All language subtitles for Dust.Devil.1992.Final.Cut.1080p.BluRay.x265.hevc.10bit.AAC.2.0.commentary-HeVK.eng

Back in the first time, in the time of
the red light, Desert

Wind, Suu Poha, was a man like us.

Until, by mischance, he grew wings.

The opening narration by the character
of Joan Nimont, literally Joan Nobody,

the local witch doctor, evokes the
mythic past.

drawn from the mythology of the hunter
-gatherer people, the Khoisan people, or

more accurately, the Ngoysar people, who
once inhabited southern Africa.

Joe's character references the time of
the red light, and in doing so, he

evokes the color wheel of creation.

In Hoki Indian and Bushman mythology,
The cycles of creation

and of the actual life cycle, the growth
from childhood into manhood into

old age, is compared to the appearance
of colors in the desert sky at dawn.

The way that the sky moves from black
through a series of shades of violent

and orange and gold up to blue and then
finally to the burned out white desert

sky.

The color wheel is, yeah, linked to
rituals and all the main phases in The

Life Warrior.

And I've tried in both Dust Devil and
Hardware, my other movie, which

was made about one year prior to this,
to organize and structure the movie

according to these colors.

There's a very vigorous area to how the
different colors are presented on

screen.

And the film is very much cyclical,
circular in structure and nature.

The mythology is all drawn from native
African folk tales, largely collected

by my mother, who was an anthropologist.

And I, too, played anthropology at the
University of Cape Town before becoming

filmmaker.

So the first story we hear about how the
wind was once a man, that grew

wings and flew like a bird, is very much
taken from Moisan oral tradition.

The devil figure we see emerging from
the Hites is, of course, a white

man and is not a tribal African
character.

I was keen in Dust Devil to present the
mythology and magic as being a power of

good. And on the subcontinent it's very
clear that the devil has white skin and

devise. At that time when we were making
the film, devil movies were essentially

criminalized in South Africa.

Southern Africa is very much a colonial
missionary culture.

The Dutch Reformed Church were in charge
of the movie censorship at the time,

and while they allowed anti -apartheid
movies like Cry Freedom or A World Apart

to play in cinemas, they banned The
Exorcist. They severely cut the Omen

movies, and basically tried to suppress
all of the 70s devil movies.

They hated any film in which the devil
appeared, and even more so, they hated

the idea of the devil winning.

So I thought, does the devil make their
very own devil movie?

And given that Clint Eastwood was the
most popular actor in the world at the

time, and I think he voted the sexiest
man alive more times than anyone else, I

think, for eight years running, I
figured that the devil looked like

I mean, if he wasn't Clint Eastwood,
he'd be Jim Morrison or Elvis Presley.

all we know is that the devil would have
to be the most charismatic

sexiest and the best looking man alive.

And under the circumstances we chose
Robert John Burke's part, which I think

an appropriate choice.

I wanted to, along with the colour
scheme, evoke the cycles of time.

So in the early scenes the vehicles you
see on the road are all vintage cars.

so that it's actually quite hard to tell
what time period this movie is set in.

It could just as easily be the turn of
the century or the 1920s or 30s.

These scenes were all shot at a location
on the Skeleton Coast, a place

that during the time of German
colonialism, when it's German East

Sorry, pardon that, when this was German
West Africa.

This is actually the Kaiser's ostrich
farm.

All the feathers in the helmet, you see,
in the time of World War I, or in the

time of the Austro -Hungarian Empire,
came from ostriches, which were farmed

here in the Skeleton Coast.

The hitchhiker uses a Polaroid camera
because he's taking continuity

photographs.

He's unstuck in space and time and is
literally trying to escape from the

continuity of the real world. So
throughout the movie he collects

photographs and is trying to keep a
rigorous track of the timeline of the

murders.

The first murder is shot entirely in a
single take.

It's a continuous dolly track which
enters the mirror while the two

are making love.

I shot it this way to avoid any
censorship issues to make it impossible

If we had had any cutaways or additional
material there might have been some way

of altering the scene or moving the
essential moment of death

further away from the moment of orgasm.

Whereas I wanted to point her together.

We can see that there is in fact a
second hitchhiker visible in the

in the mirror.

immediately between Hitch on Robert John
Burke and Saki, his victim. Seated in

the background is a second hitchhiker
holding a stopwatch.

The second hitchhiker is played by
Robert John Burke's twin brother.

There were two of them.

And when his twin came to visit the set,
I couldn't resist involving him in the

film. So this enabled me to have
basically two hitchhikers within the

Yeah, here the movie introduces Zakes
Mackay, the unfortunate

African cop on the case.

Zakes had a long history of involvement
in the anti -apartheid movement and came

to fame through the Athol Fugard plays,
notably his role in Master Harold and

the Boys, which is the smash hit on
stage.

Because of the connection between Zakes
and the apartheid era and protests

against the white regime, I thought it
would be ironic to cast him as a cop, as

a representative of the white regime.

And some theories of...

telephone calls and the notion of the
wind blowing through the

telephone lines at night and causing the
different telephones to randomly ring

that ties together our disparate
characters here Wendy and her husband

are thousands of miles further south I
named Wendy after the character in the J

.M. Barrie Japan of course and there are
a number of

first Peter Pan references scattered
throughout the story.

Peter Pan, you may recall, was also
living outside of time and refused to

get old and kidnapped Wendy and took her
away to Never Neverland.

So yeah, there is a shadow of Pan
hanging over Dust Devil.

Here we see the beginning of his ritual
and the ceremonial bowl that is used for

collecting the blood of his sacrificial
victims, which we dissolve through to

the rising sun, always trying to forge a
link between the ritual and the

land and the phases of time.

Water is very carefully controlled in
this movie. You will see very, very

of it.

Water contains various promise of mercy,
of release from the

hell of the world they're caught in.

Hitch bathed in the shower to try and
wash away his sins and to wash away the

blood. And throughout the film, yeah,
water has that same redemptive quality,

the salvation in hell.

The blood murals covering the wall were
painted by myself and Imo Horn, the

director of the second unit.

The art department did a great job. In
fact, we were a little bit out of their

depth when it came to the crime scene.

And I remember they were kind of dabbing
brushes at the wall.

So me and Imo took off our shirts and
plunged our hands into these buckets,

essentially of blood.

smeared the stuff all over the interior
walls of the set in a very

psychotic manner as we could do. We were
much younger then and there was a lot

of energy into it.

We see that there is a maimed hand, part
of the single hand, nailed to the door

inside some kind of spiral pattern
that's been painted on the door.

The killer hitchhiker character is
literally making off with Saki's severed

fingers that he's keeping in an ice bag
of the vehicle.

The severed fingers are a part, again,
of African magic and African mythology.

The knuckles of the fingers are meant to
contain power, like a witch's knot.

You'll often find knuckle bones in magic
charms or in drums.

in tom -toms and a lot of the older
African drums, if you shake them you'll

a rattle inside and that's the dried out
knuckle bone that's been put into the

drum to give it power.

Here in the background radio we hear for
the first time that we're in Namibia

and there's a background announcement
about the withdrawal of South African

troops and the appearance of the United
Nations who took over the administration

of Namibia.

Namibia was initially a German colony
that was conquered by South Africa at

time of World War I, and then taken over
by South Africa, who basically ran it

under a mandate from the UN for a bunch
of years until the 1990s, when under the

Southwest African People's Organization,
SWAPO, Namibia, the former Southwest

Africa, finally became independent.

and Dust Devil is essentially set in the
year before Namibia became independent.

These shots with the burning house as
the hitchhiker walks away from the door

deliberately recall John Ford's movie
The Searchers, although obviously in The

Searchers John Wayne doesn't kill the
farmers and burn the farmers dead for

walking away.

This was more my own personal statement
about South Africa.

the country where I'd spent my first 16
years of life and where at the age of 16

I was drafted and forced to leave the
country and go on the run and find

political asylum in Europe.

So I was not feeling too sweet towards
the virus.

The burning house was in fact completely
created for the movie. It's not a real

house. We built it and then we destroyed
it.

Of course we would not...

to burn down a genuine Gothic Namibian
farmstead like this. We had to build it

from scratch in order to create the
internal sequence.

One of the pleasures of shooting in
Namibia was that there were far fewer

guards and the fire inside the house was
in fact pretty deadly.

Very keen on the shot of the flame
turning the pages of the Bible.

