1
00:00:08,039 --> 00:00:14,660
Back in the first time, in the time of
the red light, Desert

2
00:00:14,660 --> 00:00:18,860
Wind, Suu Poha, was a man like us.

3
00:00:19,500 --> 00:00:24,460
Until, by mischance, he grew wings.

4
00:00:24,900 --> 00:00:31,300
The opening narration by the character
of Joan Nimont, literally Joan Nobody,

5
00:00:31,500 --> 00:00:35,500
the local witch doctor, evokes the
mythic past.

6
00:00:36,430 --> 00:00:42,430
drawn from the mythology of the hunter
-gatherer people, the Khoisan people, or

7
00:00:42,430 --> 00:00:47,290
more accurately, the Ngoysar people, who
once inhabited southern Africa.

8
00:00:48,550 --> 00:00:54,770
Joe's character references the time of
the red light, and in doing so, he

9
00:00:54,770 --> 00:00:58,510
evokes the color wheel of creation.

10
00:00:59,490 --> 00:01:05,620
In Hoki Indian and Bushman mythology,
The cycles of creation

11
00:01:05,620 --> 00:01:12,500
and of the actual life cycle, the growth
from childhood into manhood into

12
00:01:12,500 --> 00:01:18,800
old age, is compared to the appearance
of colors in the desert sky at dawn.

13
00:01:19,240 --> 00:01:25,560
The way that the sky moves from black
through a series of shades of violent

14
00:01:25,560 --> 00:01:31,500
and orange and gold up to blue and then
finally to the burned out white desert

15
00:01:31,500 --> 00:01:32,500
sky.

16
00:01:32,730 --> 00:01:39,630
The color wheel is, yeah, linked to
rituals and all the main phases in The

17
00:01:39,630 --> 00:01:40,630
Life Warrior.

18
00:01:41,450 --> 00:01:48,170
And I've tried in both Dust Devil and
Hardware, my other movie, which

19
00:01:48,170 --> 00:01:53,930
was made about one year prior to this,
to organize and structure the movie

20
00:01:53,930 --> 00:01:55,670
according to these colors.

21
00:01:55,930 --> 00:02:01,610
There's a very vigorous area to how the
different colors are presented on

22
00:02:01,610 --> 00:02:02,610
screen.

23
00:02:02,620 --> 00:02:07,400
And the film is very much cyclical,
circular in structure and nature.

24
00:02:08,500 --> 00:02:15,240
The mythology is all drawn from native
African folk tales, largely collected

25
00:02:15,240 --> 00:02:17,240
by my mother, who was an anthropologist.

26
00:02:17,520 --> 00:02:22,260
And I, too, played anthropology at the
University of Cape Town before becoming

27
00:02:22,260 --> 00:02:23,260
filmmaker.

28
00:02:23,620 --> 00:02:30,500
So the first story we hear about how the
wind was once a man, that grew

29
00:02:30,500 --> 00:02:36,920
wings and flew like a bird, is very much
taken from Moisan oral tradition.

30
00:02:39,660 --> 00:02:46,460
The devil figure we see emerging from
the Hites is, of course, a white

31
00:02:46,460 --> 00:02:49,640
man and is not a tribal African
character.

32
00:02:49,920 --> 00:02:55,820
I was keen in Dust Devil to present the
mythology and magic as being a power of

33
00:02:55,820 --> 00:03:02,340
good. And on the subcontinent it's very
clear that the devil has white skin and

34
00:03:02,340 --> 00:03:08,900
devise. At that time when we were making
the film, devil movies were essentially

35
00:03:08,900 --> 00:03:10,440
criminalized in South Africa.

36
00:03:10,980 --> 00:03:17,220
Southern Africa is very much a colonial
missionary culture.

37
00:03:18,040 --> 00:03:22,920
The Dutch Reformed Church were in charge
of the movie censorship at the time,

38
00:03:22,980 --> 00:03:28,840
and while they allowed anti -apartheid
movies like Cry Freedom or A World Apart

39
00:03:28,840 --> 00:03:35,640
to play in cinemas, they banned The
Exorcist. They severely cut the Omen

40
00:03:35,640 --> 00:03:40,480
movies, and basically tried to suppress
all of the 70s devil movies.

41
00:03:40,700 --> 00:03:45,540
They hated any film in which the devil
appeared, and even more so, they hated

42
00:03:45,540 --> 00:03:47,140
the idea of the devil winning.

43
00:03:48,140 --> 00:03:52,980
So I thought, does the devil make their
very own devil movie?

44
00:03:53,460 --> 00:03:58,040
And given that Clint Eastwood was the
most popular actor in the world at the

45
00:03:58,040 --> 00:04:02,820
time, and I think he voted the sexiest
man alive more times than anyone else, I

46
00:04:02,820 --> 00:04:07,280
think, for eight years running, I
figured that the devil looked like

47
00:04:08,060 --> 00:04:12,700
I mean, if he wasn't Clint Eastwood,
he'd be Jim Morrison or Elvis Presley.

48
00:04:12,700 --> 00:04:16,860
all we know is that the devil would have
to be the most charismatic

49
00:04:18,089 --> 00:04:19,810
sexiest and the best looking man alive.

50
00:04:20,370 --> 00:04:25,270
And under the circumstances we chose
Robert John Burke's part, which I think

51
00:04:25,270 --> 00:04:26,650
an appropriate choice.

52
00:04:27,530 --> 00:04:32,230
I wanted to, along with the colour
scheme, evoke the cycles of time.

53
00:04:32,510 --> 00:04:37,530
So in the early scenes the vehicles you
see on the road are all vintage cars.

54
00:04:38,270 --> 00:04:43,430
so that it's actually quite hard to tell
what time period this movie is set in.

55
00:04:43,570 --> 00:04:48,350
It could just as easily be the turn of
the century or the 1920s or 30s.

56
00:04:50,130 --> 00:04:56,990
These scenes were all shot at a location
on the Skeleton Coast, a place

57
00:04:56,990 --> 00:05:02,390
that during the time of German
colonialism, when it's German East

58
00:05:06,000 --> 00:05:08,740
Sorry, pardon that, when this was German
West Africa.

59
00:05:09,320 --> 00:05:11,860
This is actually the Kaiser's ostrich
farm.

60
00:05:12,760 --> 00:05:19,340
All the feathers in the helmet, you see,
in the time of World War I, or in the

61
00:05:19,340 --> 00:05:23,940
time of the Austro -Hungarian Empire,
came from ostriches, which were farmed

62
00:05:23,940 --> 00:05:25,560
here in the Skeleton Coast.

63
00:05:27,920 --> 00:05:33,440
The hitchhiker uses a Polaroid camera
because he's taking continuity

64
00:05:33,440 --> 00:05:34,440
photographs.

65
00:05:34,880 --> 00:05:39,800
He's unstuck in space and time and is
literally trying to escape from the

66
00:05:39,800 --> 00:05:44,020
continuity of the real world. So
throughout the movie he collects

67
00:05:44,020 --> 00:05:49,280
photographs and is trying to keep a
rigorous track of the timeline of the

68
00:05:49,280 --> 00:05:50,280
murders.

69
00:05:50,980 --> 00:05:54,460
The first murder is shot entirely in a
single take.

70
00:05:55,120 --> 00:06:01,140
It's a continuous dolly track which
enters the mirror while the two

71
00:06:01,140 --> 00:06:02,140
are making love.

72
00:06:02,600 --> 00:06:06,580
I shot it this way to avoid any
censorship issues to make it impossible

73
00:06:07,500 --> 00:06:12,220
If we had had any cutaways or additional
material there might have been some way

74
00:06:12,220 --> 00:06:18,620
of altering the scene or moving the
essential moment of death

75
00:06:18,620 --> 00:06:21,400
further away from the moment of orgasm.

76
00:06:21,800 --> 00:06:24,240
Whereas I wanted to point her together.

77
00:06:25,360 --> 00:06:29,920
We can see that there is in fact a
second hitchhiker visible in the

78
00:06:29,920 --> 00:06:30,920
in the mirror.

79
00:06:31,080 --> 00:06:37,080
immediately between Hitch on Robert John
Burke and Saki, his victim. Seated in

80
00:06:37,080 --> 00:06:39,820
the background is a second hitchhiker
holding a stopwatch.

81
00:06:40,460 --> 00:06:44,460
The second hitchhiker is played by
Robert John Burke's twin brother.

82
00:06:45,020 --> 00:06:46,160
There were two of them.

83
00:06:46,800 --> 00:06:51,520
And when his twin came to visit the set,
I couldn't resist involving him in the

84
00:06:51,520 --> 00:06:58,480
film. So this enabled me to have
basically two hitchhikers within the

85
00:07:00,920 --> 00:07:06,380
Yeah, here the movie introduces Zakes
Mackay, the unfortunate

86
00:07:06,380 --> 00:07:09,480
African cop on the case.

87
00:07:10,180 --> 00:07:15,760
Zakes had a long history of involvement
in the anti -apartheid movement and came

88
00:07:15,760 --> 00:07:21,000
to fame through the Athol Fugard plays,
notably his role in Master Harold and

89
00:07:21,000 --> 00:07:23,300
the Boys, which is the smash hit on
stage.

90
00:07:24,380 --> 00:07:29,640
Because of the connection between Zakes
and the apartheid era and protests

91
00:07:29,640 --> 00:07:34,400
against the white regime, I thought it
would be ironic to cast him as a cop, as

92
00:07:34,400 --> 00:07:36,280
a representative of the white regime.

93
00:07:37,260 --> 00:07:39,700
And some theories of...

94
00:07:40,270 --> 00:07:46,750
telephone calls and the notion of the
wind blowing through the

95
00:07:46,750 --> 00:07:51,090
telephone lines at night and causing the
different telephones to randomly ring

96
00:07:51,090 --> 00:07:57,190
that ties together our disparate
characters here Wendy and her husband

97
00:07:57,190 --> 00:08:03,950
are thousands of miles further south I
named Wendy after the character in the J

98
00:08:03,950 --> 00:08:07,530
.M. Barrie Japan of course and there are
a number of

99
00:08:08,520 --> 00:08:11,320
first Peter Pan references scattered
throughout the story.

100
00:08:11,700 --> 00:08:17,000
Peter Pan, you may recall, was also
living outside of time and refused to

101
00:08:17,000 --> 00:08:21,020
get old and kidnapped Wendy and took her
away to Never Neverland.

102
00:08:21,640 --> 00:08:26,700
So yeah, there is a shadow of Pan
hanging over Dust Devil.

103
00:08:27,720 --> 00:08:34,179
Here we see the beginning of his ritual
and the ceremonial bowl that is used for

104
00:08:34,179 --> 00:08:41,059
collecting the blood of his sacrificial
victims, which we dissolve through to

105
00:08:41,059 --> 00:08:47,920
the rising sun, always trying to forge a
link between the ritual and the

106
00:08:47,920 --> 00:08:50,960
land and the phases of time.

107
00:08:52,120 --> 00:08:56,720
Water is very carefully controlled in
this movie. You will see very, very

108
00:08:56,720 --> 00:08:57,399
of it.

109
00:08:57,400 --> 00:09:04,320
Water contains various promise of mercy,
of release from the

110
00:09:04,320 --> 00:09:05,940
hell of the world they're caught in.

111
00:09:06,200 --> 00:09:11,120
Hitch bathed in the shower to try and
wash away his sins and to wash away the

112
00:09:11,120 --> 00:09:16,820
blood. And throughout the film, yeah,
water has that same redemptive quality,

113
00:09:17,040 --> 00:09:19,920
the salvation in hell.

114
00:09:21,520 --> 00:09:27,120
The blood murals covering the wall were
painted by myself and Imo Horn, the

115
00:09:27,120 --> 00:09:29,000
director of the second unit.

116
00:09:29,860 --> 00:09:34,900
The art department did a great job. In
fact, we were a little bit out of their

117
00:09:34,900 --> 00:09:36,480
depth when it came to the crime scene.

118
00:09:36,740 --> 00:09:39,700
And I remember they were kind of dabbing
brushes at the wall.

119
00:09:39,960 --> 00:09:45,000
So me and Imo took off our shirts and
plunged our hands into these buckets,

120
00:09:45,180 --> 00:09:46,280
essentially of blood.

121
00:09:48,910 --> 00:09:53,530
smeared the stuff all over the interior
walls of the set in a very

122
00:09:53,530 --> 00:09:58,750
psychotic manner as we could do. We were
much younger then and there was a lot

123
00:09:58,750 --> 00:09:59,750
of energy into it.

124
00:10:00,430 --> 00:10:07,430
We see that there is a maimed hand, part
of the single hand, nailed to the door

125
00:10:07,430 --> 00:10:11,970
inside some kind of spiral pattern
that's been painted on the door.

126
00:10:13,900 --> 00:10:18,900
The killer hitchhiker character is
literally making off with Saki's severed

127
00:10:18,900 --> 00:10:23,720
fingers that he's keeping in an ice bag
of the vehicle.

128
00:10:23,960 --> 00:10:29,320
The severed fingers are a part, again,
of African magic and African mythology.

129
00:10:30,080 --> 00:10:36,520
The knuckles of the fingers are meant to
contain power, like a witch's knot.

