Embeth Davidtz read Alexandra Fuller’s memoir “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs” with keen interest, in part because the longtime actress herself had grown up in South Africa around the same time that Fuller recounted living in the Republic of Rhodesia as the country was on the verge of controlling their own destiny, soon to be known as Zimbabwe, as Great Britain’s colonial rule was coming to an end. But as much as she had a personal interest, Davidtz also knew a good role when she saw one and could imagine herself as Nicola, the mother of two children whose naturally occurring psychological unraveling coincides with her world being torn apart, looking ahead at a future in which the largely carefree life on a farm she had built would get considerably more complicated as the country would enter a time of social and political turmoil.
It was an undeniably juicy part, but Davidtz ended up with two when for the first time in a storied career, she decided she’d step behind the camera for an adaptation of Fuller’s book in addition to being in front of it. The poise and confidence that she’s long projected in films ranging from “Schindler’s List” and “Junebug” to memorable turns on TV series such as “Mad Men” and “Ray Donovan” comes through even when she’s not on screen in “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs,” capturing a surreal time with inventive approach when she cedes the starring role to Nicola’s seven-year-old daughter Bobo, who tries to make sense of a situation that’s bedeviling even the adults. Played by first-time actor Lexi Venter, Bobo is blissfully ignorant of decorum as she asks questions about why things are the way they are, with the family potentially having to move as they confront an uncomfortable reality of facing up to inequities they never thought to question as white landowners presiding over a predominantly Black workforce in a colonial era.
Davidtz does make sure to give Nicola a memorable introduction, literally coming in with guns a-blazin’ as she attempts to ward off snakes that have crept onto the porch of the family’s house with an assault rifle, but she makes an even greater impression in expressing how the mother’s become so consumed with with protecting what the family has that she’s lost all track of what she’s trying to protect as Bobo largely keeps company with the family’s dog and sees her caretaker Sarah (Zikhona Bali) as more of a maternal figure in her life, and her increasingly erratic behavior alienates those around her, putting everyone more on edge than they already are in tense times. While Fuller’s book spanned two decades, “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs” unfolds over a much more condensed chronology, sparing only a drive to Bobo’s grandmother’s house as its one foray outside of the family farm, and yet Davidtz is able to speak so much to the historical tensions that have led to this moment with savvy production design and needle drops that provide proper context and with an untamed camera not only captures the sensibilities of her curious prepubescent main character but a wild moment in time.
After taking Telluride and Toronto by storm last fall, “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs” is starting its U.S. theatrical run this week and Davidtz generously spoke about how it became only natural that she direct the first feature script she was inspired to write, the parallels of her personal experience with Fuller’s that led her to include some family heirlooms in the film and how her sharp instincts as a director were not all that different than those she had developed as an actor and how they ultimately led to an impressive debut.
I didn’t set about thinking I was going to direct it, but I loved the memoir and the characters of Bobo and Nicola so much that I thought this would make a good film and I could get to play the part of Nicola, so [I thought] let me option the rights and someone else can write and direct it, little knowing that I would end up writing it myself. I kept toying with [the idea of] how does this make a movie and I ended up with a screenplay and then once the screenplay was written, I’d taken so long to write it [over] so many drafts I thought, “I actually know how to tell the story and I’m scared to give it to someone else.” That’s how it happened, sort of upside down and by accident.
It turned out right and it must’ve been tough to adapt as a movie when it took place over a longer period of time and not necessarily Bobo’s perspective. What cracked it open?
It dawned on me one day the only way that I’m going to be able to show all of the struggles with race and all of [other] issues going on is through the child’s eyes because at first I made it far too vast and then I tried to bring it in and make it a shorter period of time. I had the main events but I couldn’t cover 20 years and it was told from the outside. But I really began to enjoy the process of getting into Bobo’s head and pulling the parts from the book that were her outrageous behavior and thoughts that really brought the script together.
I think the memoir had the impact on me that it did because I had many similar parallel experiences as a child in South Africa, so I had all that memory in me. We are so wide open when we’re that age that we really lock into our memories as young children and I was liberated by being able to make this film. I could take what I’d carried as a child and create a child who’s now my favorite character in a film I could put lots of my own crazy memories in. That was my grandmother’s ashtray with the bum [on the backside facing the table that’s a prop in the film] and I borrowed the ashtray from my brother, so I could put that scene in the film. I could also put in incidents of watching drunk adults behaving badly – the way that adults used to drink and misbehave when we were little – and how we’d sit under the table, smoking cigarettes and stealing beer.
