Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - October 17, 2004
Neil Sonnekus

"Yes," I said. There was no money, though, Witte said. "Fine," I said. We were young.

Roodt drove an old grey VW Beetle and, at 24, was already going grey. He had a mild stutter and didn't smoke or drink. We may have ingested copious amounts of dope and tequila after hours, but Roodt seemed to have been dipped in a bath of speed at birth.

To give you an example of his manic intensity: one day we were shooting in an office on the third floor of a building. It was hot, we were milling about and the door leading out onto the balcony was open. Roodt got so agitated about one of the million things that can go wrong on a film set that he shouted: "I'm going to commit suicide!"

Whereupon he promptly ran towards the balcony, through the door and jumped. High. And far. Our hearts sank. But he landed on top of the railing, balanced there for a second... then he smiled, stepped down onto the balcony and came back into the office.

We made the film on stolen stock in just under two weeks and endlessly discussed other movies between set-ups.

Halfway through the shoot, Durban producer Anant Singh came on board. After the wrap some extra footage had to be shot to bring the film up to standard feature length.

That film was Place of Weeping and the extra footage became those interminably long travel shots, taken from a helicopter, to the accompaniment of a breathy score. But the core of the film, a passionate young Gcina Mhlope saying there wasn't enough money for her fellow farm workers near the town of Weenen, struck a chord and kick-started a career...

Today, almost 20 years and as many feature films later, Roodt has come full circle. The hair is snow white, our good friend Paul Witte has been dead for more than a decade, but the passionate intensity is still there. Roodt's latest film, Yesterday, is causing the same kind of ripples that his first film made, the kind of ripples that are every Hollywood marketer's dream.

That is, word of mouth, the bush telegraph. People are talking.

The story is simple. A young black mother in the deceptively beautiful landscape of KwaZulu-Natal discovers she has Aids.

The eponymous Yesterday's husband, a miner in Johannesburg, has infected her. They have a bright young daughter, Beauty.

Only one woman in the entire village is prepared to help Yesterday, who is played by Leleti Khumalo.

Both films are set in rural KwaZulu, though the former was shot near Hartbeespoort Dam for budgetary reasons. Both films deal with common people's most pressing needs; too little money then for racial reasons, too much Aids now caused by another kind of poverty.

The problem with talking to Roodt, though, is that you're talking to a gallery of personae. There is, among others, the obsessive filmmaker who really is only interested in manufacturing images. Then there is the more left-brained pragmatist who chooses his words carefully lest he offends.

Another persona is the destructive artist who can be viciously dismissive of anything that preceded the here and now.

And then there is the extremely funny comic who, alas, never manifests on screen.

Starting with images, I tell him my favourite shot is a slow track towards a weeping Yesterday's back against an amphitheatre-like backdrop of mountains. We don't see her face and for me it sums up every anonymous rural woman's plight in this country.

He bursts out laughing and says his favourite shot is the opening one, all two and a half minutes of it. "It's just a slow track to nowhere." Later, however, he says his favourite shot is the one of a R5-coin being pushed backwards and forwards between Yesterday and her good friend the teacher, played by Harriet Lehabe.

So did the pragmatic Roodt have any particular audience in mind when he wrote Yesterday? Yes. "A relatively big audience. I thought if I can tap into the hearts and minds of the middle class, the audience that goes to see Billy Elliot... "

According to Roodt, the Americans love it. "Ironically, there hasn't been a film like this made since Philadelphia. You know, it's just bizarre." And locally "at least it's generating this kind of conversation."

So much so in fact that the Nelson Mandela Fund, a co-funder thanks to some shrewd manoeuvring by Roodt's old collaborator Singh, is taking the film to the rural areas worst affected by Aids.

"It's depressing what's happening out there and I think by being depressing it's also encouraging, it's also inspiring. You realise, you know, stop moaning about your own f***ing life. Look at Yesterday having to deal with all this shit. She's got Aids and she's still got to f***ing chop the wood."

Anyway, to pursue the line of pragmatic thinking, I ask him whether he pointedly decided to make Yesterday's benefactor a Christian, since she carries a large gold cross around her neck all the time. The answer is frustrating, coming as it does from someone who eats and sleeps visual messages.

"I don't know if I did that pointedly. You know the problem with a film like Yesterday is that after the event you can over-analyse it to the nth degree. I looked at the cross [on the day of shooting] and I thought: 'Okay, that's fine.'"

He is quick to agree when I suggest that his first and his most recent films are his best because their strongest or lead characters are women.

When I further suggest that his boy films tend to be cowboy flicks dressed up as having a conscience, he simply says they "didn't work".

This includes films like The Stick and Cry, the Beloved Country, of which he now says: "It was completely mis-timed and nowhere. It's a completely irrelevant movie... in a little time capsule."

I don't believe he means that, and I know he'd agree that James Earl Jones's performance in the latter film transcended all the politicking about his playing a humble local priest.

Inevitably, one has to ask why Yesterday was shot in Zulu and why a whitey was directing people in a language he can't speak. What follows is a long story about how he would originally have directed Promised Land, but that he insisted on it being shot in its own language. That is, Afrikaans.

But money couldn't be raised on those terms, so he walked.

Finally, he wrote Yesterday and took it to Singh, whom he credits with having the balls to have it made in Zulu.

"All the people I chose to make the film were acutely aware, all the time, that it was their movie. Perhaps it was unfair to take a director's credit, but... it's their movie. I really let them have the movie. I wasn't condescending. I told them they could do whatever they liked in the frame. I said: 'You're just channelling it through me because I know where to put the camera.'"

And then that self-destructiveness kicks in again and he adds: "Blah-di blah-di blah, you know?"

If both Place of Weeping and Yesterday were shot within very short spaces of time, then their approach to music is as different as the languages they were shot in.

Roodt tells how music producer Lloyd Ross tried to convince him that he should use pre-recorded local music for the former. But no, Roodt wanted a score. He was being precious, he admits.

This time round he showed singer/guitarist Madale Kunene the footage and the man responded directly to what he was seeing.

"Just me and this beautiful Zulu man in a studio in Pinetown."

The effect is haunting, minimalist, South African - even African. And maybe that is why it has been nominated as a contender for the Foreign Oscar.

Because its very voluble creator has finally grown up to realise that a black screen and a certain sound at the end of the movie can convey the real horror of Aids in this country and this continent.

That sound, of course, is one of complete silence.

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