Again, it's not something you get to see
every day.

I mean, the temperature is very extreme,
and we literally had to approach the

camera, then get the hell out of there
before we faked ourselves.

And, yeah,

of course, it was something you could
only shoot once.

That was the beauty of it, that
obviously we destroyed the entire set on

first take.

To make certain that we actually got the
shot, I covered it with a number of

cameras simultaneously.

from a helicopter, then there was also a
dolly set up just outside, and a number

of other hidden cameras picking up
angles on telephoto to make the most out

the burn, which is the single most
expensive act of the day that we had

in the shoot.

Dust Devil was not an expensive movie.

I mean, the entire film came in at just
over one million pounds sterling in the

UK. So by taking it to Africa, we were
able to cut the budget to a

point where we achieved things which I
don't think we could possibly have done

in any other circumstance.

Yeah, here we see the absolutely
hellacious...

It's a painful relationship between Mark
and Wendy, who are very just living out

the South African suburban nightmare.

I mean, apart from its racism, South
Africa is notorious for its lousy

sexual politics.

And it also has the world's highest
ratio of family slaying per capita to

white population.

In other words, more husbands in South
Africa come home from work and shoot

their wives, shoot the kids, shoot the
dog, and shoot the TV set than in any

other country.

It's interesting to me always how they
tend to include the television set

amongst the other family members.

But yeah, I think this is something to
do with the sense that the country

doesn't have a future, that you're
brought up in this place as a white

African to believe there is no future,
and that you essentially don't belong in

the place.

On top of that, all of the white
population were given two years of

military training.

So everyone's being taught how to strip
and clean firearms, how to use guns,

while at the same time being
consistently indoctrinated from an early

believe that life is essentially
pointless, that there is no future,

point pushing down roots or trying to
raise a family. And I think this

contributes to the...

the psychopathological underpinnings of
the culture, to the psychotic violence,

the murders that take place all too
frequently.

I mean, it's an extremely violent part
of the world.

This story, Dust Devil, is partly based
on a true case.

There were murders, a series of serial
killings that took place in Namibia.

in southern Namibia in the years
immediately before the first election,

before the country became independent.

The victims were always white settlers,
usually living in remote locations, who

were chopped up and burned.

The police were unable to basically find
the culprit, and this went on for about

two years, and then taped off the time
of the elections.

There was never any arrests.

After about two years, there was a
shootout between the police and an

culprit. And in the course of the
shootout, they actually blew the guy's

off.

And the headless body of the alleged
killer was buried at a mission station

underneath an extinct volcano named
Mount Parra, which is just near Kipman

Grove.

But who this guy was and whether the
headless corpse really was the killer

never be answered.

There's another movie about the same
case, a film called Winters with John

and Sean Bean directed by Andre Voigt.

that takes a totally different approach
to the story and phrases it as a police

conspiracy, a conspiracy within the
white establishment, which may have been

kind of like a false flag operation.

A lot of people thought that maybe it
was the white cops killing the white

farmers in order to create a sense of
terror and lawlessness, in order to...

create unease and a lack of confidence
in the notion of Namibia, South -West

Africa, being able to govern itself.

But whatever the case is, the killer was
never captured, never apprehended, and

the case never closed.

Over the years, the myth grew up that
the killer wasn't a human being, but was

somehow able to transform himself.

to travel like the wind, to transform
into a dog or a bird

or a boon.

In Afrikaans, these supernatural
shapeshifters, these

vampiric xenomorphs, are named Nachtlok.

Nachtlok, which is literally Night
Walker.

They're disembodied forces similar to
vampires.

which creep into your house and steal
your vital essences, literally suck out

your soul.

And this is widely believed amongst a
lot of people living in the Nama, the

Kalahari, and the Great Groove.

And their belief in the Naxalotl
continues to this day.

And there are still people in these
locations who go in fear of these shape

-shifting presences.

I guess...

It's very much comparable to the Islamic
idea of the djinn, the spirits of dust

and fire.

And in Christian iconography, we talk of
demons like Asmodeus, who was driven

out into the wasteland by King Solomon.

So, yeah, there's various ideas of
invisible beings or demonic presences

are condemned to taunt the wastelands of
the earth.

And that certainly fed into Dust Devil's
pathology.

Yeah, these scenes on the train were
very, very lucky to be working in an

where there was still steam and still
steam trains, which always impressed me.

And I wanted to show some little bits of
the war.

South Africa was permanently at war with
frontline states.

which was all the countries abutting
South Africa.

So there were perennially South African
troops going up to the border between

Namibia and Angola in the Caprivi Strip
to try and fight

the insurgency, which was essentially a
communist -backed uprising

of the black population against white
totalitarian rule.

So yeah, those scenes on the train were
deliberately shot in a cattle car. I

wanted to make reference to the
Holocaust by putting the soldiers in the

truck. So we're literally seeing the
South African troops boarding the cattle

truck as the devil, the hitpiker, gets
off from the same train.

I think of it as a pre -Holocaust
moment.

Much of Dust Devil to me feels like a
pre -Holocaust movie, i .e. it's a film

which is taking place shortly before
something extremely bad happens.

If World War III or the end of the world
is coming, it's just a little bit

further ahead in the future from Dust
Devil, but Dust Devil itself is still

important.

Here again we see the cattle, the cows
from the cattle truck, seeing the white

soldiers being herded aboard, obviously
on their way to some kind of nightmare.

And as the smoke clears, then we see the
devil coalescing out of nowhere, very

much in the manner you would imagine
Clint Eastwood's Man of No Name or High

Plains Drifter might have arrived in
town.

This entire station was built especially
for the movie.

It's another one of the extraordinary
achievements of production designer

Bennett, who pretty much built the whole
of Dust Devil, right down to the

billboard signs you see in the
background.

None of it is rail. The whole thing is
constructed for our movie.

And all of it designed in these
corrugated iron gothic.

kind of aesthetic which Joseph based on
the existing Namibian architecture I

mean Bethany is a town obviously living
in hell and on the very edge of drying

up I mean in Namibia the sand dunes move
like an ocean and

if you don't clear the sand back from
the roads and the houses every day and

sand clearing crews literally go out to
keep the main roads open

The dunes will simply march across the
roads and march into the houses and

slowly cover everything.

So the entire time there's this battle
to keep the desert from swallowing the

towns. And when the town drops below the
point where they're able to afford to

keep the roads open and keep the sand
-peering crews out there, they simply

And there's about four of these towns,
empty places, scattered along the

Skeleton Coast, completely cut off from
the world.

In these scenes, the school shooting
team, the shooting range sequence, these

are an accurate recreation of my own
childhood.

I went to a Marist Catholic cadet school
when I was a child. It wasn't

a government school, and I was literally
taught how to strip and clean firearms

and how to shoot by Marist monks.

And here I've recreated the school
shooting team scene.

The Marist Monk in this scene was
actually played by a convicted

local sex criminal from Kietmanswil.

You never get to see his face, but I
thought it was ironic that we cast an

actual pedophile in the very brief role
of the Marist Monk.

Here we meet Marianne Sachbrecht's
character, Dr. Leitzinger, the

pathologist.

Marianne was originally meant to have a
much bigger role in Dark Devil, but

unfortunately while we were shooting she
received word that her mother was very

ill back in Germany, and she was forced
to fly home after completing only two

days on the movie.

So her character has a much smaller part
of the film than I might have wished.

We met at a horror movie festival in
Spain, and I discovered Marianne was a

horror movie fan, and she asked me to
write her a role in the next horror

I made, so that's how it happened.

Yeah, here Wendy arrives at the
roadhouse, at Henrik's bar and

the gas station.

Again, this is a set.

Like pretty much everything in the
movie, it's not a real place.

The whole of Dust Devil was dumb.

Designed, drawn, constructed on camera.
We used very, very few rail locations.

One of the running gags in this movie,
like I mentioned before, is about the

water, or the lack of water.

The roadhouse is entirely decorated with
fishing trophies and deep -sea angling

trophies, which makes not a lot of sense
considering they're in the middle of a

desert.

Yeah, Chelsea Field as Wendy and then
back to Marianne in the

mortuary.

These scenes were very tense, I recall,
because of the problem of Marianne's mum

back home and the fact that we had to
shoot as fast as possible in order to

release her.

