a little more compassion for each other, something that gives us a sense of our better selves against a backdrop that clearly indicates it’s pretty tough to be better.'

While the shape of the story derives from a '50s-set novel by Afrikaner playwright Athol Fugard, the challenge for Hood (of British-South African descent) was to make the drama persuasive in the context of today's teeming ghettos, especially when it came to the dialogue in the hoodlum patois known as 'Tsotsitaal'.

'South Africans do get pretty pissed off with the rest of the world thinking they're just two groups, black and white,' explains the veteran of a string of early '90s educational TV dramas dealing with AIDS and child abuse in the townships.

'There are six different nations within South Africa, and 11 official languages. It's like a mini-Europe. Although they're both from a similar background to the world of the movie, the actor Presley Chweneyagae, who plays the central character, is a Tswana, while Kenneth Nkosi, his burly pal, is a Zulu, yet they had to look like they were a partnership speaking this pick-and-mix dialect. Mothusi Magano, who plays their drunken friend, is a drama school graduate from a middle-class background, and he sure as hell didn't know 'Tsotsitaal'. We needed a great dialogue coach on this film, and it wasn't just for the white guy!'

And yet, presumably the judgement you face from some people is that this isn't your story to tell?

'Absolutely, but let's not get hung up on this idea that an outsider can't tell a great story. Take a look at one of my heroes, Ang Lee, who can go from 'Eat Drink Man Woman' to 'Sense and Sensibility' to 'Brokeback Mountain'. For me, it's not about your skin pigmentation, it's about your research, your humility, and your willingness to learn.'

Clearly, though, it's an issue that rankles, since the temperature of the conversation just went up a few degrees.

'What I really resent is being told I can't examine issues which have affected my life too,' he emphasises, with a note of determination. 'You know what? My mother's had a gun in her face twice. She was right outside her house, just like it happens in the film. Fortunately, she didn't get shot, but she did have her earrings pulled from her ears. I've been mugged in a back alley, and had to empty my savings from the cash machine at knife-point. My 81-year-old grandmother had her house broken into, and she was raped.'

'I'm no saint, I wanted to go out and kill those guys. But instead, I chose to examine these things, because that’s the privilege of the writer. Some people will say I'm trying to show what a liberal I am, what a nice guy for going into the black community. Some people will still say it's "sentimental", but the best response for me came from a white South African who'd been held up so many times he'd started wearing a gun. "Thank you for taking away my anger," he said. If that's being sentimental, then I can live with it.'

'Tsotsi' is out now.

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