Film Directors From South Africa

"Anybody who lets facts interfere with his imagination is a person who will never enjoy anything else again."

"There's nothing wrong with the world. It just goes around and around, and you gotta get on with your life."

"Mr. Sam was our father. He knew about our dreams and ambitions."

"I’m in the business of making people realize that their opinions aren’t worth the paper they’re written on."

"Aah, violence is the only way I can make people pay attention to me."

"There’s no question he’s smarter than I am, but does that give him the right to call me a name like that?"

"A hint of water, a whisper of foam. Long, white tails streaming behind them as they twist and turn in the bay."

"Without me breathing down your neck all the time, you’d lean even more to the right than you do now."

"You were scared of the ball because it was big and hard and could hurt you, just like life can hurt you."

"Somebody once said that there are only two places you can be alone—inside your mother’s womb and inside your coffin."

"I thought I was keeping it straight and I’ve suddenly wondered whether it is straight, and whether it matters whether it is or not."

"Doesn’t it sort of bug you that people like your dad can’t take care of the world?"

"Do you think Fathers do any more for their sons, except in terms of money, that Mothers do for their daughters."

"Don’t talk crap, Hally! You don’t even know what the word ‘sympathy’ means."

"She’s no match for him when it comes to a battle of words."

"Hally: It’s a bloody awful world when you come to think of it. People can be real bastards. Sam: That’s the way it is, Hally. Hally: It doesn’t have to be that way. There is something called progress you know. We don’t exactly burn people at the stake anymore."

"Hally: Anyway, that’s my man of magnitude. Charles Darwin! Who’s yours? Sam: [without hesitation] Abraham Lincoln. Hally: I might have guessed as much. Don’t get sentimental, Sam. You’ve never been a slave, you know. And anyway, we freed your ancestors here in South Africa long before the Americans."

"Hally: Not many intellectuals are prepared to shovel manure with the peasants then go home and write a ‘little book’ called War and Peace. Incidentally, Sam, he was somebody else who, to quote, ‘…did not distinguish himself scholastically."

"Tonight I find Hilda and say sorry. And make promise I won't beat her no more. You hear me, Boet Sam?"

"For all agonies of the joints: Lum¬ bago, rheumatism, tennis elbows, housemaid’s knees;also ideal for bunions, corns, callouses"

"Too many cooks spoil the broth"

"No smell doth stink as sweet as labour, Tis joyous times when man and man Do work and sweat in common toil.When all the world’s my neighbor."

"Ethel Lange, 10 de Villiers Street, Oudtshoom. I am eighteen years old and well-developed and would like to correspond with a gent of sober habits and a good outlook on life. My interests are nature, rock-and-roll, swimming and a happy future. My motto is, ‘rolling stones gather no moss.’ Please note: I promise to reply faithfully"

"Twenty-two and no strings attached. Would like letters from men of the same age or older. My \interests are beauty contests and going out. A snap with the first letter, please."

"Betty Jones. Roodepoort. Young and pleasing personality. I’d like to correspond with gentlemen friends of maturity. No teenagers need reply. My hobby at the moment is histori¬ cal films, but I’m prepared to go back to last year’s, which was autograph hunting. I would appreciate a photo¬ graph"

"I’m sure you’d like to know I got your letter, and the picture. I’d say Oudtshoom seems okay. You were quite okay too. I would like to send you a picture of me, but it’s this way. It’s winter down here. The light is bad, the lake is black, the birds have gone. Wait for spring, when things improve. Okay? Good. I heard you ask about my car. Yes. I have it. We pumped the tires today. Tomorrow I think I’ll put in some gas. I’d like to take you for a drive, Ethel, and Lucy too. In fact. I’d like to drive both of you. They say over here. I’m fast. Ethel I’ll tell you this. If I could drive you, Ethel, I would do it so fast, Ethel, and Lucy too, both of you, so fast I would, do it so fast, fast, fast it would hurt—"

"I notice your brother got boots. All policemen got boots. Good luck to him, any¬ way, and Lucy too. Write soon. Zachariah Pietersen"

"I like the thought of this little white girl"

"I took a good look at my life. What did I see? A bloody circus monkey! Selling most of his time on earth to another man. Out of every twenty-four hours I could only properly call mine the six when I was sleeping. What the hell is the use of that?"

"This is a strong-room of dreams. The dreamers? My people. The simple people, who you never find mentioned in the history books, who never get statutes erected to them, or monuments commemorating their great deeds. People who would be forgotten, and their dreams with them, if it wasn’t for Styles. That’s what I do, friends. Put down, in my way, on paper the dreams and hopes of my people so that even their children’s children will remember a man."

"Burn that book? Stop kidding yourself, Sizwe! Anyway, suppose you do. You must immediately go apply for a new one. Right? And until that new one comes, be careful the police don’t stop you and ask for your book. Into the Courtroom, brother. Charge: Failing to produce Reference Book on demand. Five rand or five days."

"You must understand this. We own nothing except ourselves. This world and its laws, allows us nothing except ourselves."

"Sizwe Bansi, in a manner of speaking, is dead!"

"I don't want to die."

"What's wrong with me? I'm a man. I've got eyes to see. I've got ears to listen when people talk. I've got a good head to think things. What's wrong with me?"

"If I don’t write down what I’ve witnessed, who will? We can easily say we can’t look at this stuff, we can’t record it because it’s too shocking, but then what happens is there’s this silence, there’s this lacuna around it and it disappears."

"Our culture works with ways of looking. If you think of the colonial gaze — the scopic power is masculine. You see it. You take it. It’s yours. We learn to reflect this gaze back on to ourselves as women when we look at ourselves in that objectifying way."

"With language and art, we can restore something that has been erased. It’s a way of saying the unsayable, of restoring humanity."

"The heart is blind. You can’t love unless you have the heart of a child. It’s beautiful, but it’s the thing that makes you vulnerable. And when this connects with the secrets you hold, it can create a distortion in the psyche."

"I think we keep the secrets from ourselves. Because we have experienced a moment when you look into a person’s eyes and you see that how they are looking at you is dehumanising. In that moment, all your humanity is lost. And it’s unbearable. We keep that secret from our daughters, because we don’t want them to be seen in that way."

"There was such a sense of liberation and opening that sort of space that had been closed off so completely under Apartheid – no light, no oxygen – it really opened and expanded and into that came so much publishing and writing."

"In fiction you have the mind, the interiority of the person, and the action happening at the same time. But I agree with you, they’re such different forms."

"It’s a thing that requires complexity, people’s sexualities are very complex. There can be great desire in submission. It’s the image making and then the reduction of a full human response to this two-dimensional thing."

"I believe if we know about one another, and focus more on how we are the same rather than how different, we will be less inclined to prove that we have all the right answers, and get on with the real business of living."

"Editing makes or breaks a movie, you know."

"He is the most consistently successful South African movie maker around, firmly cornering the giggle market."

"He's a kind of Paul McCartney of the cinema."

"I often sneak into the cinema and watch how the audience are reacting to my movie. It teaches me so much."

"Sex is not necessary to make a movie sell. It's enough to have a pretty girl in the movie."

"I've had people working for me who are film-school graduates and honestly, if they had been clapper boys or tea boys they probably would have learned more."