And I recall that the fluorescent tube
in the light box that she's examining

caused the character of the morgue
attendant who has been cut out of the

there was a mortuary attendant, to
completely freak out because it turned

had epilepsy and the fluorescent tube
tripped. some epileptic reaction in the

lab attendant who started screaming and
flailing and fell to the floor and the

first AD, Guy Travis, had to rush in and
try and stick a leather wallet in his

mouth and bring him out of the seizure.

But that just served to freak out Zake
and Marianne even further.

What Marianne is saying in the scene
about the Bushmen rock paintings is

entirely true and comes from a fair
amount of detailed research.

The Bushmen rock paintings can be found
literally all over Namibia.

The largest number are just on the banks
of the Zambezi River near the

Limpopo. There's approximately 1 ,600
identified caves and shelters built with

rock paintings, which go back a couple
of thousand years.

Quite how the Bushmen achieved that is
still relatively unknown to us.

They obviously learned the skills for
creating the rock paintings, which

passed from tribe to tribe, and the
actual ingredients in the fragments

Something which we're still not entirely
sure about. Here we have the

devil playing pinball.

The sound effect of the pinball table
accidentally recorded in Mark's

service, which serves to lead him to his
doom later on.

Chelsea Field was just off the back of a
film called The Last Boy Scout and

never really felt like she belonged in
Africa.

She was very uncomfortable on the
location, which I think is good for the

character in a way.

The moment she finished shooting each
day, she would hurry back to her hotel

room and almost as if she was afraid of
the devil.

She wasn't my first casting choice.

But that was yet down to a dispute with
Miramax, then under the control of the

dreaded Harvey Weinstein.

In fact, this is Steve Earnhardt, the
Miramax executive in charge of

who plays the driver of the camp van.

This was because Miramax complained
about there not being enough killings in

movie. I didn't want to kill any more
women because I'm not a misogynist, and

didn't want this to be a film about a
male psychopath killing women.

So I made certain that the hitchhiker's
second victim is a male.

And as Miramax weren't giving us any
more money to hire an extra victim, I

got their executive in charge, Steve
Earnhardt, to stand in as the victim.

And I believe somewhere in the deleted
scenes is the death of Steve Earnhardt

that was trimmed out of the movie.

Mark, Wendy's husband, is played by
Swart, who is the only real white South

African in the movie.

The entire movie is shot in Namibia, and
although it's dealing with South

Africa, it was shot during the apartheid
regime.

So we kept the entire movie north of the
border and deliberately stayed out of

South African territory.

And Rufus, who was the one white South
African from Johannesburg whom we

up to star in the movie, very much ended
up carrying the can for South Africa's

sins at the time.

Now we have, yeah, Wendy pulling asleep
on the road between towns at night.

Highway hypnosis.

And, yeah, in the meantime, Joe Niemann,
played by John Machikiza, is working

some kind of sorcerous ritual.

Wendy starts to nod off the wheel and
imagines she sees a creature, the Night

Walker, or the Hitchhiker running across
the road in front of the car.

I believe that when you're driving long
distance, you start to slip into a semi

-hypnotic state where you're neither
asleep nor awake.

It's a liminal state, somewhat in dream
and waking.

And I should add that in the sequence
when the hitchhiker runs in front of the

car, that's actually me dressed up as
the hitchhiker.

A lot of the time I'm shooting these
scenes when Rob's work wasn't available,

and in those cases it's very often
myself wearing the coat and the hat.

The owl, of course, is another nocturnal
bird associated sorcery in Southern

Africa. And, yeah, the owl is kind of
speaking to Zake, the cop.

And here we are to the cop's dream.

where Zakes is evidently haunted with
guilt over his failed

relationship with his ex -wife, which
has fallen apart because of the death of

their son.

The dead son is on the autopsy table in
the dream sequence, and we can gather

from the uniform the son is wearing,
like Zakes' uniform, that they've

been cannon fodder for South Africans.

They're characters who serve the
country, but the service is never going

rewarded or recognized because they're
black characters serving a white

authoritarian regime.

So it's essentially a wasted effort, and
the life of Zakes' son has been

wasted. And because this guilt still
hangs over him, it's as if the

spirit of the dead son hasn't fully
passed on.

which is the reason why in the dream Dr.
Leitzinger gives Zake the rock to break

the son's fingers, to cut off the
fingers and allow the soul, the

spirit of his dead son to pass on.

This is something again that you found
in Khoisan or Khoisar mythology,

this notion that you have to sever the
fingers.

in order for the soul to be freed.

A lot of the elder Muslim men are
missing the top joints of their middle

fingers, a kind of ritual scarification.

They cut off the tip of their middle
finger as a sacrifice in

order to be able to go smoothly to the
other world, in order to be able to make

the transition from this life to the
next.

And again,

Chelsea suspended in this liminal state,
this place somewhere between sleep and

waking, which is very important to the
whole of Dust Devil.

I tried throughout the movie to try to
capture that sense of hypnosis, of being

suspended somewhere between one state of
consciousness and another.

The whole of this movie almost exists in
a zone between worlds.

somewhere between dream and waking.

This is in fact the time, the place in
your life where vampires, where

demons and night walkers can actually
reach you.

I don't know if you've ever fallen
asleep and found on waking that you're

in your room but you can't move.

You're still asleep and dreaming, yet
you're dreaming you're in bed, except

there's usually something in the bed
with you. There's usually something

is sitting on your chest or pressing you
down to the mattress so that you can't

move, so that you can't breathe or even
scream.

In Western mythology, we think of these
things as incubi, a crushing incubus, or

the succubi, which is a female person,
or just plain old -fashioned vampires.

But all we do know is that they steal
into your life between sleep and waking,

between those two states.

There's something in that state, that
interstitial space, that allows them to

have access to you.

In science and conventional psychology,
we refer to this as nocturnal sleep

paralysis or the old hag.

And it's a tricky condition.

It's something truly terrifying.

And I do believe that when you're
driving a long distance from the

you start to slip into that same state,
into a liminal or interstitial state.

And in the same way, when you're driving
alone at night in a flat country,

the demons can get to you.

I think this is why UFOs, accounts of
flying saucers,

And accounts of the vanishing
hitchhiker, the undead figure that you

when you're driving alone, who later
vanishes off your car seat, almost

come from flat countries with monotonous
scenery.

Places like South Africa, Australia, New
Mexico or Texas.

Places where you are lulled by the sheer
distance and the size of the landscape.

Yeah, here Wendy drives off without
tipping the man who has dug her out of

dirt, again revealing her fear and
inherent racism.

Wendy's not a particularly nice
character.

Good -looking, perhaps, but not my kind
of lady.

She's headed throughout the sea, and a
close eye will spot the Save the Whale

sticker in the back of the Volkswagen
window, another one of the...

strange fishy deep -sea angling
references that float around in this

There's actually a book written by a
Mormon, a man named Jan Harald Brunvand,

based in Salt Lake City, Utah, about the
vanishing hitchhiker and the number of

sightings that are reported every year.

Because every year, people pick up
hitchhikers in the middle of nowhere.

who have a strange conversation with you
while you're driving, and then when you

look around, they've disappeared off the
car seat.

In some cases, these hitchhikers are
female.

Sometimes they're characterized as the
victims of car accidents, disturbed

spirits who are still wandering the road
trying to get home.

And other times they're creepy guys like
Robert John Burke.

In California, they're known to make
promises and say, well, there's an

earthquake coming, the big one's coming.

And sometimes I've heard variants of

the story where after the driver notices
the hitchhiker has vanished off the

seat, the car goes out of control and
they nearly have an accident themselves.

And then they're flagged down by a cop,
and they usually stammer out their story

to the cop.

And in the American version of the
story, the cop is meant to say, Lady,

ordinarily I wouldn't believe you, but
you're the third person to tell me that

story tonight.

These are essentially urban myths,
although I'm not sure that the term

myth applies to it, because it's
obviously something that doesn't happen

cities. It happens in the outback in the
middle of the desert.

Yet these stories are reported over and
over again in multiple different

countries. And it's difficult to say
that it's all just the same bad joke,

same myth that keeps somehow finding its
way back into the newspapers.

Or whether there really are vanishing
hitchhikers out there, or spirits or

demons wandering the roads.

Here again we see he's left the
fingerless hand guarding the door as he

the crime scene at the Harroff house.

