EMBETH DAVIDTZ on DON’T LET’S GO TO THE DOGS TONIGHT – Sandie Angulo Chen interviews
South African actress turned director speaks with Sandie Angulo Chen about her featre film debut, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, based on Alexandra Fuller’s memoir. The film explores a child’s experience during Zimbabwe’s transition from white rule to democracy, amidst family turmoil and the brutal war. Davidtz chose the memoir for its vivid writing and personal resonance, having grown up in South Africa during similar circumstances. She faced challenges adapting the 24-year-old memoir into a focused narrative and balancing the Zimbabwean nuances with her South African upbringing. Davidtz also discusses the casting of non-actor Lexi Venter and her approach to directing the young novice. And, she reflects on the evolving landscape for women filmmakers and the importance of asserting one’s vision.
Sandie Angulo Chen: We always like to start with all of our filmmakers and just have them tell our viewers briefly what their movie is about.
Embeth Davidtz So my film, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, is about a child living through the very moment in Zimbabwe in which it shifted from white rule to a democratic society at the end of a very, very brutal war. So the child is going through the tail end of the war and the terrors of that. And at the same time, her family is imploding. Her mother has mental illness, and she is very much in love with her Black nanny, but the world around her is fracturing including her relationship with the people that work on the farm. So it’s somewhat of a childhood story, somewhat of it’s not yet a coming of age, but I think a coming into consciousness of a little girl, and it’s all told through the child’s eyes.
SAC: And this is your directorial debut, after a very accomplished career as an actor, what drew you specifically to Alexandra Fuller’s memoir as the story you wanted to tell from behind the camera as well as in front of the camera?
ED: So for me, really, I’d never read a book — she is an amazing writer. So anybody who’s read her work, everybody I run into goes, “My God, her writing.” So she was just one of the finalists for the Pulitzer that speaks to the level of the way that she writes, but she has a way of capturing time and place and character, and the way that she describes her family with so much love but humor, but honesty and really set the story of this very eccentric, quite wacky, colorful family within the context of a very, very complex socio,, political meltdown, and she has an amazing sense of humor, and the characters of the mother and the child that she once was come through so strongly that I just remember reading it first of all and going, my God, I recognize all of this because of my childhood in South Africa.
Zimbabwe is different to South Africa, but her writing really covered a lot of what happened for me as a kid.
And then, I just could see the characters. I could see the place. And I just thought, I must tell the story. I wanted to play the part of the mother, which I very much reduced down. Once I realized I was going to be directing it, I thought, I cannot. This can’t be that big of a part while I am trying to direct this thing. But also that naturally happened as I was moving along with the script. I thought the way into this world and the way to tell the story is by making it through the peephole of the child’s point of view, but I just loved her writing. That was the first thing that grabbed me, the characters, the humor, the tragedy of it.
SAC: Given how much you loved her writing, what challenges did you face adopting a memoir that meant so much to you and making it such a focused narrative?
ED: Yeah, that focused narrative is the thing that really, really challenged me for the first probably five years of trying — because it took me six years to work on the screenplay. The memoir encompasses 24 years of her life, and this is just a tiny moment in the middle of it, or a few moments throughout it, that I pulled together and created a moment in time. I made the setting be the war, which just is a couple of pages in the book, and I expanded that out.
And then O took many episodes and many lines from the book, actually, so she helped me, the way that she described herself as a child, helped me come up with the dialog, and even lines from the book I put into the film. But it was that concentrated, almost scaffolding, the blueprint for what the narrative was that was the hardest thing to do. How do you take 24 years and reduce it down into pretty much… I mean, I always try and figure out how long is the setting…a few days. The film takes place over a couple of days, but there are the flashbacks. So that was the hardest thing.
And the other thing was the responsibility of taking on somebody’s story that involves highly personal stuff, mental illness in her family. What’s the way of showing her mother, not in a way of just being punishingly awful, but of showing a dimensional person and also really respecting the Shona people,, the indigenous people whose story is also impacted by the colonialists. And , how do you show both sides of the story? That was really a razor’s edge to walk. So I felt very, very much on the hot seat to get that right.
SAC: , speaking of the protagonist, I’m sure everyone’s going to ask you about the remarkable star turn from Lexi Venter, who plays the young Alexandra, or Bobo, as she’s called. How did you find her, and what was your approach to directing such a young performer in such a layered role?
ED: I really wanted a non-actor. I had a casting director looking and sending in sweet little kids who were used to performative acting, and I just… that’s not the kind of actor I am, and it’s not the kind of actor I felt I could work with, because I did in auditions with these kids, try to get rid of that stuff, and I couldn’t get rid of it. And to their credit, actually, the problem was that once a child learns something, learns a line, then they can’t say it any other way. So my biggest approach, so what I did is I put out a Facebook post and I said, “I’m looking for a wild, feral, dirty, barefoot horse-riding child who’s fearless and open and, has like a gorgeous face and a free spirit.” And somebody in a tiny little town said, “I know a kid like that,” passed it on to the mom, and that’s how I found her.