130
00:10:37,040 --> 00:10:42,380
You'll often find knuckle bones in magic
charms or in drums.

131
00:10:42,790 --> 00:10:47,530
in tom -toms and a lot of the older
African drums, if you shake them you'll

132
00:10:47,530 --> 00:10:52,370
a rattle inside and that's the dried out
knuckle bone that's been put into the

133
00:10:52,370 --> 00:10:53,470
drum to give it power.

134
00:10:54,870 --> 00:10:59,730
Here in the background radio we hear for
the first time that we're in Namibia

135
00:10:59,730 --> 00:11:04,070
and there's a background announcement
about the withdrawal of South African

136
00:11:04,070 --> 00:11:09,050
troops and the appearance of the United
Nations who took over the administration

137
00:11:09,050 --> 00:11:10,050
of Namibia.

138
00:11:10,520 --> 00:11:16,000
Namibia was initially a German colony
that was conquered by South Africa at

139
00:11:16,000 --> 00:11:20,640
time of World War I, and then taken over
by South Africa, who basically ran it

140
00:11:20,640 --> 00:11:27,360
under a mandate from the UN for a bunch
of years until the 1990s, when under the

141
00:11:27,360 --> 00:11:33,660
Southwest African People's Organization,
SWAPO, Namibia, the former Southwest

142
00:11:33,660 --> 00:11:35,200
Africa, finally became independent.

143
00:11:36,110 --> 00:11:40,510
and Dust Devil is essentially set in the
year before Namibia became independent.

144
00:11:42,650 --> 00:11:48,390
These shots with the burning house as
the hitchhiker walks away from the door

145
00:11:48,390 --> 00:11:54,390
deliberately recall John Ford's movie
The Searchers, although obviously in The

146
00:11:54,390 --> 00:11:59,150
Searchers John Wayne doesn't kill the
farmers and burn the farmers dead for

147
00:11:59,150 --> 00:11:59,909
walking away.

148
00:11:59,910 --> 00:12:03,470
This was more my own personal statement
about South Africa.

149
00:12:04,110 --> 00:12:09,910
the country where I'd spent my first 16
years of life and where at the age of 16

150
00:12:09,910 --> 00:12:15,590
I was drafted and forced to leave the
country and go on the run and find

151
00:12:15,590 --> 00:12:16,870
political asylum in Europe.

152
00:12:17,410 --> 00:12:19,730
So I was not feeling too sweet towards
the virus.

153
00:12:20,910 --> 00:12:26,690
The burning house was in fact completely
created for the movie. It's not a real

154
00:12:26,690 --> 00:12:29,430
house. We built it and then we destroyed
it.

155
00:12:30,030 --> 00:12:31,370
Of course we would not...

156
00:12:32,440 --> 00:12:38,540
to burn down a genuine Gothic Namibian
farmstead like this. We had to build it

157
00:12:38,540 --> 00:12:42,260
from scratch in order to create the
internal sequence.

158
00:12:42,960 --> 00:12:48,000
One of the pleasures of shooting in
Namibia was that there were far fewer

159
00:12:48,000 --> 00:12:53,940
guards and the fire inside the house was
in fact pretty deadly.

160
00:12:54,220 --> 00:12:58,600
Very keen on the shot of the flame
turning the pages of the Bible.

161
00:12:59,200 --> 00:13:01,940
Again, it's not something you get to see
every day.

162
00:13:02,340 --> 00:13:07,240
I mean, the temperature is very extreme,
and we literally had to approach the

163
00:13:07,240 --> 00:13:10,240
camera, then get the hell out of there
before we faked ourselves.

164
00:13:11,440 --> 00:13:12,860
And, yeah,

165
00:13:13,860 --> 00:13:15,560
of course, it was something you could
only shoot once.

166
00:13:16,380 --> 00:13:21,720
That was the beauty of it, that
obviously we destroyed the entire set on

167
00:13:21,720 --> 00:13:22,720
first take.

168
00:13:22,940 --> 00:13:27,000
To make certain that we actually got the
shot, I covered it with a number of

169
00:13:27,000 --> 00:13:28,000
cameras simultaneously.

170
00:13:28,940 --> 00:13:35,520
from a helicopter, then there was also a
dolly set up just outside, and a number

171
00:13:35,520 --> 00:13:40,140
of other hidden cameras picking up
angles on telephoto to make the most out

172
00:13:40,140 --> 00:13:47,060
the burn, which is the single most
expensive act of the day that we had

173
00:13:47,060 --> 00:13:48,220
in the shoot.

174
00:13:49,660 --> 00:13:51,400
Dust Devil was not an expensive movie.

175
00:13:51,620 --> 00:13:56,840
I mean, the entire film came in at just
over one million pounds sterling in the

176
00:13:56,840 --> 00:14:03,740
UK. So by taking it to Africa, we were
able to cut the budget to a

177
00:14:03,740 --> 00:14:07,980
point where we achieved things which I
don't think we could possibly have done

178
00:14:07,980 --> 00:14:09,040
in any other circumstance.

179
00:14:10,280 --> 00:14:13,180
Yeah, here we see the absolutely
hellacious...

180
00:14:15,340 --> 00:14:20,940
It's a painful relationship between Mark
and Wendy, who are very just living out

181
00:14:20,940 --> 00:14:23,680
the South African suburban nightmare.

182
00:14:24,260 --> 00:14:31,100
I mean, apart from its racism, South
Africa is notorious for its lousy

183
00:14:31,100 --> 00:14:32,100
sexual politics.

184
00:14:32,280 --> 00:14:39,000
And it also has the world's highest
ratio of family slaying per capita to

185
00:14:39,000 --> 00:14:40,000
white population.

186
00:14:40,460 --> 00:14:45,040
In other words, more husbands in South
Africa come home from work and shoot

187
00:14:45,040 --> 00:14:50,700
their wives, shoot the kids, shoot the
dog, and shoot the TV set than in any

188
00:14:50,700 --> 00:14:51,700
other country.

189
00:14:51,980 --> 00:14:55,700
It's interesting to me always how they
tend to include the television set

190
00:14:55,700 --> 00:14:58,080
amongst the other family members.

191
00:14:58,480 --> 00:15:01,860
But yeah, I think this is something to
do with the sense that the country

192
00:15:01,860 --> 00:15:06,820
doesn't have a future, that you're
brought up in this place as a white

193
00:15:06,820 --> 00:15:11,000
African to believe there is no future,
and that you essentially don't belong in

194
00:15:11,000 --> 00:15:11,899
the place.

195
00:15:11,900 --> 00:15:17,740
On top of that, all of the white
population were given two years of

196
00:15:17,740 --> 00:15:18,740
military training.

197
00:15:18,840 --> 00:15:23,180
So everyone's being taught how to strip
and clean firearms, how to use guns,

198
00:15:23,540 --> 00:15:28,280
while at the same time being
consistently indoctrinated from an early

199
00:15:28,280 --> 00:15:33,260
believe that life is essentially
pointless, that there is no future,

200
00:15:33,260 --> 00:15:38,360
point pushing down roots or trying to
raise a family. And I think this

201
00:15:38,360 --> 00:15:40,320
contributes to the...

202
00:15:41,580 --> 00:15:47,860
the psychopathological underpinnings of
the culture, to the psychotic violence,

203
00:15:48,100 --> 00:15:51,960
the murders that take place all too
frequently.

204
00:15:52,380 --> 00:15:56,700
I mean, it's an extremely violent part
of the world.

205
00:15:58,140 --> 00:16:02,620
This story, Dust Devil, is partly based
on a true case.

206
00:16:04,060 --> 00:16:08,960
There were murders, a series of serial
killings that took place in Namibia.

207
00:16:09,400 --> 00:16:14,580
in southern Namibia in the years
immediately before the first election,

208
00:16:14,580 --> 00:16:16,140
before the country became independent.

209
00:16:17,080 --> 00:16:23,020
The victims were always white settlers,
usually living in remote locations, who

210
00:16:23,020 --> 00:16:25,600
were chopped up and burned.

211
00:16:27,440 --> 00:16:34,100
The police were unable to basically find
the culprit, and this went on for about

212
00:16:34,100 --> 00:16:37,560
two years, and then taped off the time
of the elections.

213
00:16:38,540 --> 00:16:40,040
There was never any arrests.

214
00:16:40,920 --> 00:16:44,740
After about two years, there was a
shootout between the police and an

215
00:16:44,740 --> 00:16:49,660
culprit. And in the course of the
shootout, they actually blew the guy's

216
00:16:49,660 --> 00:16:50,639
off.

217
00:16:50,640 --> 00:16:56,640
And the headless body of the alleged
killer was buried at a mission station

218
00:16:56,640 --> 00:17:02,140
underneath an extinct volcano named
Mount Parra, which is just near Kipman

219
00:17:02,140 --> 00:17:03,140
Grove.

220
00:17:03,280 --> 00:17:08,859
But who this guy was and whether the
headless corpse really was the killer

221
00:17:08,859 --> 00:17:09,859
never be answered.

222
00:17:10,359 --> 00:17:15,900
There's another movie about the same
case, a film called Winters with John

223
00:17:15,900 --> 00:17:18,079
and Sean Bean directed by Andre Voigt.

224
00:17:18,970 --> 00:17:24,990
that takes a totally different approach
to the story and phrases it as a police

225
00:17:24,990 --> 00:17:30,210
conspiracy, a conspiracy within the
white establishment, which may have been

226
00:17:30,210 --> 00:17:32,470
kind of like a false flag operation.

227
00:17:32,690 --> 00:17:37,250
A lot of people thought that maybe it
was the white cops killing the white

228
00:17:37,250 --> 00:17:42,770
farmers in order to create a sense of
terror and lawlessness, in order to...

229
00:17:44,330 --> 00:17:50,590
create unease and a lack of confidence
in the notion of Namibia, South -West

230
00:17:50,590 --> 00:17:52,750
Africa, being able to govern itself.

231
00:17:53,370 --> 00:17:59,490
But whatever the case is, the killer was
never captured, never apprehended, and

232
00:17:59,490 --> 00:18:01,370
the case never closed.

233
00:18:02,350 --> 00:18:07,730
Over the years, the myth grew up that
the killer wasn't a human being, but was

234
00:18:07,730 --> 00:18:09,730
somehow able to transform himself.

235
00:18:10,360 --> 00:18:17,220
to travel like the wind, to transform
into a dog or a bird

236
00:18:17,220 --> 00:18:18,840
or a boon.

237
00:18:19,360 --> 00:18:25,980
In Afrikaans, these supernatural
shapeshifters, these

238
00:18:25,980 --> 00:18:30,040
vampiric xenomorphs, are named Nachtlok.

239
00:18:31,620 --> 00:18:34,640
Nachtlok, which is literally Night
Walker.

240
00:18:35,040 --> 00:18:38,440
They're disembodied forces similar to
vampires.

241
00:18:39,260 --> 00:18:44,160
which creep into your house and steal
your vital essences, literally suck out

242
00:18:44,160 --> 00:18:45,160
your soul.

243
00:18:45,620 --> 00:18:52,000
And this is widely believed amongst a
lot of people living in the Nama, the

244
00:18:52,000 --> 00:18:54,740
Kalahari, and the Great Groove.

245
00:18:55,100 --> 00:18:58,940
And their belief in the Naxalotl
continues to this day.

246
00:18:59,460 --> 00:19:04,380
And there are still people in these
locations who go in fear of these shape

247
00:19:04,380 --> 00:19:05,380
-shifting presences.

248
00:19:05,560 --> 00:19:06,600
I guess...

249
00:19:07,760 --> 00:19:13,640
It's very much comparable to the Islamic
idea of the djinn, the spirits of dust

250
00:19:13,640 --> 00:19:14,640
and fire.

251
00:19:14,900 --> 00:19:21,540
And in Christian iconography, we talk of
demons like Asmodeus, who was driven

252
00:19:21,540 --> 00:19:23,600
out into the wasteland by King Solomon.

253
00:19:24,260 --> 00:19:30,800
So, yeah, there's various ideas of
invisible beings or demonic presences

254
00:19:30,800 --> 00:19:34,580
are condemned to taunt the wastelands of
the earth.

255
00:19:35,310 --> 00:19:39,530
And that certainly fed into Dust Devil's
pathology.

256
00:19:40,770 --> 00:19:46,390
Yeah, these scenes on the train were
very, very lucky to be working in an

257
00:19:46,390 --> 00:19:52,570
where there was still steam and still
steam trains, which always impressed me.

258
00:19:53,370 --> 00:19:57,070
And I wanted to show some little bits of
the war.

259
00:19:58,210 --> 00:20:01,430
South Africa was permanently at war with
frontline states.

260
00:20:02,160 --> 00:20:05,100
which was all the countries abutting
South Africa.

261
00:20:05,560 --> 00:20:09,860
So there were perennially South African
troops going up to the border between

262
00:20:09,860 --> 00:20:16,520
Namibia and Angola in the Caprivi Strip
to try and fight

263
00:20:16,520 --> 00:20:23,080
the insurgency, which was essentially a
communist -backed uprising

264
00:20:23,080 --> 00:20:28,460
of the black population against white
totalitarian rule.

