Khalo Matabane won the award for best South African film at the 2007 Durban International Film Festival (Diff) for Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon. He returns with the remarkable State of Violence, which is the opening-night film of Diff 2010. Set in Johannesburg, the film tells the story of a man whose wife is murdered in what seems to be a random act of violence. He embarks on a search for the killer, only to discover that the killing is linked to the darkness in his past. From one of South Africa’s most promising filmmakers, this is a complex meditation on the nature of vengeance and violence.
Your new film enjoys its world premiere on Friday. When was it completed?
I’m busy completing it now. Friday afternoon, we will have finished the grading and the final mix. I’m very particular about sound. It’s imperative to the overall aesthetic of the film to get the sound just right. If you look at The Hurt Locker or Apocalypse Now, the overall effect of the film is fundamentally dependent on the quality of the sound. It’s all about the texture.
Those are two quite violent films. Is State of Violence a violent film?
No, I wouldn’t describe it as that. Although acts of violence guide the narrative, the film itself is not overtly violent. The conflict is more of one between past and present than between individuals. In that sense, it’s a relatively abstract meditation on the nature of violence as opposed to being simply a violent film.
Sound is an inherently technical element of the filmmaking equation. If you’re not shooting on a huge Hollywood budget, does focusing on technical aspects of the medium pose a degree of risk?
Of course, but that’s the whole point. There is a certain school of thought that says “small” films need to steer clear of the big stuff that costs a lot of money — aeroplanes being blown up, cruise liners sinking, that kind of thing. But I don’t buy into that. After all, I’m telling a big story and my challenge is to tell it in a big way on a small budget. For me, it’s all about attention to detail. Despite its astronomical budget, Avatar was all about obsessive attention to detail. Even on a way smaller budget, that discipline is crucial to avoid being thrown into the ghettoes of African or indie filmmaking.
How do you manage to capture this scrupulous detail on a tight budget and an even tighter shooting schedule?
You just have to be extremely resourceful. There’s also some luck involved. For example, from a filmmaker’s perspective the township is already art-directed. If the script says: “Alex, 1980s”, you go to Alex now, throw in a few Casspirs and Hippos and there it is. I think Neill Blomkamp discovered that too with District 9.
You have previously said that State of Violence is the second part of a trilogy, with your first film, Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon, being the initial instalment. To what extent is this still true?
I have been intrigued by the interlinking themes of migration, violence and religion for as long as I can remember and have always wanted to make a trilogy based on them.There’s an elegant finality, a completeness, in the concept of trinity. The sun, the moon and the stars. The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. That sort of thing. A trilogy of films, done properly, achieves the state where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. [Krzysztof] Kieslowski did it well in the Three Colours films. There’s an overarching unity involved where you can see them together as one epic creation, but they are also incredible in their individual rights.
So if Conversations was about migration [the film dealt unflinchingly with prejudice and suspicion among people from different cultures and countries] and State of Violence is about violence, can we expect your third opus to be a meditation on religion?
That I can’t say right now. At any given moment I have about a dozen ideas swirling about in my head. For film, for television [he made the TV series When We Were Black], for documentaries [Matabane has several acclaimed documentaries under his belt: Story of a Beautiful Country, The Waiters and Two Decades Still]. At the moment I’m developing a film about the gangs of the Western Cape. I want to do another film as quickly as possible. As a filmmaker I’m in search of a language, so it’s imperative to maintain massive forward momentum. Most filmmakers break through on their third film and I want to get there as quickly as possible.
If this is the case, with increased success and recognition, are you looking forward to working with bigger budgets?
On the surface of it the answer is, obviously, yes. Bigger budgets mean more technical and logistical freedom. Yet it may prove just another challenge to overcome since I’m constantly learning as a filmmaker. For instance, I had initially seen State of Violence as an ambitious epic. Yet during its creation I realised I wanted to keep it very simple. The confrontation between one man and his buried past is a monolithic thing that would be wrong to overcomplicate. Having said that, look at Ken Loach and the singularly powerful films he makes, yet he still battles to get the cash. Is this what I want? To die a noble death and not be able to afford the coffin? Ideally I want to strike a balance between making the films I want to on the kinds of budgets that give me the freedom I need to stay true to my vision without selling out.
Screenings of State of Violence take place on July 24 at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre and on August 1 at Musgrave Centre