It’s exciting when a new auteur emerges on the film scene. Greta Gerwig took the leap from acting to writing and directing back in 2017 with “Lady Bird,” and now actress Embeth Davidtz, who broke out back in 1993 with “Schindler’s List,” and since then has starred in “Matilda” (1996), “Bridget Jones Diary” (2001), and tons of TV, including the recent “The Morning Show,” has emerged as an auteur in her own right with “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight.”
Davidtz adapted the 2001 Alexandra Fuller bestselling memoir of the same name over eight years, after many others, including the author, tried and failed.
That time was well-spent. The final result, which debuted to raves at the Telluride and Toronto festivals last fall, is a detailed, specific, visually rich, and immersive dive into a time and place: war-torn Rhodesia/Zimbabwe in 1980. A once peacefully settled farm family is now in terrible danger from the civil war erupting around them. While the stressed-out white parents (Davidtz and Andreas Damm) sleep with guns by their beds, their feral daughter Bobo (discovery Lexi Venter) plays with her dog and local housekeeper Sarah (Zikhona Bali), whose loyalty is hard to parse.
The filmmaker’s breakthrough: anchoring the narrative on the eight-year-old Bobo. By focusing on the Rhodesian farm girl, Davidtz found herself, too.
The film, while based on Fuller’s life, is also rooted in Davidtz’s experience moving to South Africa at the same age, and confronting a baffling, racist culture. She is attending the opening in South Africa with her family, partly so her two grown kids can visit their grandparents.
Davidtz felt compelled to adapt Fuller’s memoir herself. “It’s such a mirror image of my own [life],” she told IndieWire. “The reason I fell in love with the story was because, even the child that I found to play Bobo looked like me at that age. Though the war, the mother, the mental illness, the alcoholism, the relationship to Zimbabwe, that was Alexandra’s story, mine was a child put into this unequal place, alcoholism in the family, the loneliness, the unsupervised childhood, where things felt so scary and so much could go wrong.”
While Davidtz and Fuller bonded over their shared experiences, “I have to be careful to always distinguish between my story and hers,” said Davidtz. “They have blended at this stage.”
Davidtz did not hesitate to make the film her own. “I kept telling it from the outside, the third person, trying to explain and show,” she said. “I remember one day thinking, ‘This isn’t working.’ What did it was the opening line: ‘Mum says we mustn’t come creeping into her room at night.’ What if that was the voice? What if I wrote everything from that point of view? It changed everything once I did that.”
Where did these hidden writing and directing skills come from? “I’ve always written,” she said. “I loved English at university [Rhodes University]. I’ve actually got a little novella that I’ve whittled away at. But acting always took me away from it. Acting is distracting.”
While Davidtz’s acting resume is extensive, over the last 20 years she took time to raise her kids. She battled breast cancer. And over the last eight years, she tackled Final Draft. “Very slow,” she said. “I’m a slow writer. I’m slow with technology. But the book gave me the scaffolding to pick the sliver of time that I wanted to tell the story in, and then pull and cherry pick the pieces that were the most interesting dramatically.”
The filmmaker invested her own money in the project. “My husband [attorney Jason Sloane] kindly threw in a bit, and we had one person who had a little bit of money, not a lot, and we ended up doing it for about $1.4 million, U.S. And there’s a good exchange rate,” she said.
Proceeding on the movie hinged on a stroke of luck. “I took a Starz Network job [‘The Venery of Samantha Bird’],” she said. “It was a good, well-written pilot, which was then going to be an eight-part series, and we got most of the way through it. Then they got in trouble with the writing, and they fired the showrunner, and then the strike happened. I took that job because I said, ‘Whatever I make on this is going to hire me the DP and the camera package that I want.’ That job that I shot in the five months, went away. They were not airing it because it didn’t get finished. It wasn’t very good, but I got the money. So [the financing] was cobbled together.”
Davidtz shot the film mostly around one farm in South Africa. “We got the one house, the one location, that land that we rented with that messed-up old house,” she said. “I had a brilliant set designer. She decorated this set, but all of it was old, broken stuff. So we somehow managed.”
When she searched for the right cinematographer, she “pulled family photographs from the late ’70s with those great saturated colors,” she said. “Willie Nel came along, and I started talking about the way Peter Weir shot ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock.’ I could see the dust and the dirt and the light. And he started talking the same language back at me.”