265
00:20:29,450 --> 00:20:34,330
So yeah, those scenes on the train were
deliberately shot in a cattle car. I

266
00:20:34,330 --> 00:20:40,650
wanted to make reference to the
Holocaust by putting the soldiers in the

267
00:20:40,650 --> 00:20:47,330
truck. So we're literally seeing the
South African troops boarding the cattle

268
00:20:47,330 --> 00:20:51,430
truck as the devil, the hitpiker, gets
off from the same train.

269
00:20:53,650 --> 00:20:58,310
I think of it as a pre -Holocaust
moment.

270
00:20:58,920 --> 00:21:03,280
Much of Dust Devil to me feels like a
pre -Holocaust movie, i .e. it's a film

271
00:21:03,280 --> 00:21:07,380
which is taking place shortly before
something extremely bad happens.

272
00:21:07,840 --> 00:21:12,440
If World War III or the end of the world
is coming, it's just a little bit

273
00:21:12,440 --> 00:21:16,480
further ahead in the future from Dust
Devil, but Dust Devil itself is still

274
00:21:16,480 --> 00:21:17,480
important.

275
00:21:17,580 --> 00:21:23,020
Here again we see the cattle, the cows
from the cattle truck, seeing the white

276
00:21:23,020 --> 00:21:28,320
soldiers being herded aboard, obviously
on their way to some kind of nightmare.

277
00:21:29,200 --> 00:21:35,720
And as the smoke clears, then we see the
devil coalescing out of nowhere, very

278
00:21:35,720 --> 00:21:40,720
much in the manner you would imagine
Clint Eastwood's Man of No Name or High

279
00:21:40,720 --> 00:21:43,480
Plains Drifter might have arrived in
town.

280
00:21:44,650 --> 00:21:47,610
This entire station was built especially
for the movie.

281
00:21:47,990 --> 00:21:53,850
It's another one of the extraordinary
achievements of production designer

282
00:21:53,850 --> 00:21:59,150
Bennett, who pretty much built the whole
of Dust Devil, right down to the

283
00:21:59,150 --> 00:22:00,950
billboard signs you see in the
background.

284
00:22:01,330 --> 00:22:04,830
None of it is rail. The whole thing is
constructed for our movie.

285
00:22:05,450 --> 00:22:09,990
And all of it designed in these
corrugated iron gothic.

286
00:22:10,700 --> 00:22:16,880
kind of aesthetic which Joseph based on
the existing Namibian architecture I

287
00:22:16,880 --> 00:22:23,200
mean Bethany is a town obviously living
in hell and on the very edge of drying

288
00:22:23,200 --> 00:22:30,020
up I mean in Namibia the sand dunes move
like an ocean and

289
00:22:30,020 --> 00:22:34,920
if you don't clear the sand back from
the roads and the houses every day and

290
00:22:34,920 --> 00:22:38,660
sand clearing crews literally go out to
keep the main roads open

291
00:22:39,500 --> 00:22:43,900
The dunes will simply march across the
roads and march into the houses and

292
00:22:43,900 --> 00:22:45,040
slowly cover everything.

293
00:22:45,600 --> 00:22:51,300
So the entire time there's this battle
to keep the desert from swallowing the

294
00:22:51,300 --> 00:22:56,080
towns. And when the town drops below the
point where they're able to afford to

295
00:22:56,080 --> 00:23:00,800
keep the roads open and keep the sand
-peering crews out there, they simply

296
00:23:01,700 --> 00:23:06,000
And there's about four of these towns,
empty places, scattered along the

297
00:23:06,000 --> 00:23:08,180
Skeleton Coast, completely cut off from
the world.

298
00:23:10,730 --> 00:23:16,370
In these scenes, the school shooting
team, the shooting range sequence, these

299
00:23:16,370 --> 00:23:19,390
are an accurate recreation of my own
childhood.

300
00:23:19,990 --> 00:23:26,990
I went to a Marist Catholic cadet school
when I was a child. It wasn't

301
00:23:26,990 --> 00:23:30,730
a government school, and I was literally
taught how to strip and clean firearms

302
00:23:30,730 --> 00:23:32,690
and how to shoot by Marist monks.

303
00:23:33,170 --> 00:23:38,010
And here I've recreated the school
shooting team scene.

304
00:23:38,750 --> 00:23:44,910
The Marist Monk in this scene was
actually played by a convicted

305
00:23:44,910 --> 00:23:48,190
local sex criminal from Kietmanswil.

306
00:23:48,410 --> 00:23:52,310
You never get to see his face, but I
thought it was ironic that we cast an

307
00:23:52,310 --> 00:23:57,970
actual pedophile in the very brief role
of the Marist Monk.

308
00:23:59,530 --> 00:24:06,150
Here we meet Marianne Sachbrecht's
character, Dr. Leitzinger, the

309
00:24:06,150 --> 00:24:07,150
pathologist.

310
00:24:08,320 --> 00:24:12,020
Marianne was originally meant to have a
much bigger role in Dark Devil, but

311
00:24:12,020 --> 00:24:15,560
unfortunately while we were shooting she
received word that her mother was very

312
00:24:15,560 --> 00:24:19,800
ill back in Germany, and she was forced
to fly home after completing only two

313
00:24:19,800 --> 00:24:20,800
days on the movie.

314
00:24:21,260 --> 00:24:27,760
So her character has a much smaller part
of the film than I might have wished.

315
00:24:28,520 --> 00:24:33,760
We met at a horror movie festival in
Spain, and I discovered Marianne was a

316
00:24:33,760 --> 00:24:38,680
horror movie fan, and she asked me to
write her a role in the next horror

317
00:24:38,680 --> 00:24:40,780
I made, so that's how it happened.

318
00:24:42,380 --> 00:24:48,240
Yeah, here Wendy arrives at the
roadhouse, at Henrik's bar and

319
00:24:48,240 --> 00:24:49,360
the gas station.

320
00:24:49,920 --> 00:24:50,980
Again, this is a set.

321
00:24:51,420 --> 00:24:54,600
Like pretty much everything in the
movie, it's not a real place.

322
00:24:55,480 --> 00:24:57,400
The whole of Dust Devil was dumb.

323
00:24:59,770 --> 00:25:05,530
Designed, drawn, constructed on camera.
We used very, very few rail locations.

324
00:25:06,470 --> 00:25:10,450
One of the running gags in this movie,
like I mentioned before, is about the

325
00:25:10,450 --> 00:25:12,050
water, or the lack of water.

326
00:25:13,030 --> 00:25:19,970
The roadhouse is entirely decorated with
fishing trophies and deep -sea angling

327
00:25:19,970 --> 00:25:24,890
trophies, which makes not a lot of sense
considering they're in the middle of a

328
00:25:24,890 --> 00:25:25,890
desert.

329
00:25:31,440 --> 00:25:37,120
Yeah, Chelsea Field as Wendy and then
back to Marianne in the

330
00:25:37,120 --> 00:25:38,960
mortuary.

331
00:25:40,260 --> 00:25:45,180
These scenes were very tense, I recall,
because of the problem of Marianne's mum

332
00:25:45,180 --> 00:25:48,900
back home and the fact that we had to
shoot as fast as possible in order to

333
00:25:48,900 --> 00:25:49,900
release her.

334
00:25:50,250 --> 00:25:55,890
And I recall that the fluorescent tube
in the light box that she's examining

335
00:25:55,890 --> 00:26:00,010
caused the character of the morgue
attendant who has been cut out of the

336
00:26:00,130 --> 00:26:04,050
there was a mortuary attendant, to
completely freak out because it turned

337
00:26:04,050 --> 00:26:10,540
had epilepsy and the fluorescent tube
tripped. some epileptic reaction in the

338
00:26:10,540 --> 00:26:14,800
lab attendant who started screaming and
flailing and fell to the floor and the

339
00:26:14,800 --> 00:26:19,480
first AD, Guy Travis, had to rush in and
try and stick a leather wallet in his

340
00:26:19,480 --> 00:26:21,860
mouth and bring him out of the seizure.

341
00:26:22,180 --> 00:26:26,960
But that just served to freak out Zake
and Marianne even further.

342
00:26:28,400 --> 00:26:33,540
What Marianne is saying in the scene
about the Bushmen rock paintings is

343
00:26:33,540 --> 00:26:39,700
entirely true and comes from a fair
amount of detailed research.

344
00:26:40,140 --> 00:26:45,740
The Bushmen rock paintings can be found
literally all over Namibia.

345
00:26:46,400 --> 00:26:53,240
The largest number are just on the banks
of the Zambezi River near the

346
00:26:53,240 --> 00:26:58,910
Limpopo. There's approximately 1 ,600
identified caves and shelters built with

347
00:26:58,910 --> 00:27:02,270
rock paintings, which go back a couple
of thousand years.

348
00:27:03,290 --> 00:27:09,230
Quite how the Bushmen achieved that is
still relatively unknown to us.

349
00:27:09,870 --> 00:27:15,830
They obviously learned the skills for
creating the rock paintings, which

350
00:27:15,830 --> 00:27:20,810
passed from tribe to tribe, and the
actual ingredients in the fragments

351
00:27:22,400 --> 00:27:29,320
Something which we're still not entirely
sure about. Here we have the

352
00:27:29,320 --> 00:27:31,700
devil playing pinball.

353
00:27:33,020 --> 00:27:39,800
The sound effect of the pinball table
accidentally recorded in Mark's

354
00:27:39,800 --> 00:27:44,180
service, which serves to lead him to his
doom later on.

355
00:27:51,310 --> 00:27:56,430
Chelsea Field was just off the back of a
film called The Last Boy Scout and

356
00:27:56,430 --> 00:28:01,370
never really felt like she belonged in
Africa.

357
00:28:01,770 --> 00:28:06,490
She was very uncomfortable on the
location, which I think is good for the

358
00:28:06,490 --> 00:28:07,490
character in a way.

359
00:28:07,530 --> 00:28:11,070
The moment she finished shooting each
day, she would hurry back to her hotel

360
00:28:11,070 --> 00:28:15,090
room and almost as if she was afraid of
the devil.

361
00:28:15,890 --> 00:28:18,090
She wasn't my first casting choice.

362
00:28:18,730 --> 00:28:23,950
But that was yet down to a dispute with
Miramax, then under the control of the

363
00:28:23,950 --> 00:28:25,150
dreaded Harvey Weinstein.

364
00:28:25,750 --> 00:28:31,550
In fact, this is Steve Earnhardt, the
Miramax executive in charge of

365
00:28:31,750 --> 00:28:33,630
who plays the driver of the camp van.

366
00:28:34,110 --> 00:28:38,310
This was because Miramax complained
about there not being enough killings in

367
00:28:38,310 --> 00:28:42,410
movie. I didn't want to kill any more
women because I'm not a misogynist, and

368
00:28:42,410 --> 00:28:46,410
didn't want this to be a film about a
male psychopath killing women.

369
00:28:47,130 --> 00:28:50,650
So I made certain that the hitchhiker's
second victim is a male.

370
00:28:51,210 --> 00:28:56,190
And as Miramax weren't giving us any
more money to hire an extra victim, I

371
00:28:56,190 --> 00:29:00,230
got their executive in charge, Steve
Earnhardt, to stand in as the victim.

372
00:29:00,950 --> 00:29:05,830
And I believe somewhere in the deleted
scenes is the death of Steve Earnhardt

373
00:29:05,830 --> 00:29:07,830
that was trimmed out of the movie.

374
00:29:09,590 --> 00:29:15,010
Mark, Wendy's husband, is played by
Swart, who is the only real white South

375
00:29:15,010 --> 00:29:16,010
African in the movie.

376
00:29:16,800 --> 00:29:20,020
The entire movie is shot in Namibia, and
although it's dealing with South

377
00:29:20,020 --> 00:29:22,900
Africa, it was shot during the apartheid
regime.

378
00:29:23,300 --> 00:29:28,060
So we kept the entire movie north of the
border and deliberately stayed out of

379
00:29:28,060 --> 00:29:29,060
South African territory.

380
00:29:29,440 --> 00:29:34,800
And Rufus, who was the one white South
African from Johannesburg whom we

381
00:29:34,800 --> 00:29:40,700
up to star in the movie, very much ended
up carrying the can for South Africa's

382
00:29:40,700 --> 00:29:41,700
sins at the time.

383
00:29:44,110 --> 00:29:48,390
Now we have, yeah, Wendy pulling asleep
on the road between towns at night.

384
00:29:49,510 --> 00:29:50,850
Highway hypnosis.

385
00:29:51,690 --> 00:29:56,670
And, yeah, in the meantime, Joe Niemann,
played by John Machikiza, is working

386
00:29:56,670 --> 00:29:58,190
some kind of sorcerous ritual.

387
00:29:59,510 --> 00:30:05,590
Wendy starts to nod off the wheel and
imagines she sees a creature, the Night

388
00:30:05,590 --> 00:30:09,270
Walker, or the Hitchhiker running across
the road in front of the car.

389
00:30:10,830 --> 00:30:16,110
I believe that when you're driving long
distance, you start to slip into a semi

390
00:30:16,110 --> 00:30:20,950
-hypnotic state where you're neither
asleep nor awake.

391
00:30:21,810 --> 00:30:26,170
It's a liminal state, somewhat in dream
and waking.

392
00:30:26,890 --> 00:30:31,290
And I should add that in the sequence
when the hitchhiker runs in front of the

393
00:30:31,290 --> 00:30:35,390
car, that's actually me dressed up as
the hitchhiker.

