Forget the reckless bravado. It’s the flashes of stillness that you notice most inside mercurial young Tsotsi, the troubled title character in Gavin Hood’s Oscar-nominated South African feature, brought to life with great sensitivity by young actor Presley Chweneyagae. An impoverished, Johannesburg AIDS orphan with cunning street smarts, Tsotsi’s narrow world is forever changed when an accidental kidnapping leads to an unexpected crisis of conscience.

Shot from the same cannon as Fernando Meirelles’ modern Brazilian classic City of God and similar in its hothouse shantytown milieu life of crime, Tsotsi eschews the maverick thug ferocity and broad crime canvas of that film. Instead, Hood's beautifully etched character study is a classic tale of redemption told through the eyes of a drifting, feral man-child who comes to know himself and a world he does not yet trust—through an unlikely bond with a stolen baby.

I recently caught up with writer/director Gavin Hood to chat about his trek to bring Tsotsi to the screen with integrity intact. Spoken in its native tongue, shot in intimate, widescreen glory and performed with sensitive subtlety by a remarkable young actor with an impressive hold on the camera—and us—right to the film’s elegiac final scene.

Lee Shoquist, Reel Movie Critic: Let’s talk about your relationship with the book and how you approached the adaptation.

Gavin Hood: The script is based on a novel by Athol Fugard. The book is magnificent in terms of its theme and ideas but very much an inner journey of this character, written about what’s going on in his mind. It’s also quite episodic in the sense. The book is absolutely beautifully written, but a tough one to turn into a movie because the novelist is writing about what’s going on the mind of the character, and in the movies you don’t want voice over. Which is why it was so important to find someone like Presley, as an actor, who had the emotional range and the ability to create so much with so little.

What attracted me to the movie is that on a certain level it is a fable; it is a myth. It’s a classic, universal story about a young person who is ignorant of the world and ignorant of their own effect on the world, and has not yet had any kind of introspection. Now this is classically told in an inverted way, with stories like the Buddha, who is wealthy and ignorant and descends into a world beyond his safe home and returns wiser. Tsotsi does that. It’s just somebody who is deeply impoverished who nevertheless has not looked inward. And through a series of encounters with various figures, who traditionally in classic myth might be the mentor figures, in this case it takes the form of a three month old baby and man in a wheelchair, and then a woman who has got her own kid—a single mom—and then it ultimately takes the form of the father himself. But all of these people in some way are unintentionally mentoring him toward a greater self-awareness. When he emerges with self-awareness, that’s the end of the story. He’s moved from being a boy to a man.

LS: And when he gets there by the end of the film, we feel like we’ve actually seen it happen. The final scene of the film is really powerfully acted with little dialogue.

GH: It’s a tough one and the one I struggled with the most. That moment was my biggest worry¾ the final encounter between the father and Tsotsi, and what happens in that exchange where they say almost nothing verbally but a huge amount is exchanged. It was like, ‘How do we strike the right note here?’ I didn’t want Tsotsi to be too cool because then you don’t experience the catharsis that he experiences. If he overplays it, we end up in melodrama. Presley’s performance in that scene is when I thought, ‘I think we have it.’ It’s just the way he is able to hold for a minute and a half. He doesn’t move. He doesn’t speak. It just builds and builds until that need to say, ‘I’m sorry,’ which he can’t say but which we know he’s feeling, and is generated to such an extent that redemption is possible.

LS: Tell me about your unbelievable young actor.

GH: Presley was a true person. It’s one thing to decide to do a film in a local language and use local actors and not do it in English. It’s another thing to actually find the actor that can deliver at the level that is required. You audition and you audition. Then at a certain point, in comes a young man who has never made a film before, has grown up in these kinds of areas. He has been doing theater since he was six years old and has played Hamlet in the State Theater. Therefore has an extraordinary understanding of character development and a willingness to explore.

LS: He’s listening through the whole film. There’s a stillness in him.

GH: Thank you for saying that. Oh man, he’s listening with his eyes, his ears, his smell. That’s one of the things that we worked very hard on with the actors, was to help them move from theater to film. Theater is so much about words and lines. Film is about what happens between lines and in the spaces where there are no lines.

LS: There are many moments like this. For example, the way he watches Miriam (Terry Pheto) breastfeed and then looks away.

GH: Yes, or even the moment in the alley when he says goodbye to her. It’s three lines on the page and someone might say, ‘There’s not enough going on here!’ These little words are just floating on a huge river of emotional stuff that’s going on underneath that has to be exchanged.

LS: The musical score is very effective here and functions as a pronounced character in the story.

GH: The music was like a gift. This is the music that is coming out of the townships right now. It was like, ‘Here is your soundtrack.’ What the music really helped with was to give the film an energy and pace and drive. It grabs the audience by the throat in the first ten minutes and says, ‘I promise I will not bore you.’ This then helps me earn those more silent moments that counterpoint. So you can find the rhythm of the picture and this music helps you to earn the stillness.

LS: Tsotsi is a widescreen picture that’s very controlled and the space is used to heighten the drama. We often think of it as a format for epics, and I suppose this is a different kind of epic, actually. Why this format?

GH: Thank you for asking that. There was a pressure to shoot this film handheld on 16mm grainy, gritty film stock because City of God did it brilliantly. And it was a good model because it made money and it worked and it was excellent. The panic you immediately have is that you’re going to look like you’re imitating. I looked back at myself and said well, first of all, my background as a kid growing up with my dad was that he was an actor when I was young, then a very successful architect. I also grew up around my dad’s love of still photography and wildlife photography, which he still at seventy-eight-years-old has a passion for. I was used to looking through a still camera where composition, lighting and then one little emotional moment happen to make the image. There’s nowhere to hide—there it is. I tend to come at the work like that. I come at the work from an acting point of view because I grew around actors. Then I want to record that emotion. I want to be seen as the observer. I don’t want you to feel my presence in the room as the director, watching me, moving around.

LS: Because it’s a character study. It’s not a kinetic, on the streets crime film.

GH: You said it, I’m happy. It’s not a kinetic, on the streets crime film. I’m going to steal that. Exactly right. It’s very much a character study, but it’s cloaked in the gangster, ghetto genre.