I met with her, and just knew, instantly, I knew it was her. I feel like my own feral young self went, “That’s you Embeth, and that’s Alexandra back in her day. And we three will merge and create this character.” And she, the big thing was to not give her the lines. The key was not giving her scenes ahead of time, not letting her learn lines. I put two cameras on her at all times. I gave her things to play with in the tub or the shoe or the whip, as long as she was kept busy, or the cigarette. She loved the smoking part. She just loved having tactile things. Because she’s seven, I only had her for three hours a day, and her focus was very limited, and I had a lot that I had to cover every day. So the way that I got the most out of her was to give her something to keep her occupied, to play with, and then to call lines out from off camera. So I would say, “You’re going to say to her this, and she’s going to say this to you.” It meant a very complicated editing process, because I didn’t want her to learn the scene. There was one scene that she learned, and I couldn’t use it, and that was early on in shooting, and I’m glad I learned it early on. And I said, I can’t give her the scenes anymore. Let me just throw scenarios at her, and either I will work with her, if I’m the person on screen with her, or someone else will. And I used a lot in the voiceover after the fact, which I also recorded a line at a time, and I’d say it to her. And she just has an amazing young emotional intelligence, so that if I said a line to her, like, “Africans don’t have last names,” she could say it like that. She wouldn’t go “AFRICANS don’t have last names,” because some children parrot. They talk that way. She could do it the way I was asking her to do it. So,, if I were directing, when I direct the older actors, I don’t do that with them. Obviously, they have their own agency and stuff, but I had to be very controlled at the same time very free with her.
SAC: Yeah, that authenticity comes through so beautifully in the film, and it really is remarkable the performance that you were able to hone out of such a young performer. I wanted to switch a little bit and just talk about being a woman filmmaker, if that’s okay, since our organization loves to elevate the voices of women filmmakers. You’ve had this long career, and I have to ask, how have you seen the landscape in the industry change for women?
ED: Listen, it’s changed a lot for the better. I’ll give two answers here, yes and no, it’s changed. It hasn’t changed, right? So I feel like the way that it’s changed is, you know, the time, the thing that made me actually option the book was people were beginning to option things like Reese and Nicole were doing, what is it? Pretty little Lies. What’s that called? Again, that Big Little Lies. And I went, “Oh, interesting.” Different material than I was interested in. But wow, they actually taking asserting, finding material and asserting, which made me go, what’s material that I loved? I’d really stopped working for a while to raise my kids. And then I thought, God, I loved that book. Let me go back to that again. The rights were available. That started me on the journey of this.
So the fact that women are finding the material advocating for themselves, the fact that the business is saying it’s open to women, it is… The door, the crack in the door is definitely wider than it used to be. Is it wide open? No. I did find, and I won’t mention where, in my own experience of filming, that misogyny is alive and well, and so in the technical aspects of me as a female of almost 60 years old, and an actress showing up and going, “This is how I want this to be done.” I definitely felt some male pushback where we know better. We think it should be like this. We should be like that. So for the first maybe seven days or so, I went along with it. And was like, gosh. I kept pushing and saying, No, I’d like it more like this, or I’d like it more like that. And then finally, I had to actually be really strong, somewhat strident, and go, “This is the way it needs to be. This is my vision. This is what we need to do,” which is very hard for me as a person. That’s not my nature to do it. And then it fell into place, but I had it in several layers of the making of the film. And , it happened more than once in two different departments, and it was hard for me, and I felt my face on fire when I did that. But I think that’s where, yes, things have changed. The doors opened a bit. It also hasn’t, and I think it’s hard. I was talking to a female producer last night who said,, women, female, female filmmakers, are still struggling. I just think we’re on a path now to where I think it’s just going to get easier and easier, but there’s a generational thing that still has to fade out.
SAC: Absolutely. And do you think that there is a way that you can see moving forward, that now that you have made your first feature film as a director, that you can try to help other up and coming women filmmakers?
ED: For sure, I think you have to go into it,, if your instinct is, and I’m almost 60, so my instinct, I’m old school, right? I grew up in the old school way of the business of , whoever was in charge, that’s who you listen to. They were right? And as a female, you were ‘difficult’ if you raised your hand or said something right, particularly as an actress. So, we’ve all learned to tamp down.
I would just say to female filmmakers, be really clear on what your vision is. what you want your film to be, or your role, whatever it is you want. You know what you want it to look like. You need to pick the collaborators around you that understand it, do really good due diligence and find out what other people who’ve worked with them think of them, and I ended up with wonderful people, but even they needed to be directed in that I’m a sweet person, I’m a nice person, I’m kind to people, but don’t fuck around with me. I know what I want this to look like, . And as women, I would say, just go against what you’ve been told, if you’ve been told, be nice, show up. Be sweet, be charming, go against it. If the avenues that you need open are not open, it’s tough to do. Confrontation is hard, but you have to do it, and then things actually flow really beautifully after that.
SAC: Given that you’ve shared about your own background, being South African, are there parts of the movie that are just as much informed by your experience as they were from, you know, by Alexandra’s memoir?