394
00:30:35,950 --> 00:30:40,690
A lot of the time I'm shooting these
scenes when Rob's work wasn't available,

395
00:30:40,930 --> 00:30:45,570
and in those cases it's very often
myself wearing the coat and the hat.

396
00:30:49,530 --> 00:30:55,870
The owl, of course, is another nocturnal
bird associated sorcery in Southern

397
00:30:55,870 --> 00:31:01,110
Africa. And, yeah, the owl is kind of
speaking to Zake, the cop.

398
00:31:01,550 --> 00:31:04,650
And here we are to the cop's dream.

399
00:31:05,550 --> 00:31:11,050
where Zakes is evidently haunted with
guilt over his failed

400
00:31:11,050 --> 00:31:16,470
relationship with his ex -wife, which
has fallen apart because of the death of

401
00:31:16,470 --> 00:31:17,470
their son.

402
00:31:17,730 --> 00:31:24,490
The dead son is on the autopsy table in
the dream sequence, and we can gather

403
00:31:24,490 --> 00:31:29,390
from the uniform the son is wearing,
like Zakes' uniform, that they've

404
00:31:29,390 --> 00:31:32,110
been cannon fodder for South Africans.

405
00:31:34,380 --> 00:31:40,020
They're characters who serve the
country, but the service is never going

406
00:31:40,020 --> 00:31:44,600
rewarded or recognized because they're
black characters serving a white

407
00:31:44,600 --> 00:31:45,900
authoritarian regime.

408
00:31:46,360 --> 00:31:52,960
So it's essentially a wasted effort, and
the life of Zakes' son has been

409
00:31:52,960 --> 00:31:58,800
wasted. And because this guilt still
hangs over him, it's as if the

410
00:31:58,800 --> 00:32:02,900
spirit of the dead son hasn't fully
passed on.

411
00:32:03,630 --> 00:32:10,130
which is the reason why in the dream Dr.
Leitzinger gives Zake the rock to break

412
00:32:10,130 --> 00:32:16,970
the son's fingers, to cut off the
fingers and allow the soul, the

413
00:32:16,970 --> 00:32:21,030
spirit of his dead son to pass on.

414
00:32:21,710 --> 00:32:28,490
This is something again that you found
in Khoisan or Khoisar mythology,

415
00:32:28,790 --> 00:32:31,730
this notion that you have to sever the
fingers.

416
00:32:32,320 --> 00:32:33,820
in order for the soul to be freed.

417
00:32:34,520 --> 00:32:40,120
A lot of the elder Muslim men are
missing the top joints of their middle

418
00:32:40,120 --> 00:32:42,960
fingers, a kind of ritual scarification.

419
00:32:43,180 --> 00:32:50,080
They cut off the tip of their middle
finger as a sacrifice in

420
00:32:50,080 --> 00:32:54,860
order to be able to go smoothly to the
other world, in order to be able to make

421
00:32:54,860 --> 00:32:58,000
the transition from this life to the
next.

422
00:32:59,860 --> 00:33:00,860
And again,

423
00:33:01,800 --> 00:33:08,620
Chelsea suspended in this liminal state,
this place somewhere between sleep and

424
00:33:08,620 --> 00:33:12,760
waking, which is very important to the
whole of Dust Devil.

425
00:33:13,000 --> 00:33:19,780
I tried throughout the movie to try to
capture that sense of hypnosis, of being

426
00:33:19,780 --> 00:33:25,100
suspended somewhere between one state of
consciousness and another.

427
00:33:25,940 --> 00:33:30,960
The whole of this movie almost exists in
a zone between worlds.

428
00:33:31,760 --> 00:33:33,520
somewhere between dream and waking.

429
00:33:34,380 --> 00:33:41,280
This is in fact the time, the place in
your life where vampires, where

430
00:33:41,280 --> 00:33:44,440
demons and night walkers can actually
reach you.

431
00:33:45,060 --> 00:33:49,640
I don't know if you've ever fallen
asleep and found on waking that you're

432
00:33:49,640 --> 00:33:51,160
in your room but you can't move.

433
00:33:51,580 --> 00:33:55,360
You're still asleep and dreaming, yet
you're dreaming you're in bed, except

434
00:33:55,360 --> 00:33:58,700
there's usually something in the bed
with you. There's usually something

435
00:33:58,700 --> 00:34:02,320
is sitting on your chest or pressing you
down to the mattress so that you can't

436
00:34:02,320 --> 00:34:05,020
move, so that you can't breathe or even
scream.

437
00:34:06,240 --> 00:34:12,360
In Western mythology, we think of these
things as incubi, a crushing incubus, or

438
00:34:12,360 --> 00:34:18,080
the succubi, which is a female person,
or just plain old -fashioned vampires.

439
00:34:19,280 --> 00:34:25,159
But all we do know is that they steal
into your life between sleep and waking,

440
00:34:25,380 --> 00:34:27,440
between those two states.

441
00:34:28,060 --> 00:34:34,219
There's something in that state, that
interstitial space, that allows them to

442
00:34:34,219 --> 00:34:35,219
have access to you.

443
00:34:35,600 --> 00:34:42,080
In science and conventional psychology,
we refer to this as nocturnal sleep

444
00:34:42,080 --> 00:34:44,739
paralysis or the old hag.

445
00:34:45,929 --> 00:34:47,830
And it's a tricky condition.

446
00:34:48,030 --> 00:34:49,469
It's something truly terrifying.

447
00:34:50,250 --> 00:34:55,750
And I do believe that when you're
driving a long distance from the

448
00:34:55,750 --> 00:35:00,310
you start to slip into that same state,
into a liminal or interstitial state.

449
00:35:00,610 --> 00:35:04,550
And in the same way, when you're driving
alone at night in a flat country,

450
00:35:05,290 --> 00:35:06,690
the demons can get to you.

451
00:35:07,750 --> 00:35:13,290
I think this is why UFOs, accounts of
flying saucers,

452
00:35:14,060 --> 00:35:19,440
And accounts of the vanishing
hitchhiker, the undead figure that you

453
00:35:19,440 --> 00:35:23,880
when you're driving alone, who later
vanishes off your car seat, almost

454
00:35:23,880 --> 00:35:26,940
come from flat countries with monotonous
scenery.

455
00:35:27,480 --> 00:35:32,280
Places like South Africa, Australia, New
Mexico or Texas.

456
00:35:32,860 --> 00:35:37,620
Places where you are lulled by the sheer
distance and the size of the landscape.

457
00:35:38,830 --> 00:35:44,150
Yeah, here Wendy drives off without
tipping the man who has dug her out of

458
00:35:44,150 --> 00:35:50,150
dirt, again revealing her fear and
inherent racism.

459
00:35:51,230 --> 00:35:53,070
Wendy's not a particularly nice
character.

460
00:35:53,310 --> 00:35:58,150
Good -looking, perhaps, but not my kind
of lady.

461
00:35:58,550 --> 00:36:04,650
She's headed throughout the sea, and a
close eye will spot the Save the Whale

462
00:36:04,650 --> 00:36:07,610
sticker in the back of the Volkswagen
window, another one of the...

463
00:36:08,200 --> 00:36:12,460
strange fishy deep -sea angling
references that float around in this

464
00:36:18,080 --> 00:36:23,740
There's actually a book written by a
Mormon, a man named Jan Harald Brunvand,

465
00:36:23,880 --> 00:36:30,700
based in Salt Lake City, Utah, about the
vanishing hitchhiker and the number of

466
00:36:30,700 --> 00:36:32,320
sightings that are reported every year.

467
00:36:33,020 --> 00:36:37,240
Because every year, people pick up
hitchhikers in the middle of nowhere.

468
00:36:37,840 --> 00:36:44,580
who have a strange conversation with you
while you're driving, and then when you

469
00:36:44,580 --> 00:36:47,120
look around, they've disappeared off the
car seat.

470
00:36:47,760 --> 00:36:50,340
In some cases, these hitchhikers are
female.

471
00:36:50,960 --> 00:36:55,740
Sometimes they're characterized as the
victims of car accidents, disturbed

472
00:36:55,740 --> 00:36:58,620
spirits who are still wandering the road
trying to get home.

473
00:36:59,220 --> 00:37:03,700
And other times they're creepy guys like
Robert John Burke.

474
00:37:04,560 --> 00:37:09,460
In California, they're known to make
promises and say, well, there's an

475
00:37:09,460 --> 00:37:11,540
earthquake coming, the big one's coming.

476
00:37:12,320 --> 00:37:19,300
And sometimes I've heard variants of

477
00:37:19,300 --> 00:37:23,980
the story where after the driver notices
the hitchhiker has vanished off the

478
00:37:23,980 --> 00:37:27,800
seat, the car goes out of control and
they nearly have an accident themselves.

479
00:37:28,260 --> 00:37:33,020
And then they're flagged down by a cop,
and they usually stammer out their story

480
00:37:33,020 --> 00:37:34,020
to the cop.

481
00:37:34,030 --> 00:37:39,210
And in the American version of the
story, the cop is meant to say, Lady,

482
00:37:39,430 --> 00:37:43,570
ordinarily I wouldn't believe you, but
you're the third person to tell me that

483
00:37:43,570 --> 00:37:44,570
story tonight.

484
00:37:46,250 --> 00:37:52,610
These are essentially urban myths,
although I'm not sure that the term

485
00:37:52,610 --> 00:37:56,190
myth applies to it, because it's
obviously something that doesn't happen

486
00:37:56,190 --> 00:38:00,090
cities. It happens in the outback in the
middle of the desert.

487
00:38:00,780 --> 00:38:05,580
Yet these stories are reported over and
over again in multiple different

488
00:38:05,580 --> 00:38:11,740
countries. And it's difficult to say
that it's all just the same bad joke,

489
00:38:11,740 --> 00:38:16,980
same myth that keeps somehow finding its
way back into the newspapers.

490
00:38:17,840 --> 00:38:22,360
Or whether there really are vanishing
hitchhikers out there, or spirits or

491
00:38:22,360 --> 00:38:23,620
demons wandering the roads.

492
00:38:24,190 --> 00:38:29,610
Here again we see he's left the
fingerless hand guarding the door as he

493
00:38:29,610 --> 00:38:31,050
the crime scene at the Harroff house.

494
00:38:31,750 --> 00:38:37,250
The actor playing the cop who is
stealing the watch off the severed hand

495
00:38:37,250 --> 00:38:41,550
South African actor named Russell Copley
who was the lead singer in a Cape Town

496
00:38:41,550 --> 00:38:43,150
band named Euthanasia.

497
00:38:43,850 --> 00:38:46,210
Another one of my teenage reference
points.

498
00:38:46,530 --> 00:38:52,290
Here we see the star of Bethany driving
and we notice that the star of Bethany

499
00:38:52,290 --> 00:38:53,290
is playing

500
00:38:53,950 --> 00:38:59,470
The Hammer horror movie, Legend of the
Seven Golden Vampires, and Dario

501
00:38:59,470 --> 00:39:02,430
Argento's first movie, The Bird of the
Crystal Plumage.

502
00:39:03,870 --> 00:39:06,310
Joe the Projectionist is watching a dust
devil.

503
00:39:06,550 --> 00:39:07,950
That's a real dust devil.

504
00:39:08,150 --> 00:39:12,590
One of the few real dust devils you get
to see in this movie, which are these

505
00:39:12,590 --> 00:39:16,970
little violent winds that come out of
nowhere, literally like genies.

506
00:39:17,240 --> 00:39:22,680
or demons, and the dust goes spinning up
in little vortex, and these things come

507
00:39:22,680 --> 00:39:27,180
and scatter everything around and then
blow out to nowhere again, which is

508
00:39:27,180 --> 00:39:29,120
really what the film's title refers to.

509
00:39:29,820 --> 00:39:35,020
And that spiraling vortex, the spiral of
the desert wind, is something that's

510
00:39:35,020 --> 00:39:39,780
reflected in the design of the movie, as
well as the structure.

511
00:39:40,120 --> 00:39:44,860
As I mentioned earlier, everything in
Dust Devil is designed in circles and in

512
00:39:44,860 --> 00:39:45,860
spirals.

513
00:39:46,730 --> 00:39:52,210
Joe Nobody, the projectionist, is just
literally completing the circle as he

514
00:39:52,210 --> 00:39:54,530
talks to Zakes.

515
00:39:59,690 --> 00:40:04,290
Here Joe refers to something that he
calls the num.

516
00:40:05,830 --> 00:40:12,070
Joe Niemann's character is in fact not a
bushman. He's played by a Zulu named

517
00:40:12,070 --> 00:40:13,610
John Machikiza.

518
00:40:14,350 --> 00:40:19,490
John was a very dapper man who was
actually a lecturer in political science

519
00:40:19,490 --> 00:40:23,730
Yale University in the United States
when I contacted him to play this movie.

520
00:40:24,670 --> 00:40:29,970
He really dressed down for the part and
I think did a remarkable job. I think

521
00:40:29,970 --> 00:40:33,730
John's performance is one of the real

522
00:40:33,730 --> 00:40:39,670
treasures in Dust Devil. We were
extremely lucky to have him.

