Theo (Jarrid Geduld) may not be touched by flames as he enters a burning building at the beginning of “Indemnity,” but he leaves a man on fire, haunted by deaths of two of his colleagues who went with him to respond to a call about an open gasline. Discharged by the fire department to get some much needed therapy, he doesn’t find refuge at home where his wife (Nicole Fortuin), an investigative journalist, receives a disturbing tip about a conspiracy that reaches the highest levels of the South African government, learning first of a hacker who was killed after uncovering classified documents and then ending up dead herself one morning next to him in bed. Already psychologically fragile, the suspicion that Theo could be her murderer by the local authorities would be enough to push him over the edge, but director Travis Taute has other ideas in his twisty debut, watching the firefighter-turned-fugitive attempt to clear his name as he carries on his wife’s investigation while contending with survivor’s guilt from all those who have died around him.
Theo may punish himself the most, but he saves some for others in “Indemnity,” a rare action film set in Cape Town made by local filmmakers that has the size and scope of blockbusters made around the world. Complete with white knuckle brawls, car chases and at one point, Theo dangling out a high-rise — clearly without the aid of CGI — the film is a thrilling showcase of physical feats, but is cleverly driven by its lead’s mercurial mental state, fighting for his survival whether dodging punches from someone else or dealing with the demons within. A breakout last summer at Fantasia Fest, “Indemnity” is set to take the rest of the world by storm as it makes its way into theaters and VOD and recently, Taute spoke about how he wanted to make the kind of entertaining afternoon matinee he’d go see with friends growing up in the ‘90s, working out the film’s dynamic action sequences and marrying the moves to the emotions of the characters.
How did this come about?
I always knew that I wanted to make an action film. It was definitely my favorite genre growing up, the one I obsessed over the most and when thinking about it, there was a particular story that I wanted to tell. Around the time I was starting to develop this film, I really wanted to make a man-on-the-run film and I knew that I wanted to make the kind of film that was a little nod to the kind of action film that was made in the early to late ‘90s/early naughties, which were grounded in realism and more character-driven than they were spectacle. Beyond this veil of entertainment, there was actually a deeper message and I loved that. It was by accident that I stumbled upon an article that I had seen online about soldiers who had just recently returned from the war in Afghanistan, struggling to reintegrate themselves into ordinary society. There was one particularly harrowing story that I read, which was about this man who had been back in the States for less than 24 hours and he had seen his family, he had gone to the convenience store and then he pulled out a gun and shot the cashier multiple times and went outside, sat on the sidewalk and waited for the police to arrive and when they came and questioned him, he actually had no recollection of what he had done.
That was imprinted on my brain and that really sent me down this rabbit hole of looking into trauma as a whole, PTSD specifically and then bringing it closer to home, I started reading all these crazy statistics about the amount of people living in this country who are probably living with PTSD, but undiagnosed and then taking that a step further and going, “Well, look at all the frontline workers and the daily traumas they are witnessing. What is in place for them to cope with these experiences?” The answer was not much. Having always been fascinated by psychology, it felt like a a no-brainer that I’d want to explore this in a film.
And then as I was developing this character as a fireman, I had spoken to a couple of firefighters and listened to their stories and it made sense as what you would think of as an environment, a firehouse to be like [where] it’s incredibly masculine, sometimes to the point where it’s a little bit toxic and that was like a big part of the theme in really developing this character and what he was struggling with because in the film, as much as he’s experienced trauma, there’s an element of pride and how you should be presenting yourself as a man’s man and then the mental health issues or any problems that these guys are facing gets swept under the rug. Mostly you don’t want to been seen as weak, and that is so prevalent, especially in a culture of the fire department or the South African police service, it was really all these different ideas that came together for “Indemnity.”
What was it like to find Jarrid? I understand you may have actually cast him for his acting skills, not knowing he happened to be gifted as an acrobat as well.
It was really fortuitous. I did not know that Jarrid is as athletic as he is, but he had done gymnastics for most of his life and parkour. In the early discussions with producers in terms of what person we were looking for, there’s this preconceived idea of what firemen or Theo should look like. You have this idea of a big, bulky dude and I had gone through basically everyone that there is to see in this country for the film, but I knew I was in good hands when it came to the action and the stunt choreography [because the] guys that I’d been working with for a very long time and were the experts at what they were doing, so whoever we cast, we were going to get that person there regardless. Then Jarrid walked in and he did something so completely different than anyone I’d seen before. He was just so much softer and more vulnerable and you had this immediate empathy towards him.