All of that’s in the memoir and clearly Alexandra Fuller had the same experiences, so then to take it to the next step and express [that experience] in the character of that mother [Nicola]. You have to almost walk in her shoes to understand why someone would behave like that. It’s a very difficult thing to do and I don’t ever make excuses for being an unlikable [character] as Nicola, but I think when you understand the full story – her background, her losses, her mental illness – I wanted to make sense of it. It doesn’t explain fully why someone so wants to hang on to their land, never let it go and think that they have to have dominance over the people who were originally there, but it was liberating to me from my past to be able to play that and direct a film about it.
That was really tricky because it is her perspective, but it’s not always what she sees, so it’s tricking the audience a bit because sometimes to show something properly, it couldn’t just be her point of view. I set it up with the voiceover, and there was the [more traditional] spoken voiceover and then the whispered voiceover and sometimes the whispers were her deep inner thoughts. The camera had to take the liberty of sometimes moving around to show the world properly, but I always tried to anchor it back in her voice and then I’d bring it back because [Lexi Venter], the child who played Bobo, was so beautifully visual that I’d have to be on her face rather than just showing what she saw, like RaMell [Ross] did with “Nickel Boys.”
I also realized I had to be as tight as possible at all times. One thing I learned is that it’s one thing to take a camera and move and stay close, and I used special cameras that weren’t that big and lenses that weren’t that heavy to do handheld, but I met my match in the steadicam — or it was more the lens that was put on the steadicam. The first 10 days, I stumbled around a little bit not figuring it out, and I knew absolutely what I needed was to go in tighter and I kept saying to the [director of photography] “We’ve got to go in closer. We’ve got to go in closer.” We shot a few things on the steadicam already that were wide that I ended up just cutting all together, but I learned a big technical lesson very early on and I’m glad I did, especially because of Lexi and the detailed world that I wanted to show.
When you talk about connecting the voiceover to the visuals, what was it like to get that performance out of Lexi after the fact? It’s quite attuned to what’s happening on screen, but I imagine because of her age, you couldn’t exactly have her engage with that in recording it.
The voiceover I [initially] wrote in the screenplay because I wanted to just cut through all the exposition. I hate someone saying, “Well, when my mother was…” So it served a big functional part in the screenplay, but then when I actually was filming with the seven-year-old, there was a lot that I couldn’t get right. There’s be an emotional back and forth and I’d have to cut it up and or not give [Lexi] lines or shoot to cover her face, but then the way I got the voiceover was in a recording studio a line at a time. [Lexi’s] very little, so I couldn’t give her a line because she couldn’t even read so I would say [a specific line like] “Mom says we mustn’t come into her room at night,” and then she’d say “Mom says we mustn’t come,” then I’d say, “No, say it again like this,” but then I could stitch the voiceover onto the picture. It was really a trick, but I needed to do it because otherwise I don’t think I’d have had a full film.
Yes, I got to be loving and kind and really support my actors, which I don’t always feel I was given. There’s been a lot of amazing directors in my life, but the ones that stood out [in thinking about this were those] that I didn’t want to repeat. I used to always say to Lexi, “I’m not nice mom when I’m on screen when the camera’s rolling, but then I’m going to be very nice. You’ll see when I’m not playing Nicola.” And it was a great fulfillment, almost like putting away the ghosts of sets past that weren’t with nice directors. You meet all kinds of people in the world and all kinds of people in this business. I was just happy I got to play a kind mom to my cast.
Zikhona Bali seems as much of a discovery as Lexi, playing the role of a surrogate mother in Sarah. What was it like to find her and develop their dynamic between the actors?
I couldn’t make the film without the right Sarah because Sarah becomes this very important figure, representative of something to me and I’d seen many excellent actresses and worked with a few. Then this tape arrived from Zikhona and she just was so still and sure and quiet and calm. I just knew right away she was the right person – there was no artifice. She never overacts. She’s just always so clear and beautiful and then her working relationship with Lexi was so wonderful. She just emanates this spiritual quality that character Sarah needed, so I was beyond blessed with her. I was so lucky that I found an actress like that.