523
00:40:40,530 --> 00:40:45,930
But because he was coming from a Zulu
background, his lake is also a Zulu,

524
00:40:46,130 --> 00:40:49,550
he mispronounces the nom.

525
00:40:50,610 --> 00:40:56,390
The nom is actually, in its proper
pronunciation, in the Khoisanji for

526
00:40:56,390 --> 00:40:58,590
myth, is referred to as the nom.

527
00:40:59,110 --> 00:41:00,150
The nom.

528
00:41:01,350 --> 00:41:03,150
I can hardly do it myself.

529
00:41:03,630 --> 00:41:05,010
And it's the power.

530
00:41:05,660 --> 00:41:12,660
It's the actual spiritual power that the
witch doctors use to work their magic.

531
00:41:13,160 --> 00:41:19,580
It's the power which you can steal from
other creatures. A nightwalker or a

532
00:41:19,580 --> 00:41:26,420
vampire sucks the loom out of the dying
animals. It steals the life or the

533
00:41:26,420 --> 00:41:31,860
energy from them. And the loom is
something which is contained within

534
00:41:31,860 --> 00:41:34,500
plexus, within one's hips.

535
00:41:34,890 --> 00:41:39,250
and the lower part of your body, which
is the reason why when people are

536
00:41:39,250 --> 00:41:43,330
possessed or in the middle of a trance
ritual, you're often seeing them bent

537
00:41:43,330 --> 00:41:47,950
over or bending double. If you look at
the rock paintings, the figures are

538
00:41:47,950 --> 00:41:52,690
bent over in a rather alarming way. And
it's because of the power of the ngum,

539
00:41:52,750 --> 00:41:54,870
the ngum which is growing inside them.

540
00:41:55,090 --> 00:42:01,770
And this is something very widely
believed in African and South

541
00:42:01,770 --> 00:42:02,770
American witchcraft.

542
00:42:03,660 --> 00:42:10,660
We see similar effects in voodoo and in
Umbanda and Kumbanda,

543
00:42:10,820 --> 00:42:17,200
some of the syncretic religions you find
in Brazil and South America, where

544
00:42:17,200 --> 00:42:21,220
there's also this curious business of
the characters almost being bent double

545
00:42:21,220 --> 00:42:27,220
they're dancing by the power of this
magical energy which is building up

546
00:42:27,220 --> 00:42:31,240
them. Of course, it's something
indetectable to science.

547
00:42:32,230 --> 00:42:38,330
Our western science has not been able to
record or measure this energy and most

548
00:42:38,330 --> 00:42:42,730
folk believe that it's complete fantasy
and something which is purely imaginary.

549
00:42:43,050 --> 00:42:50,050
But I think any study of comparative
witchcraft and comparative mythology

550
00:42:50,050 --> 00:42:53,170
shake even the most skeptical of minds.

551
00:42:53,490 --> 00:42:57,030
It seems to me that there is very
definitely something at the base of all

552
00:42:57,030 --> 00:42:58,030
this.

553
00:42:58,910 --> 00:43:05,530
Here again we have a number of
references to both

554
00:43:05,530 --> 00:43:12,130
the Adam and Eve and the snake in the
garden, the apple, to Peter Pan and

555
00:43:12,310 --> 00:43:14,870
the J .M. Barrie story.

556
00:43:18,570 --> 00:43:23,890
Hitch and Wendy have their little
conversation in the car prior to Hitch's

557
00:43:23,890 --> 00:43:26,830
disappearance. And this again is all
about faith.

558
00:43:27,600 --> 00:43:29,520
whether you believe in magic or not.

559
00:43:30,460 --> 00:43:36,920
Sadly, most people in the 21st century
don't believe in magic, which I think is

560
00:43:36,920 --> 00:43:42,240
personally a huge mistake, because on my
own experience, there's an invisible

561
00:43:42,240 --> 00:43:48,820
world out there which is vast and
mysterious and filled with things that

562
00:43:48,820 --> 00:43:51,640
us Westerners still barely understand.

563
00:43:52,840 --> 00:43:55,300
Here, Hitch disappears off the car seat.

564
00:43:55,980 --> 00:43:58,140
If you ask me, Wendy takes it rather
well.

565
00:43:58,620 --> 00:44:03,940
In many of the accounts I've heard, the
drivers have accidents, burn out or

566
00:44:03,940 --> 00:44:06,600
crash the car after the hitchhiker
disappears.

567
00:44:07,580 --> 00:44:12,980
And as I've mentioned before, this is
something that is reported hundreds of

568
00:44:12,980 --> 00:44:13,980
times every year.

569
00:44:14,800 --> 00:44:17,880
Yeah, a brief glimpse of an Afrikaans
comic book.

570
00:44:18,400 --> 00:44:22,380
The cop is reading a photo comic
while...

571
00:44:23,240 --> 00:44:25,400
Psycho Russell tortures the suspect.

572
00:44:25,880 --> 00:44:30,780
The photo comic was an expression of the
noble savage thing, so there were all

573
00:44:30,780 --> 00:44:37,360
panels showing blonde, white, sardine
-type characters fighting evil

574
00:44:37,360 --> 00:44:38,360
natives.

575
00:44:38,640 --> 00:44:45,520
And here he has basically breaks up
Russell's torture session.

576
00:44:46,240 --> 00:44:51,900
Russell Copley, who played the younger
cop, actually played the main psycho.

577
00:44:52,300 --> 00:44:57,400
He played the hitchhiker in the 16mm
version of Dust Devil.

578
00:44:58,140 --> 00:45:00,340
I shot this crazy movie twice.

579
00:45:00,740 --> 00:45:04,160
The first time around I was only 15, 16
years old.

580
00:45:04,780 --> 00:45:06,920
We tried shooting it on 16mm.

581
00:45:07,640 --> 00:45:11,840
And in the first iteration of Dust
Devil, Russell, the lead singer from

582
00:45:11,840 --> 00:45:14,060
Euthanasia, played the Hitchhiker.

583
00:45:14,540 --> 00:45:19,660
And Wendy's character was played by a
young South African actress, Michelle

584
00:45:19,660 --> 00:45:23,560
Waters. And we really picked the story
because I thought it was the simplest

585
00:45:23,560 --> 00:45:28,780
thing we could shoot, that we could tell
a story with two characters and a

586
00:45:28,780 --> 00:45:35,760
Volkswagen and the extraordinary
vastness, the inhuman vastness of the

587
00:45:35,760 --> 00:45:36,760
African desert.

588
00:45:37,150 --> 00:45:38,150
and the felt.

589
00:45:38,190 --> 00:45:44,950
The 60mm movie was strong enough that we
were eventually able

590
00:45:44,950 --> 00:45:51,030
to draw interest from Miramax and the
dreaded Harvey Weinstein to

591
00:45:51,030 --> 00:45:57,910
reshoot the film on 35mm and create the
strange

592
00:45:57,910 --> 00:46:02,730
mutant African road movie horror western
that you are now watching.

593
00:46:09,960 --> 00:46:16,680
This is one of my favorite scenes where
we see Zakes McKay and Bill

594
00:46:16,680 --> 00:46:22,000
Utkin, both of them now sadly no longer
with us, having a beer together in the

595
00:46:22,000 --> 00:46:23,000
roadhouse.

596
00:46:23,660 --> 00:46:29,700
It was always important to me that the
white cop and the black cop should have

597
00:46:29,700 --> 00:46:34,740
time in this movie to sit down and have
a beer together because I wanted to show

598
00:46:34,740 --> 00:46:37,460
some vague optimism for the future.

599
00:46:38,030 --> 00:46:42,910
It's not the most optimistic of all
movies, but there is some sense of

600
00:46:42,910 --> 00:46:45,330
cooperation in the scene.

601
00:46:45,610 --> 00:46:51,670
And I also think both of them, Zakes and
Bill Hootkins, are magnificent. They

602
00:46:51,670 --> 00:46:54,050
both turn in excellent performances in
my book.

603
00:46:57,470 --> 00:46:58,470
Yeah,

604
00:47:01,290 --> 00:47:05,070
the dreaded pinball table. The devil's
pinball table in the background, which

605
00:47:05,070 --> 00:47:06,070
is...

606
00:47:06,400 --> 00:47:12,220
being moved to the beer hall across the
street in order to mislead Mark.

607
00:47:12,500 --> 00:47:18,620
I mean, that's the effect it has on
Wendy's husband, who will later get the

608
00:47:18,620 --> 00:47:21,360
wrong end of the stick thanks to the
pinball table being moved.

609
00:47:22,440 --> 00:47:29,400
And here's Zake's character,

610
00:47:29,780 --> 00:47:34,500
Ben Mukarob, the cop, starts to realize
the futility of the situation.

611
00:47:35,980 --> 00:47:42,720
that essentially the murders, the
rituals have been continuing for

612
00:47:42,720 --> 00:47:45,900
years and probably will continue into
the future.

613
00:47:46,180 --> 00:47:52,400
And there's honestly very little that
the cops can truly do to change things.

614
00:47:53,020 --> 00:47:59,120
But Zake is very much this movie's
vampire hunter.

615
00:47:59,540 --> 00:48:04,840
And it's all to him to try to find some
way to talk to that devil.

616
00:48:07,000 --> 00:48:12,020
Again, some sympathy here for the
character of the white police chief.

617
00:48:12,260 --> 00:48:19,040
And in the background we see the actual
Namibian pre -independence celebrations

618
00:48:19,040 --> 00:48:25,780
with the placards which are hyping the
new nation and the

619
00:48:25,780 --> 00:48:29,240
hopeful future offered by the freedom of
Namibia.

620
00:48:30,350 --> 00:48:33,810
Originally, I really wished I could have
used the Chris Christopherson song, Me

621
00:48:33,810 --> 00:48:39,010
and Bobby McGee, on the soundtrack,
because the lyrics of that song,

622
00:48:39,010 --> 00:48:45,190
just another word for nothing left to
lose, sums up much of Dove's Devil, in

623
00:48:45,190 --> 00:48:50,630
which the only true freedom is death,
separation from the hell of the material

624
00:48:50,630 --> 00:48:56,070
world, which is why we end up with these
images of burning bodies. These are

625
00:48:56,070 --> 00:48:57,690
real dead bodies, by the way.

626
00:48:58,460 --> 00:49:00,520
and Wendy settling into the water.

627
00:49:01,760 --> 00:49:06,440
I always want to show a little bit of
real death in my movies, just so that

628
00:49:06,440 --> 00:49:11,360
audience can see what the real thing is
like, and I generally always have a

629
00:49:11,360 --> 00:49:17,040
moment of actual death somewhere in the
film, and in Dust Devil it's what you

630
00:49:17,040 --> 00:49:18,260
see on the television.

631
00:49:21,480 --> 00:49:24,800
Here we see Hitch manifesting in the
motel room.

632
00:49:25,550 --> 00:49:29,590
And Hitch is always the promise of
death, and it's a pleasant death.

633
00:49:30,050 --> 00:49:33,410
I mean, he will kill you in a way that
is ecstatic.

634
00:49:33,630 --> 00:49:38,890
He took care to break the first woman's
neck between the atlas and axial

635
00:49:38,890 --> 00:49:43,350
vertebrae at the moment of orgasm, hence
probably extending the orgasm into

636
00:49:43,350 --> 00:49:49,210
infinity. So he does try to kill you in
a relatively pleasant way, and he does

637
00:49:49,210 --> 00:49:51,010
only for people who want to die.

638
00:49:51,700 --> 00:49:56,740
like letting the vampire into the room.
The vampire had to ask to come inside

639
00:49:56,740 --> 00:50:00,540
and you have to open the window or open
the door to let the vampire in.

640
00:50:01,080 --> 00:50:05,520
In the same way you have to want to die
in order for the hitchhiker to take you.

641
00:50:06,060 --> 00:50:09,720
Here Wendy is grappling with the idea
where she's thinking about it but she's

642
00:50:09,720 --> 00:50:13,480
not ready to die yet. She drops the
razor blade and the moment she drops the

643
00:50:13,480 --> 00:50:15,000
razor blade the hitchhiker vanishes.

644
00:50:15,440 --> 00:50:19,000
He only manifests behind her at the
point when she's thinking about suicide.

645
00:50:19,720 --> 00:50:24,740
And when she reaches to choose life
instead, the hitchhiker draws away.

646
00:50:25,400 --> 00:50:29,240
So in this respect, he's very much the
angel of death.

647
00:50:33,500 --> 00:50:37,280
Again, all of these scenes in the motel
are of that.

648
00:50:38,200 --> 00:50:44,400
The entire motel building, the interior
rooms, all of it is a construct.

649
00:50:45,060 --> 00:50:46,640
I don't think we used...

650
00:50:46,890 --> 00:50:49,910
really any rail locations in the course
of this movie.

651
00:50:50,470 --> 00:50:55,730
The desert was very much like a blank
sheet of paper that enabled us to create

652
00:50:55,730 --> 00:51:02,390
our fantasies, to build drive -ins and
railway stations and to basically create

653
00:51:02,390 --> 00:51:03,730
the world of Dust Devil.

654
00:51:07,430 --> 00:51:12,690
All of these second unit shots, these
time -lapse shots of the desert.

