Urban Renewal

WHO WAS YOUR INTENDED AUDIENCE WHILE YOU WERE MAKING THE FILM?
I don’t know if I had an intended audience. This is not a tv film, it wasn’t commissioned by a tv station and it wasn’t conceived of as fulfilling a tv slot. It would be silly to say you don’t have an intended audience, but I never thought it would be a big tv film. It was conceived of as a film that would get a good festival run and a cinematic release. To date it has shown at 25 festivals and Ster-Kinekor has said they want to release it at the cinema.

DID YOU HAVE A MORE NATIONAL OR LOCAL AUDIENCE IN MIND?
You have to keep certain things in mind, where you know that an international audience would not understand certain things. I found that because our society is so racially aware, we automatically attach meaning to certain things and an international audience would miss subtleties and nuances to the film. Having said that, people with a little bit of knowledge on SA, pick up on some racial nuances. The themes of belonging are universal, but manifest in South Africa along racial lines.

WHY IS THIS FILM DIVIDED INTO FIVE PARTS? THERE ISN’T AN OBVIOUS NARRATIVE PROGRESSION:
The chapter divisions are quite arbitrary – they’re quotes from people saying things in the film – and I like that in a way: it’s a reference, more than a frame. The chapters are not thematically organised because the themes are all present throughout.

The first chapter is about happiness, the second loaded towards racial harmony, or perceptions of disharmony, the third a spiritual quest, the fourth is the climax, the fifth is the conclusion where things go on. Originally there were only going to be three chapters, partly to give a sign post for the audience, which is a narrative device to tell people how far they are from the end. The film didn’t have a narrative and it didn’t have principal themes, so it seemed the film should be developed tonally – a bit like a musical piece with different moods – so, the identity is more in the mood, than in the theme of the story.

I had to decide on some kind of organizing principle because it’s not in my power to make sense of such massive material otherwise.

It’s not badly edited, but with a top class editor it would have gone to another level. For example, I think the pacing isn’t always perfect in places, so the film feels a bit convoluted to me sometimes, and maybe with another editor, certain things would have breathed a bit more. If someone like Peter Neal or Stefan Sundlöf had been on board at the end … There’s a kind of magic that happens at the end of the edit process and there would have been a lot more of that if there had been a wise mind on board. There’s an otherworldliness that maybe a more experienced editor could have pulled through even more. It could have done with another mind on board.

The two producers, Neil Brandt and Lucinda Engelhart gave feedback at various times, which was useful.

It was a very lonesome process because there was no budget and the producers were in other places. This happened because the original producer left Cape Town halfway through the film, which is when we brought Neil on board because we had a good relationship and we had worked together before. There was no-one locally who seemed either suitable for, or interested in this non-funding and non-fundable film. I take my hat off to the two producers for taking on a really hard film.

I find with my films that people, who don’t want to fund it upfront because they don’t trust it, often like them afterwards when they see them. I appreciate that they (the producers) trusted the film. It was turned down three or four times by the SABC, but now that’s it finished and doing well, they are looking at it again. We have also been in touch with M-Net and Ster-Kinekor may want to take the tv rights.

Lion's Head

THERE ARE SO MANY PEOPLE WHO ARE IDENTIFIABLE IN THE FILM – DID YOU HAVE TO GET EVERY SINGLE PERSON’S PERMISSION TO HAVE THEM APPEAR IN THE FILM?
This was a big problem in this film: because you’re filming in a public space, you can’t get everybody’s permission; and we also filmed hundreds and hundreds of people. So we thought we’d get permission from significant people and then take contact details and get in touch with them if we used their pictures in the film; otherwise we would have literally hundreds of release forms.

So we have release forms for the people who do significant things in the film, e.g. there’s a girl in the film lifting her top with her bikini underneath and we contacted her to get her permission to use that shot. I showed the film to all the main characters to make sure they were okay with it – nobody’s objected – some people have reservations, but they haven’t objected.

The paradox about documentary is that usually the harder it is to make it and the harder to get access, the more meaningful it is to make it; so if you feel people are resistant, then there’s usually something going on because the things people find hardest to say are the most dramatic and meaningful. Almost as a rule of thumb, one should avoid people who really want to be on camera because it usually means they will give you what you need (rather than the truth); so resistance is a good thing.

