Racism leads South African director to make film about thug-turned-hero
As a white person growing up in South Africa, Gavin Hood recognized the ugliness of apartheid at a young age and then learned about the political and economic aspects of diving races. “The real problem with apartheid was not segregation,” Hood said at his Philadelphia hotel during a publicity tour for “Tsotsi,” his drama, based on the novel by Athol Fugard, about a penniless 19-year-old thug who accidentally kidnaps an infant during a carjacking and then cares for the baby. “The ugliness of segregation and racism is that people of one race feel superior to those of another.
“In South Africa, the problem was that racism wasn’t about hating black people but about keeping them as the workers and the whites as the elite. In South Africa, you were born into this and you didn’t realize such things are not normal.”
“Tsotsi,” starring gifted 21-year-old South African Presley Chweneyagae (Shwen-NAY-ah-hi-eh) in his screen debut, has been nominated for an Oscar as best foreign film. Hood feels one reason the $3 million picture, which opens March 10, resonates with viewers around the globe is due to its universal themes.
“There’s timelessness to the story and it could be set anywhere from Bangkok to Los Angeles,” the 42-year-old director said. “Tsotsi follows a classical mythological hero’s journey with a young person living an unexamined life and then certain points he has experiences that crack him open (emotionally).
“He achieves enlightenment at the end.”
And when asked the name of his favorite behind-the-camera talent, Hood immediately pointed to a Taiwanese filmmaker who’s nominated for an Oscar as best director.”
“In films like ‘The Ice Storm’ and ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ Ang shows a great understanding of the human condition,” Hood said. “He can tap into that.
“Cinema is a beautiful medium.”
A ‘Mountain’ view
“Brokeback Mountain” is heavily favored to win the Oscars for best picture, adapted screenplay (Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana) and director (Ang Lee).
Those seeking insights into the beautifully rendered film starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as ranch hands drawn to each other should purchase “Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay” (Scribner; $16).
The paperback book provides the short story by Annie Proulx on which the film is based, the screenplay by McMurtry and Ossana, essays by the three writers and production stills.
In her essay, Proulx reveals her inspiration for the story, which occurred in 1977 when she was at a bar and saw an old ranch hand closely watching the young cowboys playing pool, not the flashy women all around the room.
“I began to consider what it might have been like for him – not for the real person against the wall, but for any ill-informed, confused, not-sure-of-what-he-was-feeling youth growing up in homophobic rural Wyoming,” she writes. “A few weeks later I listened to the vicious rant of an elderly bar-caf? owner who was incensed that two ‘homos’ had come in the night before and ordered dinner.
“She said that if her bar regulars had been there things would have gone badly for them. ‘Brokeback’ was constructed on the small but tight idea of a couple of home-grown country kids, opinions of self-knowledge shaped by the world around them, finding themselves in emotional waters of increasing depth.”
McMurtry and Ossana were so impressed by the short story after reading it in the Oct. 13, 1997 issue of The New Yorker that they personally purchased the film rights.
“I was seduced by the simple lyricism of Annie’s prose and then startled by its rawness and power,” Ossana says. “This spare narrative about a doomed love between two unremarkable men tapped deep into my own private well of pain and regret.”
Ossana and McMurtry then spent seven years trying to interest a filmmaker and actors in the project, an investment in time that seems well spent, since “Brokeback Mountain” ranks as a ground-breaking work that will touch audiences for years and years.