The actor playing the cop who is
stealing the watch off the severed hand

South African actor named Russell Copley
who was the lead singer in a Cape Town

band named Euthanasia.

Another one of my teenage reference
points.

Here we see the star of Bethany driving
and we notice that the star of Bethany

is playing

The Hammer horror movie, Legend of the
Seven Golden Vampires, and Dario

Argento's first movie, The Bird of the
Crystal Plumage.

Joe the Projectionist is watching a dust
devil.

That's a real dust devil.

One of the few real dust devils you get
to see in this movie, which are these

little violent winds that come out of
nowhere, literally like genies.

or demons, and the dust goes spinning up
in little vortex, and these things come

and scatter everything around and then
blow out to nowhere again, which is

really what the film's title refers to.

And that spiraling vortex, the spiral of
the desert wind, is something that's

reflected in the design of the movie, as
well as the structure.

As I mentioned earlier, everything in
Dust Devil is designed in circles and in

spirals.

Joe Nobody, the projectionist, is just
literally completing the circle as he

talks to Zakes.

Here Joe refers to something that he
calls the num.

Joe Niemann's character is in fact not a
bushman. He's played by a Zulu named

John Machikiza.

John was a very dapper man who was
actually a lecturer in political science

Yale University in the United States
when I contacted him to play this movie.

He really dressed down for the part and
I think did a remarkable job. I think

John's performance is one of the real

treasures in Dust Devil. We were
extremely lucky to have him.

But because he was coming from a Zulu
background, his lake is also a Zulu,

he mispronounces the nom.

The nom is actually, in its proper
pronunciation, in the Khoisanji for

myth, is referred to as the nom.

The nom.

I can hardly do it myself.

And it's the power.

It's the actual spiritual power that the
witch doctors use to work their magic.

It's the power which you can steal from
other creatures. A nightwalker or a

vampire sucks the loom out of the dying
animals. It steals the life or the

energy from them. And the loom is
something which is contained within

plexus, within one's hips.

and the lower part of your body, which
is the reason why when people are

possessed or in the middle of a trance
ritual, you're often seeing them bent

over or bending double. If you look at
the rock paintings, the figures are

bent over in a rather alarming way. And
it's because of the power of the ngum,

the ngum which is growing inside them.

And this is something very widely
believed in African and South

American witchcraft.

We see similar effects in voodoo and in
Umbanda and Kumbanda,

some of the syncretic religions you find
in Brazil and South America, where

there's also this curious business of
the characters almost being bent double

they're dancing by the power of this
magical energy which is building up

them. Of course, it's something
indetectable to science.

Our western science has not been able to
record or measure this energy and most

folk believe that it's complete fantasy
and something which is purely imaginary.

But I think any study of comparative
witchcraft and comparative mythology

shake even the most skeptical of minds.

It seems to me that there is very
definitely something at the base of all

this.

Here again we have a number of
references to both

the Adam and Eve and the snake in the
garden, the apple, to Peter Pan and

the J .M. Barrie story.

Hitch and Wendy have their little
conversation in the car prior to Hitch's

disappearance. And this again is all
about faith.

whether you believe in magic or not.

Sadly, most people in the 21st century
don't believe in magic, which I think is

personally a huge mistake, because on my
own experience, there's an invisible

world out there which is vast and
mysterious and filled with things that

us Westerners still barely understand.

Here, Hitch disappears off the car seat.

If you ask me, Wendy takes it rather
well.

In many of the accounts I've heard, the
drivers have accidents, burn out or

crash the car after the hitchhiker
disappears.

And as I've mentioned before, this is
something that is reported hundreds of

times every year.

Yeah, a brief glimpse of an Afrikaans
comic book.

The cop is reading a photo comic
while...

Psycho Russell tortures the suspect.

The photo comic was an expression of the
noble savage thing, so there were all

panels showing blonde, white, sardine
-type characters fighting evil

natives.

And here he has basically breaks up
Russell's torture session.

Russell Copley, who played the younger
cop, actually played the main psycho.

He played the hitchhiker in the 16mm
version of Dust Devil.

I shot this crazy movie twice.

The first time around I was only 15, 16
years old.

We tried shooting it on 16mm.

And in the first iteration of Dust
Devil, Russell, the lead singer from

Euthanasia, played the Hitchhiker.

And Wendy's character was played by a
young South African actress, Michelle

Waters. And we really picked the story
because I thought it was the simplest

thing we could shoot, that we could tell
a story with two characters and a

Volkswagen and the extraordinary
vastness, the inhuman vastness of the

African desert.

and the felt.

The 60mm movie was strong enough that we
were eventually able

to draw interest from Miramax and the
dreaded Harvey Weinstein to

reshoot the film on 35mm and create the
strange

mutant African road movie horror western
that you are now watching.

This is one of my favorite scenes where
we see Zakes McKay and Bill

Utkin, both of them now sadly no longer
with us, having a beer together in the

roadhouse.

It was always important to me that the
white cop and the black cop should have

time in this movie to sit down and have
a beer together because I wanted to show

some vague optimism for the future.

It's not the most optimistic of all
movies, but there is some sense of

cooperation in the scene.

And I also think both of them, Zakes and
Bill Hootkins, are magnificent. They

both turn in excellent performances in
my book.

Yeah,

the dreaded pinball table. The devil's
pinball table in the background, which

is...

being moved to the beer hall across the
street in order to mislead Mark.

I mean, that's the effect it has on
Wendy's husband, who will later get the

wrong end of the stick thanks to the
pinball table being moved.

And here's Zake's character,

Ben Mukarob, the cop, starts to realize
the futility of the situation.

that essentially the murders, the
rituals have been continuing for

years and probably will continue into
the future.

And there's honestly very little that
the cops can truly do to change things.

But Zake is very much this movie's
vampire hunter.

And it's all to him to try to find some
way to talk to that devil.

Again, some sympathy here for the
character of the white police chief.

And in the background we see the actual
Namibian pre -independence celebrations

with the placards which are hyping the
new nation and the

hopeful future offered by the freedom of
Namibia.

Originally, I really wished I could have
used the Chris Christopherson song, Me

and Bobby McGee, on the soundtrack,
because the lyrics of that song,

just another word for nothing left to
lose, sums up much of Dove's Devil, in

which the only true freedom is death,
separation from the hell of the material

world, which is why we end up with these
images of burning bodies. These are

real dead bodies, by the way.

and Wendy settling into the water.

I always want to show a little bit of
real death in my movies, just so that

audience can see what the real thing is
like, and I generally always have a

moment of actual death somewhere in the
film, and in Dust Devil it's what you

see on the television.

Here we see Hitch manifesting in the
motel room.

And Hitch is always the promise of
death, and it's a pleasant death.

I mean, he will kill you in a way that
is ecstatic.

He took care to break the first woman's
neck between the atlas and axial

vertebrae at the moment of orgasm, hence
probably extending the orgasm into

infinity. So he does try to kill you in
a relatively pleasant way, and he does

only for people who want to die.

like letting the vampire into the room.
The vampire had to ask to come inside

and you have to open the window or open
the door to let the vampire in.

In the same way you have to want to die
in order for the hitchhiker to take you.

Here Wendy is grappling with the idea
where she's thinking about it but she's

not ready to die yet. She drops the
razor blade and the moment she drops the

razor blade the hitchhiker vanishes.

He only manifests behind her at the
point when she's thinking about suicide.

And when she reaches to choose life
instead, the hitchhiker draws away.

So in this respect, he's very much the
angel of death.

Again, all of these scenes in the motel
are of that.

The entire motel building, the interior
rooms, all of it is a construct.

I don't think we used...

really any rail locations in the course
of this movie.

The desert was very much like a blank
sheet of paper that enabled us to create

our fantasies, to build drive -ins and
railway stations and to basically create

the world of Dust Devil.

All of these second unit shots, these
time -lapse shots of the desert.

and the moon and the stars, the passage
of time in the desert, were shot by

Imo Horn, who is an excellent German
underground filmmaker, and John

Gaither, the second unit camera
operator, and who later went on to

the famous bullet speed effect in the
Matrix movies.

The famous...

effect where time is stopped during the
battle scenes in the Matrix. That's the

work of John Gator, the guy who was
shooting our second unit time

-lapse scenes.

To some extent, Dust Devil is a deranged
romance.

I mean, it is a love story based around
sympathy for the devil.

We note that Wendy is

responsible for her fate.