I thought we’ve got a film that is with all these different action set-pieces, but it’s actually really grounded by character and also a character dealing with a very massive range of emotions and who is extremely volatile and we needed someone who could pull that off, not only that, but because of who this character is and the way he treats his wife — even though you understand it, he could easily not be likable even though you understand him, so it was important not to have an audience disengage with this character’s plight and the things that he’s doing, even though he knows that it’s wrong. When I saw Jarred, he was the kind of person who would bring that vulnerability and likability to the character. Once I saw him, it wasn’t even a question. I really, really wanted him for this role, but then I found out that he is this super-athletic dude who is more than willing to do each and every one of his own stunts., which he did. He underwent training with our stunt coordinators and fight choreographers for two months before we started filming and [he was] dedicated, committed and just a really, really gracious human being to work with and I was very, very grateful that I did.
Everyone’s going to ask you about the stunt on the side of the building, but what was it like getting a camera into those tight spaces like the back of the police van or the elevator?
As I was writing this film, [I knew] when you watch an action film, every ten minutes, there has to be an action sequence, otherwise why is it called an action film? So we were very purposeful in what we thought was achievable, [with] hand-to-hand combat way cheaper than having multiple cars pile up on the freeway, for example. But I also liked this claustrophobic idea on a metaphorical level — each action sequence had to be a shift psychologically for where Theo was in that moment and immediately afterwards, so going into a particular fight sequence or a particular sequence he entered with in a particular headspace, he has to leave in a different headspace, so that definitely informed the way those fights were choreographed. Theo is more defensive and in the early parts of the film before he starts being like, “Shit, now I’ve got to be a little more aggressive,” and Theo’s walls just keep closing in on him, so translating that literally was trying to put him in confined spaces, which is why he was in the elevator or the back of the van.
For both of those things, writing it was one thing and then getting to the directing was, “Oh, okay, this is actually a bit more of a challenge than I thought it was going to be.” [laughs] We built the elevator as a set and it had a fully operating mechanism for the door, so we were able to actually able to open and close it as was necessary. Then depending on where we needed our camera to be, we would just then remove a panel of that side of the elevator and then shift the fight so it’d actually go into camera. But the moving vehicle stunt was a lot more complicated. We had to build a replica of the back of the van and then attach it to a gimbal, which if you think of a rotisserie chicken, it’s basically what that looked like and we shot a portion of the interior of the fight sequence we shot in a studio green screen because we couldn’t actually do that in a moving vehicle on a freeway, but we did actually shoot the car accident, which was one morning [where] we could only afford to do it once and what you saw in the film was the only take that we had. It didn’t even work out exactly how we needed it to, but we had to be clever in our editing because it turns out on the day, the vehicle went into this giant pile of sand and actually stopped its trajectory, so it didn’t roll all the way down the embankment like it needed to and after the first take having to push the damn vehicle down into position so we could continue filming. [laughs] That was an experience.
You pulled it off. And it must be a mix of magic in the editing room and having plenty of production experience, but this looks like a $100 million film even though I suspect it didn’t have that budget. Did knowing that grind or how you could cut this together play a role in creating action on this scale?
It was not an easy task. And kudos to my producers Bradley [Joshua] and Ben [Overmeyer], who just worked that budget over and over again, just to try and figure out how we can get what we need to pull off this film. But we were very blessed because we knew what the ambition of this project was. We wanted to make an action film that could actually stand up there with the rest of them from around the world and in our country, we haven’t necessarily exported any action films before because action is notoriously expensive to produce. The kinds of budgets we usually have to work with don’t give us that opportunity to do it well and I had been my producers and I were courting a lot of the team were guys that had worked on “Mad Max” and ”Tomb Raider,” so many of these Hollywood productions that had come here [to South Africa]. They have the experience and expertise to really pull this off, but they haven’t necessarily done it in a local context for local film, so it really was a conversation going, “Guys, this is really what we’re wanting to do. We want to put something out there” and they bought into the story and everyone really, really believed in the project and got invested in the project probably more than they would have on another production. It was like that in every department.
And we had production experience, but we hadn’t necessarily tried action before and we didn’t actually know how to pull this stuff off. We wanted to learn and it really was such an educational experience. It was unbelievable how much I was able to learn on set from these professionals and how they were able to take what the vision was for the film and turn it into reality, and when it came to everything else, it was like, “Okay, we’ve got these six action sequences, but we need to choose which one is the most important,” so it was like, “Okay, we only have half-a-day to film this elevator fight sequence, but that means you only have a day-and-a-half to film that final corridor fight sequence and it was a balancing act like that, like where would we compromise. The whole film was like that.
It was this organic, let’s take it week by week by week [feeling], as much as we plan for it because we started shooting in March 2020, we got about three weeks into production before national lockdown and the film got shut down and we had to go back four-and-a-half months later, get back into the rhythm of training and feeling what it was like whilst this global pandemic was going and obviously, it was a completely different environment. When we returned, it was a matter of just finding our feet and that was how we needed to tackle each and every sequence. Sometimes we didn’t have solutions for them as we were approaching and there were problems and these scenes got cut from the film, but somehow we ended up making it all the way through and here we are and it’s awesome.
“Indemnity” opens on February 11th in select theaters and on VOD.
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