ED: Yes, and I have to walk a really fine line with this, because sometimes I would go much too much in, particularly in the writing of it in my research, in my formulating of the of the screenplay. In my mind, I really was dipping into the South African experience. And Alexandra was very tough on me at certain points in time where she said, You have to remember this is Zimbabwean. You have to root this in the Zimbabwean story, not the South African and she needed to set me right there. And I actually was a little bit beaten up by it. But oh my gosh, did it help me, because I truly then descended into the research that I needed on the Shona people, because they were not the South African — the Xhosa, or the Sotho, or the Zulu, which I knew. There’s a big difference culturally between all of these tribes. There’s a huge difference between the way that the Zimbabwean war played out and the way that the South African liberation finally came. Very, very different, and the Zimbabweans are very proud of who they are and how different their path was to this. And then there are masses of overlap, so I had to do a lot of due diligence. I had to really figure that out in the writing. I had to figure it out in the music that I chose. But at the end of the day, and I remember, this was my selling point to Fuller when I went to say, I know I can tell your story. I know I can direct this film, and I know it because I’ve lived it. And we had a very intense conversation where I said, this happened to me. This happened to me. You know our parallels of alcoholism in the family, mental illness in the family, a fractured world outside. You know the smell of the Earth, the feel of the sun, the love for the land, the love for the people. Those were many things that were just absolutely parallel.
SAC: And what was your relationship like with Alexandra fuller during the adaptation process? You know, you have to balance honoring her lived experience while also making it your cinematic vision.
ED: Yeah, it was a very tricky one for me. I was absolutely terrified for most of the writing process, because I’d write something, and I’d show it to her. She was incredibly helpful. She wrote things back. She wrote lines and pieces of dialog that I actually put into the film, because no one knows the voice of Bobo like she does. And she set me off on a path. When I wrote early voiceover, I pulled lines from the book and then sent her my first draft, and she sent try these lines, and oh my God, it was a revelation. And then once she’d given me that, then I knew how to continue to write Bobo’s voice. So,, it was a great relationship. It is a great relationship.
She’s really happy with the film in the end,, there’s one scene,, she can’t help herself, because she’s so brilliant, and she’s such a perfectionist. When she saw the film, she said “Everything was perfect, just that one scene you shouldn’t have put in the film.” So, listen, she’s entitled to that. And then when, when I added and expanded, thank God, she approved of the things that I then added to it, like the ending of the film that was not in the book. And she understood why I wanted to put it there. I said, Listen, you have to understand that. I have to separate from the absolute adherence to what the book was in order to make it a film. And she did understand it. Thank God. So her biggest thing and her holding my feet to the fire on this helped me was to get the Zimbabwean experience right and to really honor that. And I did, so she was happy.
SAC: So I have to ask, because given the conversation right now about white settler colonialism, I mean, we’re still having these conversations socio-politically, you know, what do you hope that audiences take from this film? Both personally and socio-politically?
ED: My hope would be it’s two pronged the same way that the film is. It’s the microcosm and the macrocosm, right? It’s what’s happening inside the family, and then it’s what’s happening in the outside world. The world at large doesn’t really understand what happened in Africa. I think it’s a reminder of what did colonialism do, what did it bring? It brought in this structure that upended the natural order of things and always as always around us, everything that’s happening right now. It’s financially motivated.
It feels like everybody’s motivated by power and by what they can get, what they can gain. Colonialism was that, and then, even as illustrated with the character of Nicola, it is the refusal to let go of the land. “This is mine. I’m not letting go of this. This belongs to me” And the truth is, anybody who knows the history of Zimbabwe will know, that at the end of the day, once the whites left, it left behind, and similarly, it did this in South Africa, once power is stabilized and everyone gets a fair share, the organism that was created is already broken. The organism is already crippled. I want people to look at Africa with compassion and understand that. You know, I’ve heard a certain politician talking about African countries in a particularly degrading way. And I would want the world to understand Africa inherited what was given to it when democracy emerged.
And so there’s that, know the history of it. Know that we are still struggling. Everybody’s struggling in the world for the same thing, fighting against the same thing of dominance, people wanting to dominate other people. So it’s a reflection of, look what happens when that happens, and there are children watching. So there’s a child experiencing this in every war, all over the country, all over the world right now. So that’s a big thing. It’s a theme that goes through my mind all the time. How are we still repeating the same things? Mankind just does it over and over again. So that would be the bigger thing, and then the smaller thing, the macro or the microcosm of it would be that, again, from the child’s point of view. We all come from varying degrees of functional dysfunction within our families, that similarly, there are children watching. I think in my own life, I’m somebody who spent many years putting myself back together again. I have wonderful parents. I love my parents, but they really screwed up in a lot of ways, in the things that they weren’t conscious about. I’m sure I’ve screwed up with my own kids. I just would hope that we would begin to move forward with awareness and some level of trying to do better as generations move on.
SAC: Thank you so much for your time. It was a beautiful film, and I love speaking with you. Thanks.
ED: Thank YOU so much.