Again, the hitchhiker gives her the
chance to get out of the car.

It says that if she doesn't want him on
board, he'll take his bag and leave.

And it's Wendy's choice to ride with
him.

I mean, she's the one who invites the
devil into her life.

And that way around, she's definitely
not a victim, which is one of the many

things that makes Dust Devil a little
unusual in this genre.

And Wendy exercises her free will and
she chooses to dance with the devil.

Here again we see the extraordinary past
of the Nama Desert with a guest

appearance by Young Boon on the right.

And here this is...

Obviously, the real deal is an actual
Namibian small town with the corrugated

iron roof.

We didn't build this.

It's one of the few things in the movie
which is real.

And we get a brief glimpse of Bill
Whitkins' character's home life and his

Bill Whitkins, who plays Lieutenant
Bayman, the white South African cop.

An extraordinary man. A really
empowering figure in the genre that I

still miss him very deeply.

Bill is famous for... He was in the
original Star Wars.

He played...

one of the X -wing fighter pilots in
Star Wars.

He also plays the man from the
government who confiscates the Ark of

Covenant in the final scene in Raiders
of the Lost Ark.

He also plays the corrupt cop that Jack
Nicholson's Joker kills in Tim Burton's

Batman. So you've all seen Bill a dozen
times.

He's just such a chameleon that he's
almost unrecognizable.

In my first movie, Hardware, I cast Bill
as a...

a voyeur and a sexual pervert and a
child molester. It was such a foul part

such a horrible character that I decided
to cast him as a righteous man as

the main cop, as Lieutenant Bayman in
this movie, just because I wanted to

show that Bill was capable of playing
both sides of the coin, that he could

good as well as evil.

Lieutenant Bayman, who is almost the
antithesis of Bill's part in hardware.

And again, the scene is to reinforce the
futility of Zakes'

task, the way that these murders have
been going on and on since the beginning

of history.

These scenes at the edge of the world.

are shot at a place called the Great
Fish River Canyon, which is actually the

second largest natural canyon in the
world, after the Grand Canyon in

The only difference being that unlike
the Grand Canyon, the Fish River Canyon

in the middle of nowhere.

And only very few tourists ever actually
go that far.

But it's vast and beautiful.

And the locals have a great deal of
mythology.

The story the hitchhiker tells here
about the great snake father, Kutain

and how the great Dan hunter -gatherer
trapped the snake father, and in the

course of trying to escape, the Kutain
Karoo's coils allegedly created the

canyon. Again, it's actual tribal
mythology.

Here, Wendy finally shuts the hitch up,
having heard enough of the...

supernatural gobbledygook kisses him.

And again, we can see that Wendy is the
driving force in this relationship, that

she's the one that seduces him, not the
other way around.

She consistently invites the devil or
the demon into her life.

And yeah, this is one of the things this
movie I'm happiest with.

Again, a beautiful view of the Fisher
River Canyon. Very hard to photograph

because the air currents, the winds were
so strong that it buffeted the hell out

of our helicopter.

The guys manning the roadblock are real
South African cops.

We achieved this.

The movie itself was shot about a year
before the independence in Namibia, and

there were still South African cops
actually basically running the law and

in the place.

And we achieved this movie by bribing
the cops, by paying them to allow us to

use their roads and do whatever we
wanted.

And in the course of bribing the police
force and getting them on our side, we

gave little parts in the movie to the
local cops.

So all the cops in the scenes of
Roadblock are the South African cops who

literally working for our film crew for
the duration of the Dust Devil shoot.

I actually enjoyed the kind of the
diabolic nature of getting the cops,

the army, and the local police force on
our side, and that as it were a devil

movie, it seemed appropriate that they
were serving us for the course of this

movie.

Again, the images on the TV set playing
in Zakes' lounge are images of rail

deaths. Here we see the Faroe Island
whale hull, where they're literally

the whales to death.

And the subsequent scene with Hitch and
Wendy at the table in the motel, we can

see they're surrounded by whale bones,
almost as if they're inside the skeleton

of a dead whale.

Again, bringing us back to this bizarre
light motif, this recurrent theme of

fishing and deep sea animals, and the
lack of water and death.

and the way that all of these characters
are reaching out for redemption, which

is symbolized always by water.

In the background here, something
explodes far out in the desert night,

distracts them.

The movie never explains what exploded,
and that's just how it is.

It's very closely based on a couple of
things that happened to me out in

Namibia. This entire movie, in fact, is
inspired by a journey I took through

Namibia as a 15 -year -old when our car
broke down near Bethany.

And that particular moment, seeing
something explode way out in the desert

then everyone standing and watching the
flames until the flames vanish and never

finding out what it was that just blew
up, is something that actually happened

to us.

So in Dust Devil, the movie, I felt a
desire to also have a...

an inexplicable explosion just happened
for no reason at all somewhere in the

background, which very much evokes that
place to me.

And here we have the one licensed track
we could afford on our budget, which

ended up being Hank Williams' Rambling
Man, which seemed utterly appropriate

the Hitchhiker's character and pretty
much essential.

There had to be a scene where...

Wendy and the Devil would essentially
dance to Hank Williams' music by the

moonlight while the owl looks on.

Here we see the bottle moving on the
table as well, as if by psychokinesis,

which was something else that literally
happened to me in a remote motel in

Namibia during the shoot of the original
Death of the Devil.

And here we see Hitz's small change, the
devil's small change left on the

tabletop. And we see that some of those
coins are really ancient.

Some are Chinese, some are Celtic. And
again we get the sense the devil has

on the road a really long time.

Which segues into the cop's dream, into
Zake's second dream sequence.

Where again Zake is troubled by the
unquiet souls of the dead.

who are looking to Zakes, to the cop, to
somehow let them rest or pass on.

In this case, Zakes is literally meeting
the trapped, disturbed soul of Saki,

the murder victim, who was killed in the
first sequence.

Having been slain by the Nahlur, by the
black magician, Saki's

soul is pretty much trapped between
worlds, and is looking to Zakes, to the

to free her by avenging her, killing the
murderer, and freeing

the soul, the energy that the
Nightwalker has harvested, has sucked

But like a vampire, Saki is like one of
the undead herself, like

Lucy returning from the grave in
Dracula.

And as Zake slips into this world, he's
increasingly disorientated. It becomes

harder to tell sleep from waking.

This notion of waking up in the bed and
discovering the body of the murdered

girl is reaching into him and grabbing
his heart. It's another iteration of the

old hag, the nocturnal sleep paralysis
that I mentioned earlier. The

way that...

energy -sapping or soul -sucking demons
can literally break into your

consciousness when you're half asleep
and half awake, which is, yeah, where

is coming from. It's also pretty much
the basis of Wes Craven's Nightmare on

Street movies, which deal with the same
mythology in a far more American and far

more commercial manner.

Here we see Rupert Swart.

The one white South African actor we had
to go into the beer hall lured by the

sound of the pinball table.

It's pretty much about the honky going
to the wrong side of town of the white

South African stepping into a place
where a white South African shouldn't

The bartender we cast because he had no
nose.

His nose had been hacked off the rail.

So I figured I'd cast him as the
barkeeper.

We just tried to assemble the roughest,
most dangerous looking people who were

around at the time to give Rufus a hard
time.

There'd been a situation in the car on
the road from the airport when Rufus

in. The big guy in the checked shirt was
one of our stunt people.

We cast him in the movie.

On the way from the airport during the
drive, he had an argument with Rufus.

The two of them fell out. They were not
friends.

One of the actors who were sitting in
the backseat of the car overhearing this

argument between the stuntman and Ruthie
Duarte, the South African actor,

actually wrote down the exchange, noted
down the things that they'd said to each

other, and I worked them back into the
script.

And we literally restaged their fight in
the scene.

Here, our stuntman gets revenge on
Ruthie.

And to an extent, we can imagine it's
black Africa getting revenge on

-era South Africa.

Rufus is ruthlessly kicked and beaten by
the people in the beer hall while his

wife fucks the devil.

So, yeah, that was... And he gets kicked
in the balls.

And the kick to the face was real.

That actually hit him. That blow
connected.

It wasn't meant to connect, but it did.

I recall in the lengthier take, Rufus
just lies there bleeding for a while.

then he kind of opens his eyes and sees
the camera's still rolling and freaks

out. Like, you know, what the fuck is he
still rolling for? What is this, some

kind of fucking stuffed movie?