THERE ARE MANY INTIMATE SHOTS WHERE WE GET TO SPEND QUITE SOME TIME WITH PEOPLE – HOW DID YOU SHOOT THESE? WERE YOU HIDDEN, OR DID YOU GET THEIR PERMISSION? IF YOU GOT THEIR PERMISSION, HOW LONG DID YOU HAVE TO WAIT FOR THEM TO RELAX AND BE NATURAL?
They knew we were filming and we were there for long enough and people were aware of us. As far as possible you try to get permission. People get used to cameras very quickly and people like being in front of the camera actually – most people have a narcissistic streak, and there are also socio-political dynamics involved: in South Africa working class people – this is not a rule of thumb – are more keen to be filmed because it’s giving them some opportunity, and all those social dynamics come into play. Mostly you can sense that people are okay with the filming. Sometimes people were not aware that we were shooting, and if I felt it was embarrassing, I would ask them.

We had three production periods and during the first it was me and Pieter Liechti filming. He would shoot tableau stuff and I would shoot more intimate stuff, but in the edit that fell away. For the second and third production periods I shot both kinds of things, so I shot about 70% of the film. The first shoot period was three-and-a-half weeks, the second and third were about two to three weeks each.

THE COUPLE THAT YOU SHOOT UNDERWATER IN PART THREE – DID YOU GET THEM TO DO THAT, OR WERE THEY DOING WHAT THEY DID VOLUNTARILY?
I just asked them if I could film them underwater. I have spoken on the phone with her about the scene.

ONE OF MY FAVOURITE SCENES IS WITH THE GUY WHO LOVES WATER. I FEEL UNDERWATER AND AWAY FROM THE WORLD WHEN HE’S ON THE SCREEN IN THIS SCENE.
I tried to have a kind of internal – external thing going. So the archive is an internal reality, and the surveillance footage is like a nightmare, an(other) inner reality.

HOW MUCH TIME DID YOU SPEND IN THE OLD AGE HOME?
Overall, the film probably appears that a lot more time was spent with characters than really was, partly because of careful selection and good characters. And over the years you develop a way of filming that develops meaningful stuff very quickly. There were a lot of chance encounters with people on the promenade. Of all the characters, I probably went back to the old age home the most – on about five or six occasions. Maybe it was the same with Aubrey. There wasn’t that much filming with characters because it wasn’t meant to be a character led film. I needed more depth out of vignettes, so that’s why I maybe went back to certain characters.

HOW DID YOU FIND YOUR CHARACTERS?
I never met the child – Law (the singer with the skateboard) – he just happened into the film, while I was filming. Then I met him by chance a while later at the Hare Krishna thing on the promenade. Most of what you see just happened as it was and I only arranged to meet up with some characters again.

Most of the characters we found as we were filming, e.g. we knew we wanted to film at the old age home and then we met Jean. JP started speaking to the camera while we were filming the yellow bib campaign and Law just appeared. Abdoeragiem we found because we had been speaking to people at the pool and he said interesting things; people suggested we speak to Marlene because she was involved in the rate payers’ association. The guy writing the postcard just happened to be there; Aubrey just walked into the lens and started performing. It was largely a question of me and the crew walking around and finding things to film.

SEA POINT IS KNOWN AS AN OLD JEWISH NEIGHBOURHOOD, AND YOU CUT FROM THE WOMAN WHO FEELS THERE IS NO PLACE FOR THE WHITE MAN IN SOUTH AFRICA TO THE SCHUL – ARE YOU TRYING TO SUGGEST THAT JEWISH PEOPLE FEEL ALIENATED AND SHARE THIS WOMAN’S PERSPECTIVE?
There are these two stereotypes in the new South Africa: firstly, nothing has changed, and secondly, racial apartheid has become replaced by class apartheid. Both of these things are true, but both of these things are limited as well. How do these different realities co-exist?

This is a reflection of a white community being isolated and at the same time Jewish people have also gone through persecution and have struggled to find, or have had issues with belonging. The Jewish history complicates whiteness as well, so it does both things. There’s this historical thing of Jewish people, so it makes you think that whiteness is also more complicated, it’s not a uniform thing.

That scene has to do with identity and belonging, whereas the alternative would be to cut to a lot of rich white people, which would not have said anything interesting and people would have laughed at the stupid whities. And you have a responsibility to avoid saying what people already know. Jews have also been victims in an extremely tangible and radical sense, so the idea of the white as the oppressor, also breaks that a little bit – but without dictating – for consideration.

YOU USE SOME VERY DATED CCTV FOOTAGE IN THE FILM. THE FOOTAGE DOESN’T LOOK LIKE IT WAS SHOT IN SEA POINT – WHAT PURPOSE DOES IT SERVE IN THE FILM?
I thought it was an internal reality (of violence) in people’s minds. The promenade means getting away from the violence – I think crime is a big part of the South African identity, so this space represents something away from that, and does also partly feed into the racial politics of South Africa. The film also tries to show two sides of the coin, e.g. it’s easy to condemn the yellow bib campaign as liberals trying to clean the neighbourhood of the poor, but ten to twelve years ago in Sea Point people were being shot on the streets.