655
00:51:13,290 --> 00:51:20,150
and the moon and the stars, the passage
of time in the desert, were shot by

656
00:51:20,150 --> 00:51:26,630
Imo Horn, who is an excellent German
underground filmmaker, and John

657
00:51:26,630 --> 00:51:33,350
Gaither, the second unit camera
operator, and who later went on to

658
00:51:33,350 --> 00:51:37,090
the famous bullet speed effect in the
Matrix movies.

659
00:51:37,410 --> 00:51:39,130
The famous...

660
00:51:39,930 --> 00:51:44,570
effect where time is stopped during the
battle scenes in the Matrix. That's the

661
00:51:44,570 --> 00:51:51,130
work of John Gator, the guy who was
shooting our second unit time

662
00:51:51,130 --> 00:51:52,310
-lapse scenes.

663
00:51:55,050 --> 00:51:59,590
To some extent, Dust Devil is a deranged
romance.

664
00:51:59,950 --> 00:52:03,830
I mean, it is a love story based around
sympathy for the devil.

665
00:52:04,250 --> 00:52:06,630
We note that Wendy is

666
00:52:09,400 --> 00:52:10,680
responsible for her fate.

667
00:52:11,600 --> 00:52:14,760
Again, the hitchhiker gives her the
chance to get out of the car.

668
00:52:15,020 --> 00:52:19,240
It says that if she doesn't want him on
board, he'll take his bag and leave.

669
00:52:19,760 --> 00:52:23,760
And it's Wendy's choice to ride with
him.

670
00:52:24,340 --> 00:52:27,340
I mean, she's the one who invites the
devil into her life.

671
00:52:27,900 --> 00:52:33,160
And that way around, she's definitely
not a victim, which is one of the many

672
00:52:33,160 --> 00:52:38,240
things that makes Dust Devil a little
unusual in this genre.

673
00:52:39,100 --> 00:52:46,080
And Wendy exercises her free will and
she chooses to dance with the devil.

674
00:52:55,920 --> 00:53:02,000
Here again we see the extraordinary past
of the Nama Desert with a guest

675
00:53:02,000 --> 00:53:04,200
appearance by Young Boon on the right.

676
00:53:05,680 --> 00:53:07,120
And here this is...

677
00:53:07,850 --> 00:53:13,030
Obviously, the real deal is an actual
Namibian small town with the corrugated

678
00:53:13,030 --> 00:53:13,729
iron roof.

679
00:53:13,730 --> 00:53:14,850
We didn't build this.

680
00:53:15,150 --> 00:53:17,550
It's one of the few things in the movie
which is real.

681
00:53:19,270 --> 00:53:25,710
And we get a brief glimpse of Bill
Whitkins' character's home life and his

682
00:53:30,510 --> 00:53:36,930
Bill Whitkins, who plays Lieutenant
Bayman, the white South African cop.

683
00:53:37,470 --> 00:53:43,950
An extraordinary man. A really
empowering figure in the genre that I

684
00:53:43,950 --> 00:53:46,670
still miss him very deeply.

685
00:53:47,210 --> 00:53:53,610
Bill is famous for... He was in the
original Star Wars.

686
00:53:53,830 --> 00:53:54,830
He played...

687
00:53:54,940 --> 00:53:59,400
one of the X -wing fighter pilots in
Star Wars.

688
00:53:59,940 --> 00:54:03,760
He also plays the man from the
government who confiscates the Ark of

689
00:54:03,760 --> 00:54:06,620
Covenant in the final scene in Raiders
of the Lost Ark.

690
00:54:06,960 --> 00:54:11,860
He also plays the corrupt cop that Jack
Nicholson's Joker kills in Tim Burton's

691
00:54:11,860 --> 00:54:14,760
Batman. So you've all seen Bill a dozen
times.

692
00:54:15,060 --> 00:54:18,780
He's just such a chameleon that he's
almost unrecognizable.

693
00:54:19,360 --> 00:54:23,280
In my first movie, Hardware, I cast Bill
as a...

694
00:54:24,140 --> 00:54:30,580
a voyeur and a sexual pervert and a
child molester. It was such a foul part

695
00:54:30,580 --> 00:54:37,060
such a horrible character that I decided
to cast him as a righteous man as

696
00:54:37,060 --> 00:54:43,880
the main cop, as Lieutenant Bayman in
this movie, just because I wanted to

697
00:54:43,880 --> 00:54:47,940
show that Bill was capable of playing
both sides of the coin, that he could

698
00:54:47,940 --> 00:54:48,960
good as well as evil.

699
00:54:51,070 --> 00:54:56,970
Lieutenant Bayman, who is almost the
antithesis of Bill's part in hardware.

700
00:54:58,990 --> 00:55:05,690
And again, the scene is to reinforce the
futility of Zakes'

701
00:55:05,870 --> 00:55:11,950
task, the way that these murders have
been going on and on since the beginning

702
00:55:11,950 --> 00:55:13,370
of history.

703
00:55:15,830 --> 00:55:18,270
These scenes at the edge of the world.

704
00:55:19,310 --> 00:55:24,990
are shot at a place called the Great
Fish River Canyon, which is actually the

705
00:55:24,990 --> 00:55:29,250
second largest natural canyon in the
world, after the Grand Canyon in

706
00:55:29,830 --> 00:55:34,830
The only difference being that unlike
the Grand Canyon, the Fish River Canyon

707
00:55:34,830 --> 00:55:35,830
in the middle of nowhere.

708
00:55:36,350 --> 00:55:39,190
And only very few tourists ever actually
go that far.

709
00:55:39,810 --> 00:55:41,250
But it's vast and beautiful.

710
00:55:42,390 --> 00:55:44,450
And the locals have a great deal of
mythology.

711
00:55:45,640 --> 00:55:50,340
The story the hitchhiker tells here
about the great snake father, Kutain

712
00:55:50,540 --> 00:55:57,200
and how the great Dan hunter -gatherer
trapped the snake father, and in the

713
00:55:57,200 --> 00:56:02,220
course of trying to escape, the Kutain
Karoo's coils allegedly created the

714
00:56:02,220 --> 00:56:05,260
canyon. Again, it's actual tribal
mythology.

715
00:56:07,620 --> 00:56:12,160
Here, Wendy finally shuts the hitch up,
having heard enough of the...

716
00:56:14,580 --> 00:56:16,200
supernatural gobbledygook kisses him.

717
00:56:16,480 --> 00:56:21,620
And again, we can see that Wendy is the
driving force in this relationship, that

718
00:56:21,620 --> 00:56:24,740
she's the one that seduces him, not the
other way around.

719
00:56:25,400 --> 00:56:28,780
She consistently invites the devil or
the demon into her life.

720
00:56:29,280 --> 00:56:34,280
And yeah, this is one of the things this
movie I'm happiest with.

721
00:56:45,610 --> 00:56:49,830
Again, a beautiful view of the Fisher
River Canyon. Very hard to photograph

722
00:56:49,830 --> 00:56:54,030
because the air currents, the winds were
so strong that it buffeted the hell out

723
00:56:54,030 --> 00:56:55,030
of our helicopter.

724
00:56:56,670 --> 00:57:00,650
The guys manning the roadblock are real
South African cops.

725
00:57:01,850 --> 00:57:03,130
We achieved this.

726
00:57:03,570 --> 00:57:07,950
The movie itself was shot about a year
before the independence in Namibia, and

727
00:57:07,950 --> 00:57:12,350
there were still South African cops
actually basically running the law and

728
00:57:12,350 --> 00:57:13,350
in the place.

729
00:57:13,370 --> 00:57:18,670
And we achieved this movie by bribing
the cops, by paying them to allow us to

730
00:57:18,670 --> 00:57:21,710
use their roads and do whatever we
wanted.

731
00:57:21,930 --> 00:57:26,230
And in the course of bribing the police
force and getting them on our side, we

732
00:57:26,230 --> 00:57:29,330
gave little parts in the movie to the
local cops.

733
00:57:29,590 --> 00:57:35,370
So all the cops in the scenes of
Roadblock are the South African cops who

734
00:57:35,370 --> 00:57:40,330
literally working for our film crew for
the duration of the Dust Devil shoot.

735
00:57:41,520 --> 00:57:48,500
I actually enjoyed the kind of the
diabolic nature of getting the cops,

736
00:57:48,700 --> 00:57:52,860
the army, and the local police force on
our side, and that as it were a devil

737
00:57:52,860 --> 00:57:56,320
movie, it seemed appropriate that they
were serving us for the course of this

738
00:57:56,320 --> 00:57:57,320
movie.

739
00:57:57,460 --> 00:58:02,200
Again, the images on the TV set playing
in Zakes' lounge are images of rail

740
00:58:02,200 --> 00:58:07,420
deaths. Here we see the Faroe Island
whale hull, where they're literally

741
00:58:07,420 --> 00:58:08,620
the whales to death.

742
00:58:09,240 --> 00:58:15,220
And the subsequent scene with Hitch and
Wendy at the table in the motel, we can

743
00:58:15,220 --> 00:58:20,100
see they're surrounded by whale bones,
almost as if they're inside the skeleton

744
00:58:20,100 --> 00:58:21,480
of a dead whale.

745
00:58:21,960 --> 00:58:28,760
Again, bringing us back to this bizarre
light motif, this recurrent theme of

746
00:58:28,760 --> 00:58:34,420
fishing and deep sea animals, and the
lack of water and death.

747
00:58:35,150 --> 00:58:40,870
and the way that all of these characters
are reaching out for redemption, which

748
00:58:40,870 --> 00:58:43,930
is symbolized always by water.

749
00:58:45,170 --> 00:58:50,010
In the background here, something
explodes far out in the desert night,

750
00:58:50,010 --> 00:58:51,010
distracts them.

751
00:58:51,550 --> 00:58:56,670
The movie never explains what exploded,
and that's just how it is.

752
00:58:57,230 --> 00:59:01,010
It's very closely based on a couple of
things that happened to me out in

753
00:59:01,010 --> 00:59:06,510
Namibia. This entire movie, in fact, is
inspired by a journey I took through

754
00:59:06,510 --> 00:59:11,250
Namibia as a 15 -year -old when our car
broke down near Bethany.

755
00:59:11,810 --> 00:59:16,430
And that particular moment, seeing
something explode way out in the desert

756
00:59:16,430 --> 00:59:21,250
then everyone standing and watching the
flames until the flames vanish and never

757
00:59:21,250 --> 00:59:25,110
finding out what it was that just blew
up, is something that actually happened

758
00:59:25,110 --> 00:59:25,609
to us.

759
00:59:25,610 --> 00:59:30,810
So in Dust Devil, the movie, I felt a
desire to also have a...

760
00:59:31,560 --> 00:59:36,140
an inexplicable explosion just happened
for no reason at all somewhere in the

761
00:59:36,140 --> 00:59:39,880
background, which very much evokes that
place to me.

762
00:59:40,760 --> 00:59:47,600
And here we have the one licensed track
we could afford on our budget, which

763
00:59:47,600 --> 00:59:53,520
ended up being Hank Williams' Rambling
Man, which seemed utterly appropriate

764
00:59:53,520 --> 00:59:57,220
the Hitchhiker's character and pretty
much essential.

765
00:59:57,920 --> 00:59:59,820
There had to be a scene where...

766
01:00:00,910 --> 01:00:06,010
Wendy and the Devil would essentially
dance to Hank Williams' music by the

767
01:00:06,010 --> 01:00:08,210
moonlight while the owl looks on.

768
01:00:08,890 --> 01:00:13,950
Here we see the bottle moving on the
table as well, as if by psychokinesis,

769
01:00:13,970 --> 01:00:20,490
which was something else that literally
happened to me in a remote motel in

770
01:00:20,490 --> 01:00:23,050
Namibia during the shoot of the original
Death of the Devil.

771
01:00:23,950 --> 01:00:28,590
And here we see Hitz's small change, the
devil's small change left on the

772
01:00:28,590 --> 01:00:31,950
tabletop. And we see that some of those
coins are really ancient.

773
01:00:32,190 --> 01:00:37,610
Some are Chinese, some are Celtic. And
again we get the sense the devil has

774
01:00:37,610 --> 01:00:39,530
on the road a really long time.

775
01:00:40,810 --> 01:00:46,950
Which segues into the cop's dream, into
Zake's second dream sequence.

776
01:00:47,830 --> 01:00:53,130
Where again Zake is troubled by the
unquiet souls of the dead.

777
01:00:53,900 --> 01:00:58,480
who are looking to Zakes, to the cop, to
somehow let them rest or pass on.

778
01:00:58,960 --> 01:01:04,800
In this case, Zakes is literally meeting
the trapped, disturbed soul of Saki,

779
01:01:04,980 --> 01:01:08,360
the murder victim, who was killed in the
first sequence.

780
01:01:09,100 --> 01:01:16,100
Having been slain by the Nahlur, by the
black magician, Saki's

781
01:01:16,100 --> 01:01:23,060
soul is pretty much trapped between
worlds, and is looking to Zakes, to the

782
01:01:23,610 --> 01:01:30,570
to free her by avenging her, killing the
murderer, and freeing

783
01:01:30,570 --> 01:01:36,890
the soul, the energy that the
Nightwalker has harvested, has sucked

784
01:01:37,190 --> 01:01:43,190
But like a vampire, Saki is like one of
the undead herself, like

785
01:01:43,190 --> 01:01:46,490
Lucy returning from the grave in
Dracula.