I think that's what he said in the full
take.

But yeah, Rufus, like I mentioned
earlier, was carrying the can for the

white South Africa.

He was the one real white South African
we had on the movie.

And as a result, he's heavily tortured.

And, yeah, in the meantime, John
Machakese's character, Joe Nopdy, and

can't penetrate into the very vaginal,
very womb -like cave where we see the

original rock paintings.

And that's, yeah, cross -cut with the
post -coital scene between Wendy and the

Devil, where, again, the camera itself
is describing a spiral.

The devil character talks about the way
that he's trapped in his body, that he

has within him this spirit, like a wind,
which is whirling and trying to

get out, and that he fears that he might
just blow apart, so his essence can be

released, which I guess is a
foreshadowing of the end of the movie.

And it's also...

establishing some little bit of sympathy
for the devil.

The devil essentially can't help
himself.

He's pretty much a part of hell and is
trapped in the cycle and it's a lonely

place to be. There's probably little
chance of redemption for him.

Again with the zebra print.

bedding and the whole look of the motel.
The genius of Joseph Bennett, our

production designer, who created the
whole African Gothic kit. Look at this

movie.

And here, Joe Niemont, the witch doctor,

played by John Machikiza, explains
the...

The Nachtloper, the black magician, the
myth of these perturbed, soul

-stealing spirits that wander the
wasteland for eternity, which again is

drawn very much on real mythology.

It's not something that was invented
just for this movie.

Yeah, Chelsea Field had a cast iron
nudity cloth in her contract, so we

never really get her clothes off in the
course of the film, which was something

that we always kind of regretted.

It also meant that we were tied down to
shooting the sex scene missionary

position style.

And here, while she takes off the ring,
we see Rupert Swart being handcuffed and

treated with equal hostility by the
white character.

So he's beaten by both the black and the
white characters. And it's very much in

hell.

And here we are behind the mirror.

I mean, that's the reservoir of darkness
lurking beneath the surface of the

mirror. The darkness that looks back at
you as you look at your reflection.

And then back into the womb -like cave
where...

Zakes realizes that it's going to fall
to him to hunt the Dark Devil, to hunt

the demon.

Again, this was largely created for the
movie.

We didn't use real rock paintings. The
rock paintings were created by Imo Horn,

who was the unit muralist, as well as
the second unit cameraman.

Zakes' hand is bandaged from, he hurts
his knuckles when he punches the other

cop. And again, the damage to Zakes'
knuckles shows that he's losing his

and that it's the way that the black
magic is creeping into his life and

infecting him, that he's slightly
disempowered by his wounded hand, which

yeah, evoked Judeo -Christian images.

And the scene where Hitchhiker literally
tries to reach into the mirror to take

the ceremonial bowl offered to him by
the African spirit.

And we realize that actually he can't
penetrate the mirror.

That he's very much operating in the
material world as well.

And is yet trapped in our dimension.

I very much see Joe Nobody, Joe Nimont,
John Machikiza's character as the

Van Helsing of the Dust Devil story.

He's the one that has the knowledge as
to how to defeat the demon, which he has

to impart to Zakes' character, Zakes
essentially being the vampire

hunter.

And in African mythology, in...

Moisam mythology.

Strangely enough, the Nachla defeated a
stake, a stick, very similar

to the way that we deal with western
vampires.

Again, it's comparative mythology.

It seems very bizarre and coincidental
to me that this is the case.

But you take the magic kiri, the magic
stick, which John is holding in the

scene, and you lay it across the
threshold of your hut at night.

So when the vampiric Nachtloper comes to
your bed to suck your vital forces, it

has to step over the kiri.

And when it steps over the stick, the
stick has the power to suit the

spirit to the earth, to earth its
energy, and to trap it.

which is very similar to the way you
have to nail the vampire to the ground.

have to drive some stakes through the
vampire and nail it to the earth to stop

the wandering spirit from coming back
and attacking you.

So there are these weird parallels
between our vampire myths, between the

European succubi and incubi, and the
African Nachtlober, Nightwalker,

which I can't explain. These parallels
exist.

There are parallel mythologies that have
somehow grown side by side over the

course of thousands of years, but
essentially will tell you the same

Another detail being that the Nachtlover
has problems with his shadow.

Like Peter Pan, you may recall that
Peter Pan also loses his shadow, and

has to stitch Peter's shadow back to his
feet.

But the Nachtlover's shadows detach
themselves from the Nightwalker and

apart from them.

just the same way that the vampires
don't have reflections, that you can't

vampire in the mirror.

And, again, I can't explain that. I
don't know why the vampire has no

and why the African vampire has no
shadow, but it's something which both

mythologies have in common.

Here, Wendy, finds Hitch's Polaroid
collection.

As aforementioned, Hitch is taking
rigorous continuity Polaroids

because he hopes to somehow escape the
continuity of the material

world to break the cycle of time.

To an extent, all of the Polaroids in
Hitch's backpack are also like the souls

he's collecting, as if it's the souls of
all the people who are caught in his

bag, in his death bag, along with the
fingers and the knuckles.

He's been collecting all that power.

And Hitch now tries to explain himself.

In the scene, again, I'm staggered by
Robert John Burke's performance of the

Dust Devil as the Hitchhiker. He's just
wonderful.

I mean, it's an incredibly hard part to
play because he's not even a human

being. He's like a demon or a
manifestation from Wendy's id, from her

unconscious. And for an actor to take on
a part which is so alien, which is so

far from themselves, and coming from
such a dark place, to somehow make him

both... oddly sympathetic and believable
is quite an achievement.

I think Robert did an extraordinary job
in this movie.

And it's not without its sense of humor,
of course, as well, which is another

thing I really appreciate with Robert's
performance.

But for me, all of my work is
essentially black comedy on some hideous

At least, it makes me smile.

Again, Hitch refers to the colors in the
desert sky in that liminal,

transitional state between dawn and
night.

The colors that appear first as the
night segues into day, and then as the

segues into night, which is the color
wheel, the cycle by which this entire

movie is organized.

Pretty much everything that the devil
tells Wendy in the scene is

Gnosticism. I mean, it's very similar to
the beliefs of the

Cathars in 12th and 13th century Europe,
that we're living essentially in the

material world, in the world of the
devil.

Our souls belong elsewhere, that this
earth is not necessarily the creation of

true good God, which is full of... pain
and misery. Our souls belong to the true

good God in the kingdom elsewhere, but
are trapped in the hell of the material

world. They're trapped in the prison
program of the matrix in this place, in

this realm of consciousness.

And in his mind, the hitchhiker is
simply trying to help Wendy escape by

allowing her light, her consciousness to
transcend, to leave the thumb.

the void in which these characters are
trapped.

But Wendy's not ready to go. I mean, at
the last minute she fights them and

decides she doesn't want to die after
all.

This is very much based on all those
folk who

set out to commit suicide and then
change their minds at the last moment.

Like when you swim out to sea and you
decide to drown.

And then finally as you're tiring and
the waves are coming over your head and

the water is starting to come into your
mouth and lungs, you suddenly start to

panic and realize you don't want to die
after all.

And then you have to struggle against
the current and try and beat back

the waves and make it to the beach.

Just like all the folk who take overdose
pills or cut their ribs and then call

for help to the race.

And poor people finally arrive and find
them.

dead next to the telephone.

People who want to take their own lives
and then when they sense death coming

are still so terrified by it that they
suddenly grasp after life and fight to

the other way and to live after all. And
this is Wendy's dilemma.

She's someone who's gone so far into
death that now when she decides that she

actually doesn't want to die she finds
it very hard to stay alive.

Yeah, here she is.

swiped by a cat truck going the other
way, which is an accurate recreation of

car accident I had in 2015 on the
shooting of the first Dust Devil.

was kind of worse than real life.

But, yeah, I recreated it for the 35mm
movie

with the cows.

The cows were borrowed from a local
abattoir, which caused a lot of cold

-seeking on behalf of the crew members.

No one liked the idea of having to
return the cows to the abattoir after

finished shooting.

But at the same time, none of us could
take the cows home with us and give them

happy lives.

That's a tricky thing, and I don't think
any of the crew members were prepared

to stop eating meat or to give up eating
hamburgers.

Yet they're all kind of bitched and
uncomfortable about the idea of

the cows from the abattoir, from the
place where they're going to be killed,

shooting with them and then returning
them to be killed again after the shoot.