Nell proposed they acquire a costly lens package, the Black Wing Tribe 7. “It’s a Panavision lens that has this way of filming so that the edges fall off,” said Davidtz. “You get a lot of those flares, but it gives you that vintage feeling. So it feels like we were looking at footage from the late ’70s, early ’80s.”
One hurdle Davidtz encountered while shooting was the child labor law which kept the work, according to Venter’s parents, to only three hours a day. “I nearly had a nervous breakdown about it,” Davidtz said. “Everything around that child was so beautiful that I wished we’d had more leeway. But we still did it. It made me even more laser-focused to get it done, to ensure we were economical with her. By the time I had to shoot my hard scenes, which were later, you see it in my face: I’ve been through the ringer of just trying to carry this thing and keep it light for the child, because you can’t burden a seven-year-old with whatever’s going on behind the scenes. She couldn’t read upset in me, and so I had to put it somewhere else. I was nicely worn down by the end to shoot the scenes of myself. I had no director. I had to direct myself. I couldn’t watch it. I had no time to watch it back. I looked a little roughed up. And it helped.”
At the end of the movie, the family are expelled from the Garden of Eden. “They didn’t belong there,” said Davidtz. “Sarah doesn’t believe in the Garden of Eden, that Adam and Eve wore leaves on their private parts. The African believes in Maori and Earth. So there’s the African thought process, and the European thought process, and it’s the collision of the two. And ultimately, the whites had to capitulate, they had to leave. For anybody who has lived in Africa and no longer lives there, you are always separated. You feel separated from God. You feel separated from the thing that you’ve loved. I live in America, and I always feel I’m not connected to the thing that I grew up loving. But I can’t live there anymore.”
It was tough for Davidtz, shooting some of the things her racist character does in the movie in front of the all-Black crew. “I felt embarrassed at times, and filled with shame,” she said. “We laughed, and we hugged, and I kept saying, ‘I’m sorry.’”
The experience of telling this story was cathartic. “So healing,” said Davidtz. “You don’t think that’s real. You don’t think something can heal, but it does. I remember being a child much like Lexi is, like Alexandra Fuller was,” said Davidtz. “Far too young, becoming aware of sexual tensions in the air, with adults being drunk and being sexual with each other, with children being the objects of sexual attention from gross old uncles.”
Luckily the child actors were kept separate from the adult material. “Lexi was blissfully unaware of most of what she was doing,” said Davidtz. “It’s a sleight of hand with this deep, smart, and sensitive child to tell her enough, but not too much. I’d throw the lines to her, but keep her in play mode. Put her in a tub of water, give her dolls to play with, shoes, put her under that table with her dog. It was her own dog. And give her scarves, I said, ‘Tie the scarf on the dog, stick the feather up the guy’s leg,’ and then I can use the voiceover, which I could add later.”
Having mined her traumatic childhood, Davidtz is ready to move on to other phases of her life. “I’m a middle-aged woman,” she said. “A lot has happened since [age] seven: from men and the complexities of being female, to being a mother, to losing your way, and then finding your way back again. I’m trying to get the rights to an Alice Munro short story. I always want to work with the money I’ve cobbled together without someone telling me: ‘Here’s $50 million, but you’ve got to tell this story.’ I’m so scared of that. Everybody said, ‘Don’t go near something that covers race.’ And I said, ‘I know if I tell it the right way, I can tell the story.’”
Sony Pictures Classics is sending Davidtz on the road with the movie. And Trevor Noah has come on as an executive producer. She told him: “If you can get some word out on this film, and if you want to put your name on it, just let the world know about it.” And SPC knows how to pay the awards game when the time comes.
Next up: With her work on “The Morning Show” finished, Davidtz has cleared the decks for more writing. “There’s nothing in my way, which is great,” she said. “Acting is distracting, you’ve got to pay attention to what you’re doing. So it would have taken me away. I’m so happy there’s nothing else except this on my plate right now and what I can write in my spare time.”
Her agents sent her a couple of action scripts. “I would be bad at this,” she said. “I can’t. No thanks. So the poor agents feel deflated if you say ‘no’ a few times. When I find the right thing, I will know it.”
Sony Pictures Classics will release “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” in theaters on Friday, July 11.