786
01:01:47,600 --> 01:01:54,100
And as Zake slips into this world, he's
increasingly disorientated. It becomes

787
01:01:54,100 --> 01:01:56,560
harder to tell sleep from waking.

788
01:01:57,100 --> 01:02:01,040
This notion of waking up in the bed and
discovering the body of the murdered

789
01:02:01,040 --> 01:02:07,500
girl is reaching into him and grabbing
his heart. It's another iteration of the

790
01:02:07,500 --> 01:02:14,320
old hag, the nocturnal sleep paralysis
that I mentioned earlier. The

791
01:02:14,320 --> 01:02:15,320
way that...

792
01:02:16,280 --> 01:02:21,540
energy -sapping or soul -sucking demons
can literally break into your

793
01:02:21,540 --> 01:02:26,920
consciousness when you're half asleep
and half awake, which is, yeah, where

794
01:02:26,920 --> 01:02:32,560
is coming from. It's also pretty much
the basis of Wes Craven's Nightmare on

795
01:02:32,560 --> 01:02:38,600
Street movies, which deal with the same
mythology in a far more American and far

796
01:02:38,600 --> 01:02:39,600
more commercial manner.

797
01:02:41,760 --> 01:02:44,680
Here we see Rupert Swart.

798
01:02:45,210 --> 01:02:51,270
The one white South African actor we had
to go into the beer hall lured by the

799
01:02:51,270 --> 01:02:52,470
sound of the pinball table.

800
01:02:54,970 --> 01:03:01,870
It's pretty much about the honky going
to the wrong side of town of the white

801
01:03:01,870 --> 01:03:05,910
South African stepping into a place
where a white South African shouldn't

802
01:03:06,920 --> 01:03:10,460
The bartender we cast because he had no
nose.

803
01:03:10,760 --> 01:03:14,300
His nose had been hacked off the rail.

804
01:03:14,800 --> 01:03:18,400
So I figured I'd cast him as the
barkeeper.

805
01:03:20,280 --> 01:03:26,320
We just tried to assemble the roughest,
most dangerous looking people who were

806
01:03:26,320 --> 01:03:30,360
around at the time to give Rufus a hard
time.

807
01:03:31,900 --> 01:03:38,900
There'd been a situation in the car on
the road from the airport when Rufus

808
01:03:38,900 --> 01:03:43,820
in. The big guy in the checked shirt was
one of our stunt people.

809
01:03:44,700 --> 01:03:46,600
We cast him in the movie.

810
01:03:47,560 --> 01:03:54,040
On the way from the airport during the
drive, he had an argument with Rufus.

811
01:03:54,180 --> 01:03:56,480
The two of them fell out. They were not
friends.

812
01:03:58,960 --> 01:04:02,720
One of the actors who were sitting in
the backseat of the car overhearing this

813
01:04:02,720 --> 01:04:07,680
argument between the stuntman and Ruthie
Duarte, the South African actor,

814
01:04:07,960 --> 01:04:14,800
actually wrote down the exchange, noted
down the things that they'd said to each

815
01:04:14,800 --> 01:04:16,920
other, and I worked them back into the
script.

816
01:04:17,680 --> 01:04:21,740
And we literally restaged their fight in
the scene.

817
01:04:22,620 --> 01:04:26,960
Here, our stuntman gets revenge on
Ruthie.

818
01:04:27,790 --> 01:04:33,050
And to an extent, we can imagine it's
black Africa getting revenge on

819
01:04:33,050 --> 01:04:34,050
-era South Africa.

820
01:04:34,450 --> 01:04:40,130
Rufus is ruthlessly kicked and beaten by
the people in the beer hall while his

821
01:04:40,130 --> 01:04:41,210
wife fucks the devil.

822
01:04:42,330 --> 01:04:45,410
So, yeah, that was... And he gets kicked
in the balls.

823
01:04:45,790 --> 01:04:48,150
And the kick to the face was real.

824
01:04:48,870 --> 01:04:50,710
That actually hit him. That blow
connected.

825
01:04:51,010 --> 01:04:52,890
It wasn't meant to connect, but it did.

826
01:04:53,630 --> 01:04:57,570
I recall in the lengthier take, Rufus
just lies there bleeding for a while.

827
01:04:57,570 --> 01:05:01,730
then he kind of opens his eyes and sees
the camera's still rolling and freaks

828
01:05:01,730 --> 01:05:05,330
out. Like, you know, what the fuck is he
still rolling for? What is this, some

829
01:05:05,330 --> 01:05:06,430
kind of fucking stuffed movie?

830
01:05:07,030 --> 01:05:09,250
I think that's what he said in the full
take.

831
01:05:10,130 --> 01:05:15,150
But yeah, Rufus, like I mentioned
earlier, was carrying the can for the

832
01:05:15,150 --> 01:05:16,029
white South Africa.

833
01:05:16,030 --> 01:05:18,850
He was the one real white South African
we had on the movie.

834
01:05:19,150 --> 01:05:21,350
And as a result, he's heavily tortured.

835
01:05:22,760 --> 01:05:28,320
And, yeah, in the meantime, John
Machakese's character, Joe Nopdy, and

836
01:05:28,320 --> 01:05:33,740
can't penetrate into the very vaginal,
very womb -like cave where we see the

837
01:05:33,740 --> 01:05:37,280
original rock paintings.

838
01:05:39,220 --> 01:05:44,140
And that's, yeah, cross -cut with the
post -coital scene between Wendy and the

839
01:05:44,140 --> 01:05:49,020
Devil, where, again, the camera itself
is describing a spiral.

840
01:05:52,110 --> 01:05:58,330
The devil character talks about the way
that he's trapped in his body, that he

841
01:05:58,330 --> 01:06:04,750
has within him this spirit, like a wind,
which is whirling and trying to

842
01:06:04,750 --> 01:06:10,990
get out, and that he fears that he might
just blow apart, so his essence can be

843
01:06:10,990 --> 01:06:17,190
released, which I guess is a
foreshadowing of the end of the movie.

844
01:06:17,910 --> 01:06:19,350
And it's also...

845
01:06:21,000 --> 01:06:23,420
establishing some little bit of sympathy
for the devil.

846
01:06:24,080 --> 01:06:26,200
The devil essentially can't help
himself.

847
01:06:26,660 --> 01:06:33,400
He's pretty much a part of hell and is
trapped in the cycle and it's a lonely

848
01:06:33,400 --> 01:06:38,900
place to be. There's probably little
chance of redemption for him.

849
01:06:40,960 --> 01:06:43,320
Again with the zebra print.

850
01:06:45,390 --> 01:06:51,590
bedding and the whole look of the motel.
The genius of Joseph Bennett, our

851
01:06:51,590 --> 01:06:57,930
production designer, who created the
whole African Gothic kit. Look at this

852
01:06:57,930 --> 01:06:58,930
movie.

853
01:07:03,410 --> 01:07:10,010
And here, Joe Niemont, the witch doctor,

854
01:07:10,230 --> 01:07:14,050
played by John Machikiza, explains
the...

855
01:07:14,600 --> 01:07:21,400
The Nachtloper, the black magician, the
myth of these perturbed, soul

856
01:07:21,400 --> 01:07:26,720
-stealing spirits that wander the
wasteland for eternity, which again is

857
01:07:26,720 --> 01:07:29,680
drawn very much on real mythology.

858
01:07:30,100 --> 01:07:33,520
It's not something that was invented
just for this movie.

859
01:07:48,750 --> 01:07:55,210
Yeah, Chelsea Field had a cast iron
nudity cloth in her contract, so we

860
01:07:55,210 --> 01:07:58,670
never really get her clothes off in the
course of the film, which was something

861
01:07:58,670 --> 01:08:00,290
that we always kind of regretted.

862
01:08:00,510 --> 01:08:05,090
It also meant that we were tied down to
shooting the sex scene missionary

863
01:08:05,090 --> 01:08:06,090
position style.

864
01:08:06,930 --> 01:08:12,650
And here, while she takes off the ring,
we see Rupert Swart being handcuffed and

865
01:08:12,650 --> 01:08:15,970
treated with equal hostility by the
white character.

866
01:08:16,649 --> 01:08:22,090
So he's beaten by both the black and the
white characters. And it's very much in

867
01:08:22,090 --> 01:08:23,090
hell.

868
01:08:23,529 --> 01:08:25,410
And here we are behind the mirror.

869
01:08:27,670 --> 01:08:33,529
I mean, that's the reservoir of darkness
lurking beneath the surface of the

870
01:08:33,529 --> 01:08:37,210
mirror. The darkness that looks back at
you as you look at your reflection.

871
01:08:39,470 --> 01:08:43,990
And then back into the womb -like cave
where...

872
01:08:45,390 --> 01:08:52,250
Zakes realizes that it's going to fall
to him to hunt the Dark Devil, to hunt

873
01:08:52,250 --> 01:08:53,250
the demon.

874
01:08:55,630 --> 01:09:00,069
Again, this was largely created for the
movie.

875
01:09:00,410 --> 01:09:06,290
We didn't use real rock paintings. The
rock paintings were created by Imo Horn,

876
01:09:06,470 --> 01:09:11,430
who was the unit muralist, as well as
the second unit cameraman.

877
01:09:12,970 --> 01:09:18,550
Zakes' hand is bandaged from, he hurts
his knuckles when he punches the other

878
01:09:18,550 --> 01:09:24,210
cop. And again, the damage to Zakes'
knuckles shows that he's losing his

879
01:09:24,370 --> 01:09:30,330
and that it's the way that the black
magic is creeping into his life and

880
01:09:30,330 --> 01:09:36,109
infecting him, that he's slightly
disempowered by his wounded hand, which

881
01:09:36,109 --> 01:09:38,970
yeah, evoked Judeo -Christian images.

882
01:09:42,569 --> 01:09:47,970
And the scene where Hitchhiker literally
tries to reach into the mirror to take

883
01:09:47,970 --> 01:09:51,670
the ceremonial bowl offered to him by
the African spirit.

884
01:09:52,649 --> 01:09:55,250
And we realize that actually he can't
penetrate the mirror.

885
01:09:55,670 --> 01:10:01,030
That he's very much operating in the
material world as well.

886
01:10:02,250 --> 01:10:05,270
And is yet trapped in our dimension.

887
01:10:11,790 --> 01:10:18,710
I very much see Joe Nobody, Joe Nimont,
John Machikiza's character as the

888
01:10:18,710 --> 01:10:21,170
Van Helsing of the Dust Devil story.

889
01:10:21,610 --> 01:10:27,430
He's the one that has the knowledge as
to how to defeat the demon, which he has

890
01:10:27,430 --> 01:10:34,270
to impart to Zakes' character, Zakes
essentially being the vampire

891
01:10:34,270 --> 01:10:35,270
hunter.

892
01:10:35,570 --> 01:10:40,070
And in African mythology, in...

893
01:10:40,380 --> 01:10:41,520
Moisam mythology.

894
01:10:42,600 --> 01:10:49,560
Strangely enough, the Nachla defeated a
stake, a stick, very similar

895
01:10:49,560 --> 01:10:52,200
to the way that we deal with western
vampires.

896
01:10:53,140 --> 01:10:55,000
Again, it's comparative mythology.

897
01:10:55,660 --> 01:11:01,040
It seems very bizarre and coincidental
to me that this is the case.

898
01:11:01,680 --> 01:11:06,600
But you take the magic kiri, the magic
stick, which John is holding in the

899
01:11:06,600 --> 01:11:11,720
scene, and you lay it across the
threshold of your hut at night.

900
01:11:12,100 --> 01:11:18,100
So when the vampiric Nachtloper comes to
your bed to suck your vital forces, it

901
01:11:18,100 --> 01:11:19,440
has to step over the kiri.

902
01:11:19,740 --> 01:11:25,180
And when it steps over the stick, the
stick has the power to suit the

903
01:11:25,180 --> 01:11:28,880
spirit to the earth, to earth its
energy, and to trap it.

904
01:11:29,840 --> 01:11:34,900
which is very similar to the way you
have to nail the vampire to the ground.

905
01:11:34,900 --> 01:11:39,640
have to drive some stakes through the
vampire and nail it to the earth to stop

906
01:11:39,640 --> 01:11:42,240
the wandering spirit from coming back
and attacking you.

907
01:11:42,980 --> 01:11:47,680
So there are these weird parallels
between our vampire myths, between the

908
01:11:47,680 --> 01:11:53,880
European succubi and incubi, and the
African Nachtlober, Nightwalker,

909
01:11:54,040 --> 01:11:57,320
which I can't explain. These parallels
exist.

910
01:11:58,030 --> 01:12:02,770
There are parallel mythologies that have
somehow grown side by side over the

911
01:12:02,770 --> 01:12:06,870
course of thousands of years, but
essentially will tell you the same

912
01:12:07,530 --> 01:12:11,530
Another detail being that the Nachtlover
has problems with his shadow.

913
01:12:12,010 --> 01:12:18,030
Like Peter Pan, you may recall that
Peter Pan also loses his shadow, and

914
01:12:18,030 --> 01:12:20,710
has to stitch Peter's shadow back to his
feet.

