by SARAH ROWLAND

“If you really want to know who I stole from, it was Walter Salles’s Central Station,” says Tsotsi director Gavin Hood, in response to all the City of God comparisons his movie has been getting lately. “It’s wonderful to be put in that company. Apart from everything else, it’s a nice marketing angle so I’m very, very happy—I mean City of God is an amazing film. On the other hand, I think that in some ways it might be a bit of an easy comparison.”

He’s right. Both are extraordinary films that follow ruthless gangs trying to kill their way out of unfathomable poverty, but that’s where the similarities end. While Fernando Meirelles’s 2002 Brazilian masterpiece is a frenetically stylized saga of an entire posse, Tsotsi is a more classically told tale of one young man’s redemption—albeit in an extreme setting: South Africa’s AIDS-riddled shantytowns.

In Tsotsi (“thug” in ghetto speak), we spend six life-altering days in the life of a hardened 19-year-old gang leader. Through flashbacks we learn that Tsotsi was abandoned at an early age and forced to live like a stray dog in an industrial dump site. Since then he has managed to shut off any semblance of a human conscience; that is, until a car jacking goes horribly wrong. Moments after peeling away from the scene of the crime, he realizes there’s a baby in the backseat of the stolen vehicle. Not surprisingly, caring for the newborn awakens his suppressed childhood memories and consequently he starts to feel the human-like emotions he pushed deep down for years.

HOOD’S HERO

But if Tsotsi is not South Africa’s answer to City of God, the critical response is certainly on par—something that still amazes Hood.

“All we hoped for was that it would do well at home, then maybe play in London, New York, and L.A. on a couple of screens and that would be that,” he says over the phone. “So to be sitting here talking to journalists from Seattle, having just got back from Sweden, I’m more than a little bit overwhelmed.”

In between doing all this international press and receiving festival accolades, he is still trying to wrap his head around getting an Oscar nod for best foreign language film.

“Whenever people ask me about that, I feel obliged to say, ‘I’m so bloody happy,’ which I am. But I’m also deeply relieved because for three-and-a-half years—in the deep recesses of my mind—I was terribly afraid that I might be making a piece of shit—this despite all the confidence that I had to show to my cast, crew and indeed to my investors.”

Yet Hood’s biggest fear manifested itself long before he started shooting. In order to get the rights to the book, he had to get his screenplay approved by its author, Athol Fugard, who is notoriously hard to please when it comes to adaptations of his work.

“I was terrified,” says Hood, who eventually won Fugard over. “He is a hero to me and to many. His work has always been so beautifully focused on flawed characters. And he has a way of bringing to your attention the socioeconomic and political environment without shoving it down your throat as though he’s grandstanding from some sort of superior position.”

DELIBERATE DEBATE

Which brings us to the Tsotsi debate. Though there is no direct mention of AIDS, there are frequent visual reminders of how the disease has ravaged the forgotten continent, leaving millions of orphans in its wake. For some, this is enough to walk away from the theatre questioning the bigger picture; like, for example, what is the greater evil: a gangster who pumps lead into people as casually as one swats away a fly, or morally repugnant pharmaceutical companies that deny HIV treatments to the world’s poorest people? What chance did Tsotsi really have?

And then there are those who leave the screening feeling zero sympathy for Tsotsi. After all, a lot of people are dealt a shitty hand in life, but they don’t go around shooting, beating and mugging to pay for their beer. But according to Hood, highlighting this vast difference in opinion through one character was no accident.

“We decided early on that we were not going to apologize in any way for Tsotsi,” he says. “There was a discussion like, ‘Ohh, is he gonna be too unlikeable?’ But we decided that if we don’t make him truly unlikeable, we’ve somehow copped out on a challenge to explore themes of redemption, forgiveness and personal responsibility.

“Basically, if we were gonna fail, we were gonna fail big. So the goal then became to push the audience to the point where they want to leave the cinema, then see if we can win them back and do it in 90 minutes or don’t bother. That was the deal and thank God everybody involved went for it because it seems to have worked.”

LETHAL ACCENTS

Once they decided they weren’t going to sugarcoat the lead, the filmmakers set out to find someone to play their beautiful monster. This, of course, brought them to Hollywood, and even though Hood says he met with a lot of talented actors, he had his doubts about their ability to master South African enunciation

“I mean, if I see another actor do the accent that Joss Ackland did in Lethal Weapon [2], which came from God knows what planet, I’m gonna kill someone. No one sounds like that—Australian “I”s with Dutch “R”s—what is that? With all due respect, guys, get it right. We have as many accents in South Africa as you do in North America and England. Pick one.”

That is not to say he doesn’t think it’s possible for an American to rise to the challenge.

“Don Cheadle pulled it off in Hotel Rwanda, so it can be done. But when it’s not pulled off, it is devastating, particularly to the South African film community, which is struggling to make an industry. And every failure—whether it’s made by a South African or by an international director—sets us back in terms of being able to express ourselves, which is sad because we have a lot of wonderful stories to tell.”

With so much at stake and Cheadle being so long in the tooth—not to mention busy—Hood decided to tell the story of Tsotsi in a mixture of the 11 South African languages and cast only regional actors.

“It would have been too risky not to and I feared my own audience would walk out, as they have done in many of these films because the feeling is that they’re being disrespected if it doesn’t sound authentic.”

PRESLEY PERFECTION

Enter Presley Chweneyagae, then a virtually unknown stage actor. It’s safe to say that without him, there would be no debate about redemption. Any other actor would have been just another gangsta punk. But Chweneyagae’s ability to look like a scared orphan one minute and ruthless killer the next with a flicker of the eye is no doubt what has sparked so many mixed feelings among viewers.

“I recognized the cold-bloodedness in him right away when he auditioned for another part, but that was all. Then he said to me, ‘Gavin, I hope you don’t mind but I’ve prepared something for Tsotsi. Would you mind if I, I, I just try?’ And he did the scene where he says sorry to his friend. And this actor went from being the most frightening little shit to doing this genuine moment of vulnerability on a dime. So I said, ‘Okay, you need to come back and please prepare the following scenes.’”

That’s when Hood and co. raked the poor shantytown local over the coals with an eleven-hour audition that ended with him reading through the part where Tsotsi forces a woman to breastfeed his kidnapped baby at gunpoint.

“Right after he got through that scene, we all kind of looked at each other and there was that silent, ‘Yes, we got it.’”

TSOTSI OPENS FRIDAY, MARCH 10

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