I left the scene in Afrikaans without
subtitles because it's obvious what

they're saying and again I wanted people
to have an opportunity to hear a little

bit of real Afrikaans.

And it's all such classic stuff.

I mean, whenever Afrikaans people or
South Africans have car accidents and

they're not killed, the very first thing
they do is they start screaming at each

other in Afrikaans. And if anyone has
guns, they usually start threatening

other. It's always a very vicious,
violent scene. I wanted to include some

essence of that in the movie.

Wendy is saved by her convenient
sunroof.

And again, shooting in Namibia meant
that we were skirting around all kinds

safety regulations.

This was a tremendous explosion, and
seemingly hot. I recall when

Chelsea wanted to do the stunt of
running away from the Volkswagen

to her credit, she did. She ran away and
held herself off camera onto a

mattress.

And literally behind her, after she
threw herself onto the mattress, a great

piece of flaming metal came and sunk
down into the desert floor just where

been running before.

So she didn't see that.

But we all saw it from behind the
camera.

And she was the strength of the
explosives used by the South African

paratechnics team.

The South African paratechnicians were
truly frightening people.

The one, their names were Rick and Roly.

Rick Creswell and Roly was his
assistant.

But Roly's face was just a patchwork of
scars. He'd obviously been blown up so

many times and had so much plastic
surgery, you could tell it had gone

bunch of times.

And Rick only walked with the aid of two
sticks.

And these were our chief stuntmen and
pyrotechnicians who didn't exactly

confidence, but they did great work.

Now we have Robert in full dust devil
mode, hot on

Chelsea's trail.

Chelsea playing Wendy.

I mean, to a large extent, the devil in
this movie is the man of no name.

And you could probably write a whole
thesis on that character, on the

figure of the man of no name.

I'm very interested in archetypes.

in what the uncharitable would call
cliches, and essentially in

conducting a dialogue between frozen
archetypes, the cops and the

cuckolded husband, Mark Robinson's
character here.

Essentially all the characters are
playing larger -than -life symbols for,

Mark's case, white South Africa, in
Zake's case, black South Africa.

And you can imagine that Chelsea as
Wendy is essentially playing the soul

of South Africa, literally the soul of
South Africa, which is being seduced by

the devil and which is in danger and is
being sucked into the heart of the

wilderness, into the wasteland.

And it's really down to the black cop
and the white husband to try to...

to side their differences and establish
some kind of harmony between each other

in order to defeat the devil and save
the soul of the country.

If I can reduce the symbolic matrix of
the movie to something so simple, but

that's really what's going on in this
movie.

It's a spiraling voyage in which white
and black characters have to work out

their differences in order to try and
save the country.

stop South Africa from going to the
devil.

The vultures in the scene were two tame
vultures whose names were Blood and

Guts.

They were our unit vultures.

And they were great birds to work with.

Really civilized and surprisingly easy.

We only got them onto the set very late
in the production and if I'd known that

the vultures were so easy to work with I
probably would have dressed vultures

into every shot.

But as such, Blood and Guts were
wonderful.

Literally, they would sit there waiting,
and then when I said action, they would

settle into their position, and really
were very, very easy

and decorative creatures to work with.

That's Blood and Guts sitting up in the
background.

One of the tricky parts about making
this movie was that you can only do all

these shots once, because you leave the
moment.

And we kept having to find dunes and
places where there were no footprints

no car tracks.

And the moment you did one take, you
would completely fuck it up.

Which meant that, yeah, again, like
burning the house, a lot of the time we

doing things in one take.

Now we get a little bit of Mark's
backstory.

where we discover that he met Wendy
during a protest while they were at

university, that he's essentially got
once in a liberal, an urban bourgeois

liberal consciousness.

But at the same time, he's still a white
South African, and it's still

essentially a little uncool.

And this is very much about the
inability of the white and the black

to ever sort it out and cooperate.

Yet they have to cooperate if the nation
is going to be saved.

The only hope for South Africa and for
these characters is to forgive each

other, to show mercy and sympathy and
understanding, which is something which

almost everyone is incapable of in Dust
Devil.

Dust Devil is set in an emotional
drought. It's a wasteland. It's hell.

I would note also that this particular
hell, the moonscape behind them, was the

place where George Miller ended up
shooting Mad Max Fury Road many years

It's certainly an extraordinary place.

The whale song, of course, the whale
music on Lake's car stereo, that

again is all about the deep -sea fishing
theme, the promise of water, the

idea of...

Water being something almost attainable
that everyone is reaching towards.

Wendy is driving towards the sea, and
they are guided by the whale song.

They're guided by the promise of
redemption, of the hope that there might

something beyond the wasteland, that
they might somehow transcend hell and

escape the box of the material world,
the nightmare that they're caught in.

Here we see Hitch, the devil, raising
the wind, literally calling up a

storm. And of course, a movie called
Dust Devil. There had to be a dust storm

sequence in the movie.

And to realize the sequence, we got the
motor of a 747

jet aircraft.

We literally cut the motor off the wing
of a jet aircraft.

and mounted the turbine motor on a
little trolley, and then maneuvered the

into place and blasted the hell out of
Chelsea.

And this wind is created literally by
the 747 motor that we had, that was the

strongest wind machine we could possibly
master.

Like everything in the movie, it's a
fake, but I think it does a good job of

standing in for a genuine dust storm.

Zakes and Rupert Swart drive through the
night fighting their way through the

storm.

Both of them hopelessly ill -equipped
for dealing with the circumstance.

Movie's inadequate monster hunters.

The accident here is very
disorientating, which is intentional.

Most accidents are, particularly if
you're in the desert in the middle of

night, trying to work out what really
happened, or even that you had an

accident, is often difficult to figure
out. You're driving along one moment,

then something happens, and then
suddenly, as in Rupert's case, you find

suspended upside down, and maybe you've
got a pressure on your chest.

And then slowly you work out that, oh my
fuck, I've had an accident.

But it's not always clear in the first
few seconds.

It can be extremely disorientating.

Here Rufus plunges out of the vehicle
and realizes that the police car is now

upside down in the middle of nowhere.

And Zakes is firing into the dark.

Originally we wanted to have more
special effects. I wanted to have more

out there.

Dust Devil was so cheap, the production
company making Dust Devil, Palace

Films, actually was filed for bankruptcy
before the film was completed.

So by the time we got to post
-production, there was no money. The

-production process was funded out of my
own pocket, which is why we couldn't

afford to use licensed tracks beyond the
Hank Williams, the one Hank Williams

track.

Simon Boswell, the extraordinary
composer who created the score for this

had to step in and basically score the
entire film simply because we couldn't

afford any music. But by the same token,
we couldn't afford special effects.

There are no optical effects.

Anything that was supposed to be done in
post -production was lost or abandoned.

And we couldn't afford to do ADR. We
couldn't afford to re -voice some of the

scenes that had generator sound or other
noises in the background because we

couldn't afford to reassemble the main
cast members.

So some scenes were literally left out
because we couldn't fix the soundtrack.

Other scenes, like where Zakes is firing
at nothing, are kind of effective.

It may be better that we can't see the
demons in that scene.

This scene was originally meant to be
shot in the middle of the desert.

But by the time we shot the scene, we
didn't have a desert anymore.

So we shot it in the cinema set instead.

That is a real sidewinder, though.

And it is deadly poisonous.

And we allowed the sidewinder to come up
as close as possible to Chelsea's head.

The idea being that the snake is the
demon.

The snake approaches her and it's a
human hand that reaches out to touch her

hair.

Again in the dream, when she wakes up,
she finds she's still in the desert.

Yet when she looks, she sees the
sidewinder track, the track left by the

in the sand.

And these strange marks, the...

the trail of the snake, the sidewinder
marks, are also the shape

that you see around the halo on the head
of the night walker figure in the rock

painting. These tongues of fire, which
are really like, they're not only like

Hebrew tongues of fire, but they're
really the shape that the sidewinder,

desert snake, leaves in the sand.

Yeah, and here Chelsea comes to the
ghost town.

This is one of several towns on the
Skeleton Coast that have become sanded

where the sand -clearing crews have
stopped bothering to keep the dunes from

marching over the road, and have
literally become cut off, engulfed by

desert.

This is a town called Coleman's Cop.

It was once the richest town in Africa.

