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MillimeterFade to Black:
Gavin Hood, Writer/Director
Mar 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Darroch Greer
“The story has an epic, mythic, timeless, universal, classic quality,” says writer/director Gavin Hood of his film Tsotsi, the South African winner of this year's Oscar for Best Foreign Film. “It's a myth; it's not a documentary.”
Tsotsi, or “thug” in the tsotsi-taal patois of the Johannesburg shantytown, is based on Athol Fugard's only novel, and tells the story of a young criminal who steals a car with a baby in it.
In finding the look for the film, Hood had to contend with recent, exceptional films about disenfranchised youth struggling in ghettos. “There was a lot of expectation that I would shoot in the same style as City of God. ‘It's a ghetto movie; you'll shoot handheld 16mm. This is the film that did well commercially; we should emulate it.’ Well, that immediately sets you into a panic, because I'm probably going to look like an imitator, and I'm going to come up second best — and that's his style, and he's damn good at it.”
Hood's style developed from being the son of a still photographer. “I spent a lot of time as a kid looking through a long lens at some creature — an elephant, a lion, a beetle — waiting for just the right moment of light and composition, and, preferably, some sort of emotional energy. … You're always looking for an emotional point of interest, which, in the case of this movie, is this actor's eyes, because that's where the story's really unfolding — behind his eyes.”
Hood opted for fine grain on a widescreen. He shot Super 35, what he calls “the poor man's anamorphic,” and framed it keeping the mikes out of 1.85 so he could deliver his film, no matter the format, without a cropped picture. “My preferred format for the movie is still 2.35, but you know that they're never going to broadcast it in 2.35 on television. I was afraid that the film would never get released cinematically in somewhere like the United States — that our only hope might be a TV sale. So, at best we have the option of getting it well-presented in a 16:9 format because of the new HD format, which is not box 4:3. But we've done all three versions. You've got the 2.35 version, then we did a 16:9 version, which is almost like 1.85, and then we did a 4:3 version.”
Hood was most pleased with his digital intermediate — his first. Not wanting anything to distract from his actors faces, he muted the colors in both the interiors and exteriors, and even popped the eyes of the actors to help pull in the audience. The exterior of the bustling, bright shantytown was de-saturated 20 percent and given a slight sepia tone. “That just helped us stay stylistically linked to what was going on in our interiors. It also, again, means you can hold the wide shot of the shantytowns for four seconds and absorb it without too much clutter.”
But the DI might have actually saved Hood money as well, as in the crucial opening shot when the young toughs spill out on to the street and the camera reveals their milieu. “I had to shoot that whole scene, plus their reverses coming down the street, in about four hours. You start at 2:00 and the sun's gone by 6:00 — you're shooting their reverses in broad, frigging daylight, and you know that crane shot's got to work so you're saving that for magic hour. But the lighting's not matching at all, and that's not the DP's fault. That's because, if you're on a big movie, you come back tomorrow and do the close-up the same time, and you keep going four or five times until you've shot it in the same lighting conditions. The digital intermediate is hugely helpful in smoothing out these lighting difficulties.” Producers take note!
As for his decision to eschew 16mm for a glossier stock? “I didn't feel like we needed to comment on the look of the environment,” Hood asserts. “The environment has grain and texture itself. Let the film record what's really there. You want to feel that grain and texture? Show it. Why do we have to gritty it up when we're shooting a gritty environment? Let the gritty environment be the grit.”