What was it like finding a central location that could fit so much of the storytelling into it?
I did this on such a tiny budget that I knew I just needed to be in one spot, other than the few things that they have in town at the very beginning [of the story]. Everything took place in and around this area I knew and it was one of the first locations that I looked at. That funky old house that was really messed up, the hills nearby the places where she’d be riding her motorbikes — it was all within a one-mile radius and that worked for just how much I had to shoot and my short days with the child. Even the weather held. It ended up being a place that we can afford and then the look of it — the dappled light in the grove that I needed and the really harsh light in the heat of the day and the sunsets that I’d get over this one mountain — gave me all the visual things I didn’t even know I needed when I first found that location.
Yeah, so many photographs. The photograph that she looks at at the end is of my sister and a lot of the wardrobe were pieces that I’d found and collected over time because our budget just didn’t extend to finding a ratty old silk robe like that. The ashtray was my grandmother’s and I’d written that scene about that ashtray that used to perplex me as an eight-year-old. I remember looking at that thing and wondering why that bare bum was there [on the back] and wanting to feel crazy, naughty thoughts about it. I also used a ton of old faded British memorabilia because I really wanted to talk about the fall of the empire. A really exciting thing for me was also having the dog that was actually Lexi’s dog, so I could get the natural interaction between the two of them. I really had that wild and messy feeling of dogs on couches, and it authentically was that way in the book.
The soundtrack also becomes a part of the storytelling since you invoke a lot of old British songs that seem like leftovers from another era. What was it like to put together the music for this?
That was the soundtrack of that moment in time. Everyone in Zimbabwe as well as everyone in South Africa had that Rodriguez album and that [Chris de Burgh] song “Patricia the Stripper” we used to perform as children and do a strip tease. I don’t think Americans are as familiar with it, but the placement of a few of those cheesy love songs were of the time and I remember hearing them as a kid. Then I had a wonderful composer Chris Letcher, who took the Shona hymns and re-recorded them with a wonderful Shona choir to create the more African spiritual sound to it.
Did it feel like a homecoming, returning to South Africa and working with local crew?
It was a huge home homecoming for me and I had an amazing crew. All the critical people just showed up like manna from heaven and there wasn’t a single person there that wasn’t God sent. For me, also being able to go back and even shoot some of those difficult scenes — the scenes where Nicola’s horrifically abusive as she is a couple of times in the film — it was hard to play those out in front of my mostly Black crew standing there. But people cried and I hugged people afterwards and just said, “I’m sorry we have to show it and do it, but I want to tell the truth.” The kids often weren’t there when I was shooting stuff like that, but it was liberating. It was a healing of things and felt like closing a circle in some way for me.
That was probably the most challenging for me was moderating and knowing what I was doing because I didn’t have time to look at playback. Once or twice, I’d look and to see how does that read, but the [director of photography], my producer and my first AD were all eyes that I could have on me. My editor was there on a few days and he’d say, “Listen, this is a big scene and doesn’t feel like it’s gone far enough.” Interestingly enough, everyone has a different perspective on everything, so in the end the things that I picked for the edit weren’t necessarily the ones where someone else had given a note. I just think I was able to jump in and not overthink myself on what I’m doing. I just had no time, so it [was] “Give it a hundred percent, get two takes and move on” because I’ve got to keep shooting the kid.
Then [the editing] was my absolute favorite part of it because it was like this chest of jewels just opened and [it became about] which jewel am I going to pick? I had an amazing editor and there were so many mistakes that I could fix — everything from lighting mistakes to sound to even things that I could insert. The television [footage in the background of some scenes in the house] I didn’t have at first and I needed them because that footage showed how violent the war was, so the editing was just just a revelation to me. I realize now it’s almost the most important thing and if I do this again, I would shoot very much with a view to how you’re going to edit.
I hope you get to since you’re obviously good at it. What’s it been like getting this off your shoulders after carrying it with you for such a long time?
It’s very exciting for me. It’s very scary because you’re putting your baby out in the world and you want people to like your baby. Some will, some might not, but I’m excited to share it with everybody and I’m relieved to let it go. It’s felt like a very long labor and I’m ready to give birth to it.
“Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” opens on July 11th in Los Angeles at the AMC Burbank 16 and the Laemmle Royal and New York at Film at Lincoln Center and the Angelika Film Center. Future dates and theaters can be found here.