Now, silence is the lawn with the dunes
marching right into the houses.

At the time when it was German West
Africa, this was a diamond town and

wealthy.

There were a lot of atrocities under
Germany's rule.

I mean, Germany more or less tried to
wipe out the local population.

There were mass graves found behind some
of these towns containing thousands of

people, of Avambo and Herero tribal
people who had been executed back before

World War I at the time when Germany was
basically

stealing the diamonds from this place. I
mean, the whole reason

that they were there in reality was for
the diamonds.

which is why the houses were so
sumptuous and rich.

And when the diamond trade started to
become unprofitable and they'd basically

found everything there was to find in
the area, the town gradually became

unviable and slipped slowly into the
status of being the ghost

town that it is today.

It's certainly one of the eeriest places
I've been to.

The place has a distinctly bad vibe, it
should be said.

The man from the Diamond Company told us
that whenever a movie shoots in Colmans

Coppola, that area, the movie always has
a down ending.

You always know something dark or
violent is going to happen if you're

in a place like this.

Again, the sequence is done in a
continuous take.

That's one of many...

lengthy tracking shots involving a
mirror again, and Zakes

is lured by the sound of the ringing
telephone deeper into the house.

The ringing telephone is really his ex
-wife and his guilt,

Zakes' crime, the thing that he has to
make up for, which is

luring him deeper into hell.

And I like to imagine that this is
because of the way that the desert wind

through the telephone lines, that all of
these ghost telephone calls are created

by the wind moaning and keening in those
thousands of miles of line.

And from this call, Wendy, Chelsea's
character, can see at once that

Zakes is doomed.

Zakes is clearly damned.

and he doesn't trust him or want to go
with him because wherever Zake is going,

it doesn't look like a very healthy
place.

Zake penetrates deeper and deeper into
the ghost town and as he does so, the

rooms become smaller and more filled
with dust, more filled with sand and you

can imagine the air literally becomes
thick and hard to breathe.

I was in some respects inspired by the
afterlife portrayed in the Epic of

Gilgamesh, the Sumerian afterlife.

The house of the dust, described in the
cuneiform tablets from the Epic of

Gilgamesh 7 ,000 years ago.

Dust is the food and clay is the meat of
the people of this house.

They see no light. They sit in darkness.

And in the heart of the ghost town, in
the heart of hell,

is, of course, a cinema.

It's mentioned briefly earlier, the
Empire Cinema, where Joe Nobly used to

Of course, the Empire is dead and has
landed in.

And here, as Zakes approaches the limits
of its reality, we get the sense that

he almost starts to realize

that he's a character in a movie.

You start to hear laughter of the
audience as if people are being

his pain and his suffering is somehow
entertainment for something.

He is, of course, trapped in Dust Devil.
He is in the movie.

And just as our characters might realize
we're trapped in the material world, so

the movie characters start to realize
their own artificiality.

The vision he sees of his wife sitting
with the child in the football is

deliberately evoking the Black Madonna
and the image of the Madonna and child,

again, as a counterpoint to the devil.

A sense of some force of good or the
prospect of redemption, the

light that Zakes is reaching towards.

Of course, Zakes' journey is...

towards freedom, towards redemption, is
a journey towards death.

In Dust Devil, the only freedom from the
material world, the only real

redemption, the only real release, is
death.

The hitchhiker Rob John Burke's
character deliberately evokes not only

of no name, but also Henry Fonda's
character from Once Upon a Time in the

In the original Leone movies, I don't
think there was any metaphysical

Leone intended the man of no name, like
the figure from Who Killed the Cyclops

in the story of Ulysses, to represent
the little man who stands against the

system. To some extent, it was a
socialist metaphor of how one person can

difference or stand up to giants.

And the figure of the man of no name
became more mystical after Eastwood

out most of the dialogue in the script
and decided not to say the lines.

His character actually had a name in the
original Leone movies, but Eastwood

said so little that he became the man of
no name, an idea that was popularized

by the marketing of the...

spaghetti westerns when they appeared in
America, which really put this notion

of the man of no name out there.

But it was only really later when he
started directing himself movies like

Plains Drifter and Pale Rider that the
figure of the man of no name started to

adopt an occult or an esoteric
significance, where we started to sense

figure was really an angel or a devil.

Something we also see in the Terrence
Hill movie, My Name is Nobody, where

Terrence Hill's character is very much
positioned as the angel of death,

watching over Henry Fonda and waiting to
claim him.

Nobody was faster.

And this scene in the ghost town street
obviously evokes the ending

of a spaghetti western, but it's a
completely...

dreamlike, surreal version of a
spaghetti western.

But it still evokes those great
shootouts.

As Wendy and the devil stand off over
Zakes

McKay's corpse.

Zakes is still just in the land of the
living here.

Zakes' last act is to position the magic
stick, the Kiri, which roots the...

wandering through the ground and robbed
him of power.

That's making him vulnerable for Wendy
to dispatch him and hopefully release

energy.

The head explosion, like all great head
explosions, was fired by Scanners.

And I wanted to go one better than
Scanners. I didn't want to have a

wanted to show his head explode in a
continuous shot.

So we...

tried pioneering a new approach to the
head explosion there, which I think

worked pretty damn well.

Essentially what we did is we did a
trace -off from the lance position of

John Burke's head, then stopped the
camera, replaced his head with a

pyrotechnic dummy packed with meat, then
did a sort of...

half a second dissolved between his rail
head and the dummy, so the dummy

itself is never actually on screen.

And yeah, final confrontation between
the lead couple, between Wendy and her

husband.

Which again shows the absolute inability
of any of these characters to ever

work it out or forgive each other.
There's no way Wendy can forgive Mark.

Mark hasn't learned anything. He's still
hoping they're going to take her home.

But home doesn't exist anymore.

I mean, whatever sense of home or real
life these characters might have had is

futile. And Mark's got no future. He's
obviously handcuffed to a dysfunctional

police state, to white South Africa,
which in this case is represented by an

upside -down police car, which is, for
me, a symbol of authority.

of the structure and the state
incapacitated and out of control.

And Mark is still full of hope. I mean,
he's the one character who doesn't meet

the devil. He never gets to meet the
hitchhiker because he never gives up.

Right to the end, he's still convinced
that somehow he can make it work.

Whereas I think Wendy and Zagos have
gone beyond despair.

And this final scene, Wendy has adopted
the praise of the Nightwalker,

of the wandering demon herself.

And to an extent has become the next
iteration, the next avatar of

the sport.

I mean, the witch doctor did say
something about how you have to burn the

to drive away the wandering shadow.

Otherwise it will claim you.

its murderer to be its new host.

And in this scene, we suspect that Wendy
has taken on an aspect of

the demon, or maybe the demon itself. I
wanted the scene to be ambiguous, the

same as originally we were meant to see
Wendy rescued by the police when she

reached the freeway. But I thought, what
if the police or the army vehicles on

the freeway were themselves so
terrifying?

that we couldn't be sure that they were
actually coming to rescue her.

And she's so terrifying that I'm not
sure she deserves to be rescued.

So it lends an element of ambiguity.

And we see also the sky has become red,
that the color wheel has clocked all the

way around into the time of the red
light.

And the vehicles now, rather than old
-fashioned vintage cars, look almost

science fiction -y.

riot control vehicles or armored
vehicles from the near future. The

the future that is bearing down on
Wendy. The terrible place that these

characters will be spending the rest of
their lives in.

There's no escape from hell and death,
though.

There is no sea. None of the characters
reach the beach or the ocean. They talk

about it, but they fail.

It never rains.

They pray for rain, but rain doesn't
come.

Now in the final scene, we see Joe
Nobody alone in the drive -in, turning

the lights, or turning on the lights,
the house lights.

And it's the end of the show, and it's
down to the projections to close up the

movie theater.

This entire movie is very much a drive
-in movie made in hell.

And as such, it combines elements of
several drive -in genres.

It's not just a horror movie.

It's also a western. It's also a police
procedural road movie melodrama.

And it's kind of the movie I might have
dreamed.

If I'd fallen asleep, it would show
there's a driver somewhere in the South

African desert.

I hope you've enjoyed it. And next time
you find yourself driving alone at night

between towns...

and you think you see a hitchhiker just
up ahead, remember to tell yourself

there really are such things.

This is Richard Stanley, wishing you a
good night and a pleasant journey home.