Original subtitles

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.