1 of 5 | Embeth Davidtz, seen at the 2017 American Cinematheque Awards in Beverly Hills, Calif., adapted, directed and stars in “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight.” File Photo by Jim Ruymen/UPI | License Photo
Embeth Davidtz makes her screenwriting and directing debut in the film adaptation of Alexandra Fuller’s memoir Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, in theaters Friday. As an actor on screen since 1989, Davidtz drew on memories of working with directors like Steven Spielberg in Schindler’s List and Robert Altman in The Gingerbread Man while making the feature.
In a recent Zoom interview with UPI, Davidtz, 59, said she realized she’d been learning from Spielberg and other filmmakers when she stepped behind the camera herself.
“I watched Steven set up a shot and be very exacting and specific with his actors,” Davidtz said. “I watched Robert Altman move a camera. He had such a beautiful loose style.”
Davidtz optioned Fuller’s book, which chronicles life in Zimbabwe before and after the 1980 election. Her goal was to hire a writer and director, but when she couldn’t, decided to take on both roles herself.
In her screenplay, Davidtz zeroed in on the portion of the book when 8-year-old Bobo (Lexi Vinter) is living on her parents’ farm in Rhodesia, the former Zimbabwe. As the country’s 1980 prime minister election approaches, in which Robert Mugabe would defeat Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith, Bobo has grown up apprehensive of Black Africans.
Directing 8-year-old Lexi also reminded Davidtz of making the 1996 adaptation of Matilda.
“Even Danny DeVito’s dealing with a child, he was so beautiful with how he worked with Mara Wilson,” she said “I think I was taking in things that helped me as a director long before I ever thought of directing something.”
Bobo’s perspective was the only version of the story Davidtz felt comfortable telling as a White South African herself. Bobo talks about watching out for “terrorists,” and bosses around the children of her parents’ Black employees, because she learned the behavior.
“It’s not something she made up,” Davidtz said. “That gives you the background to the family that she lives in and the society that she lives in.”
Davidtz also researched the Shona tribe of Zimbabwe, which factors into the story. She credits actors Zikhona Bali and Shilubana Fumani, both South African, with helping her steer potentially volatile scenes between Black and White characters.
It also pleased Davidtz to see that behaving like a child of racist White Rhodesians was foreign to Lexi, who lives in modern South Africa.
“She doesn’t experience South Africa that way now,” Davidtz said. “She said, ‘Why do they treat them like that?’ Which I thought was really actually hopeful to me that she’s grown up in a much more integrated place than I did.”
Davidtz was a teenager in 1980 and living in South Africa following the Zimbabwe election. That is why she related to Fuller’s book.
“They were in a war which South Africa was not, but there was a lot of violence around us, a lot of oppression and suppression, people pulled off streets and state of emergencies being declared,” she said. “Nelson Mandela was locked up that whole time. Anybody like him was either killed or locked up. It was like this pot boiling.”
In focusing on Bobo’s story, Davidtz’s own role shrank. She plays Nicola, Bobo’s mother who sleeps with a machine gun in case of attacks by people she would consider terrorists.
“Nobody wants to see this terribly racist woman behaving badly for an hour and a half,” Davidtz said. “Then once I was directing, I was like let’s really make that part as small as possible because I can’t do all of it at once.”
Davidtz found Lexi through a Facebook post. It is Lexi’s first role and Davidtz wanted an untrained actor.
She also shielded Lexi from some of the more adult content of the film. Davidtz filmed with two cameras at once and gave Lexi instructions on how to react.
“The way that I worked with her as a non-actor was not to give her a script,” Davidtz said. “I didn’t give her scenes to learn. If we were in an emotional scene, she didn’t really know what was going on a lot of the time.”
Lexi did get to smoke cigarettes as one of Bobo’s acts of rebellion. They were artificial and Davidtz warned her not to smoke real ones.
“I said, ‘You know why? Because it’s going to make you look old and shriveled up before your time,'” she said. “I saw the eyes widen and she registered what I was saying.”
Now that Davidtz has directed, she would consider doing it again. She said, however, that it would have to be another passion project like Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight.
“I’d have to love my story as much as I love this story,” she said. “I fell in love with that memoir. I just thought she’d done such a brilliant job creating those characters and the characters are the reason I thought, ‘Oh, this would tell a great story.'”