915
01:12:21,050 --> 01:12:26,210
But the Nachtlover's shadows detach
themselves from the Nightwalker and

916
01:12:26,210 --> 01:12:27,210
apart from them.

917
01:12:27,430 --> 01:12:32,010
just the same way that the vampires
don't have reflections, that you can't

918
01:12:32,010 --> 01:12:33,010
vampire in the mirror.

919
01:12:34,010 --> 01:12:40,270
And, again, I can't explain that. I
don't know why the vampire has no

920
01:12:40,270 --> 01:12:45,950
and why the African vampire has no
shadow, but it's something which both

921
01:12:45,950 --> 01:12:47,170
mythologies have in common.

922
01:12:50,030 --> 01:12:54,090
Here, Wendy, finds Hitch's Polaroid
collection.

923
01:12:56,490 --> 01:13:03,390
As aforementioned, Hitch is taking
rigorous continuity Polaroids

924
01:13:03,390 --> 01:13:10,190
because he hopes to somehow escape the
continuity of the material

925
01:13:10,190 --> 01:13:14,490
world to break the cycle of time.

926
01:13:21,320 --> 01:13:25,420
To an extent, all of the Polaroids in
Hitch's backpack are also like the souls

927
01:13:25,420 --> 01:13:29,300
he's collecting, as if it's the souls of
all the people who are caught in his

928
01:13:29,300 --> 01:13:34,480
bag, in his death bag, along with the
fingers and the knuckles.

929
01:13:34,860 --> 01:13:36,680
He's been collecting all that power.

930
01:13:38,940 --> 01:13:42,120
And Hitch now tries to explain himself.

931
01:13:42,820 --> 01:13:47,780
In the scene, again, I'm staggered by
Robert John Burke's performance of the

932
01:13:47,780 --> 01:13:50,360
Dust Devil as the Hitchhiker. He's just
wonderful.

933
01:13:51,000 --> 01:13:55,080
I mean, it's an incredibly hard part to
play because he's not even a human

934
01:13:55,080 --> 01:14:01,220
being. He's like a demon or a
manifestation from Wendy's id, from her

935
01:14:01,220 --> 01:14:06,640
unconscious. And for an actor to take on
a part which is so alien, which is so

936
01:14:06,640 --> 01:14:13,120
far from themselves, and coming from
such a dark place, to somehow make him

937
01:14:13,120 --> 01:14:18,350
both... oddly sympathetic and believable
is quite an achievement.

938
01:14:18,570 --> 01:14:21,430
I think Robert did an extraordinary job
in this movie.

939
01:14:26,470 --> 01:14:29,990
And it's not without its sense of humor,
of course, as well, which is another

940
01:14:29,990 --> 01:14:32,670
thing I really appreciate with Robert's
performance.

941
01:14:33,450 --> 01:14:38,910
But for me, all of my work is
essentially black comedy on some hideous

942
01:14:39,430 --> 01:14:42,650
At least, it makes me smile.

943
01:14:44,880 --> 01:14:49,800
Again, Hitch refers to the colors in the
desert sky in that liminal,

944
01:14:49,820 --> 01:14:52,320
transitional state between dawn and
night.

945
01:14:52,780 --> 01:14:59,160
The colors that appear first as the
night segues into day, and then as the

946
01:14:59,160 --> 01:15:06,000
segues into night, which is the color
wheel, the cycle by which this entire

947
01:15:06,000 --> 01:15:07,000
movie is organized.

948
01:15:09,200 --> 01:15:13,740
Pretty much everything that the devil
tells Wendy in the scene is

949
01:15:13,740 --> 01:15:20,320
Gnosticism. I mean, it's very similar to
the beliefs of the

950
01:15:20,320 --> 01:15:25,640
Cathars in 12th and 13th century Europe,
that we're living essentially in the

951
01:15:25,640 --> 01:15:30,000
material world, in the world of the
devil.

952
01:15:30,380 --> 01:15:35,440
Our souls belong elsewhere, that this
earth is not necessarily the creation of

953
01:15:35,440 --> 01:15:40,970
true good God, which is full of... pain
and misery. Our souls belong to the true

954
01:15:40,970 --> 01:15:47,130
good God in the kingdom elsewhere, but
are trapped in the hell of the material

955
01:15:47,130 --> 01:15:52,630
world. They're trapped in the prison
program of the matrix in this place, in

956
01:15:52,630 --> 01:15:54,730
this realm of consciousness.

957
01:15:55,170 --> 01:15:59,990
And in his mind, the hitchhiker is
simply trying to help Wendy escape by

958
01:15:59,990 --> 01:16:06,770
allowing her light, her consciousness to
transcend, to leave the thumb.

959
01:16:08,320 --> 01:16:12,000
the void in which these characters are
trapped.

960
01:16:12,320 --> 01:16:17,220
But Wendy's not ready to go. I mean, at
the last minute she fights them and

961
01:16:17,220 --> 01:16:19,380
decides she doesn't want to die after
all.

962
01:16:20,540 --> 01:16:26,120
This is very much based on all those
folk who

963
01:16:26,120 --> 01:16:32,600
set out to commit suicide and then
change their minds at the last moment.

964
01:16:33,540 --> 01:16:36,160
Like when you swim out to sea and you
decide to drown.

965
01:16:37,200 --> 01:16:42,280
And then finally as you're tiring and
the waves are coming over your head and

966
01:16:42,280 --> 01:16:46,160
the water is starting to come into your
mouth and lungs, you suddenly start to

967
01:16:46,160 --> 01:16:48,700
panic and realize you don't want to die
after all.

968
01:16:49,320 --> 01:16:53,260
And then you have to struggle against
the current and try and beat back

969
01:16:53,260 --> 01:16:54,660
the waves and make it to the beach.

970
01:16:55,580 --> 01:17:00,700
Just like all the folk who take overdose
pills or cut their ribs and then call

971
01:17:00,700 --> 01:17:01,820
for help to the race.

972
01:17:02,840 --> 01:17:05,700
And poor people finally arrive and find
them.

973
01:17:06,970 --> 01:17:08,050
dead next to the telephone.

974
01:17:09,070 --> 01:17:14,090
People who want to take their own lives
and then when they sense death coming

975
01:17:14,090 --> 01:17:20,210
are still so terrified by it that they
suddenly grasp after life and fight to

976
01:17:20,210 --> 01:17:23,070
the other way and to live after all. And
this is Wendy's dilemma.

977
01:17:23,450 --> 01:17:27,350
She's someone who's gone so far into
death that now when she decides that she

978
01:17:27,350 --> 01:17:30,550
actually doesn't want to die she finds
it very hard to stay alive.

979
01:17:31,630 --> 01:17:32,690
Yeah, here she is.

980
01:17:33,120 --> 01:17:39,940
swiped by a cat truck going the other
way, which is an accurate recreation of

981
01:17:39,940 --> 01:17:45,720
car accident I had in 2015 on the
shooting of the first Dust Devil.

982
01:17:45,720 --> 01:17:47,060
was kind of worse than real life.

983
01:17:47,840 --> 01:17:53,820
But, yeah, I recreated it for the 35mm
movie

984
01:17:53,820 --> 01:17:56,320
with the cows.

985
01:18:02,640 --> 01:18:08,420
The cows were borrowed from a local
abattoir, which caused a lot of cold

986
01:18:08,420 --> 01:18:09,880
-seeking on behalf of the crew members.

987
01:18:10,180 --> 01:18:14,200
No one liked the idea of having to
return the cows to the abattoir after

988
01:18:14,200 --> 01:18:15,079
finished shooting.

989
01:18:15,080 --> 01:18:19,360
But at the same time, none of us could
take the cows home with us and give them

990
01:18:19,360 --> 01:18:20,360
happy lives.

991
01:18:20,580 --> 01:18:24,740
That's a tricky thing, and I don't think
any of the crew members were prepared

992
01:18:24,740 --> 01:18:28,520
to stop eating meat or to give up eating
hamburgers.

993
01:18:28,970 --> 01:18:33,010
Yet they're all kind of bitched and
uncomfortable about the idea of

994
01:18:33,010 --> 01:18:37,330
the cows from the abattoir, from the
place where they're going to be killed,

995
01:18:37,430 --> 01:18:42,050
shooting with them and then returning
them to be killed again after the shoot.

996
01:18:42,850 --> 01:18:47,490
I left the scene in Afrikaans without
subtitles because it's obvious what

997
01:18:47,490 --> 01:18:51,610
they're saying and again I wanted people
to have an opportunity to hear a little

998
01:18:51,610 --> 01:18:52,610
bit of real Afrikaans.

999
01:18:53,280 --> 01:18:55,380
And it's all such classic stuff.

1000
01:18:55,680 --> 01:18:59,920
I mean, whenever Afrikaans people or
South Africans have car accidents and

1001
01:18:59,920 --> 01:19:03,540
they're not killed, the very first thing
they do is they start screaming at each

1002
01:19:03,540 --> 01:19:07,220
other in Afrikaans. And if anyone has
guns, they usually start threatening

1003
01:19:07,220 --> 01:19:13,320
other. It's always a very vicious,
violent scene. I wanted to include some

1004
01:19:13,320 --> 01:19:14,420
essence of that in the movie.

1005
01:19:20,060 --> 01:19:22,660
Wendy is saved by her convenient
sunroof.

1006
01:19:23,560 --> 01:19:30,380
And again, shooting in Namibia meant
that we were skirting around all kinds

1007
01:19:30,380 --> 01:19:31,380
safety regulations.

1008
01:19:31,460 --> 01:19:37,520
This was a tremendous explosion, and
seemingly hot. I recall when

1009
01:19:37,520 --> 01:19:43,500
Chelsea wanted to do the stunt of
running away from the Volkswagen

1010
01:19:43,500 --> 01:19:47,660
to her credit, she did. She ran away and
held herself off camera onto a

1011
01:19:47,660 --> 01:19:48,660
mattress.

1012
01:19:48,720 --> 01:19:53,540
And literally behind her, after she
threw herself onto the mattress, a great

1013
01:19:53,540 --> 01:19:58,480
piece of flaming metal came and sunk
down into the desert floor just where

1014
01:19:58,480 --> 01:19:59,299
been running before.

1015
01:19:59,300 --> 01:20:00,560
So she didn't see that.

1016
01:20:00,960 --> 01:20:03,260
But we all saw it from behind the
camera.

1017
01:20:03,520 --> 01:20:09,640
And she was the strength of the
explosives used by the South African

1018
01:20:09,640 --> 01:20:10,640
paratechnics team.

1019
01:20:11,400 --> 01:20:14,780
The South African paratechnicians were
truly frightening people.

1020
01:20:15,660 --> 01:20:20,000
The one, their names were Rick and Roly.

1021
01:20:20,320 --> 01:20:22,640
Rick Creswell and Roly was his
assistant.

1022
01:20:23,040 --> 01:20:27,740
But Roly's face was just a patchwork of
scars. He'd obviously been blown up so

1023
01:20:27,740 --> 01:20:31,700
many times and had so much plastic
surgery, you could tell it had gone

1024
01:20:31,700 --> 01:20:32,659
bunch of times.

1025
01:20:32,660 --> 01:20:34,920
And Rick only walked with the aid of two
sticks.

1026
01:20:35,580 --> 01:20:41,080
And these were our chief stuntmen and
pyrotechnicians who didn't exactly

1027
01:20:41,080 --> 01:20:43,280
confidence, but they did great work.

1028
01:20:49,580 --> 01:20:54,980
Now we have Robert in full dust devil
mode, hot on

1029
01:20:54,980 --> 01:20:57,700
Chelsea's trail.

1030
01:20:58,420 --> 01:20:59,720
Chelsea playing Wendy.

1031
01:21:01,320 --> 01:21:07,540
I mean, to a large extent, the devil in
this movie is the man of no name.

1032
01:21:08,320 --> 01:21:13,200
And you could probably write a whole
thesis on that character, on the

1033
01:21:13,200 --> 01:21:14,840
figure of the man of no name.

1034
01:21:15,760 --> 01:21:17,840
I'm very interested in archetypes.

1035
01:21:18,350 --> 01:21:25,070
in what the uncharitable would call
cliches, and essentially in

1036
01:21:25,070 --> 01:21:30,570
conducting a dialogue between frozen
archetypes, the cops and the

1037
01:21:30,570 --> 01:21:36,750
cuckolded husband, Mark Robinson's
character here.

1038
01:21:37,530 --> 01:21:43,290
Essentially all the characters are
playing larger -than -life symbols for,

1039
01:21:43,290 --> 01:21:47,650
Mark's case, white South Africa, in
Zake's case, black South Africa.

1040
01:21:48,280 --> 01:21:55,180
And you can imagine that Chelsea as
Wendy is essentially playing the soul

1041
01:21:55,180 --> 01:22:01,300
of South Africa, literally the soul of
South Africa, which is being seduced by

1042
01:22:01,300 --> 01:22:07,360
the devil and which is in danger and is
being sucked into the heart of the

1043
01:22:07,360 --> 01:22:09,080
wilderness, into the wasteland.

1044
01:22:09,300 --> 01:22:16,180
And it's really down to the black cop
and the white husband to try to...

1045
01:22:16,700 --> 01:22:22,060
to side their differences and establish
some kind of harmony between each other

1046
01:22:22,060 --> 01:22:25,620
in order to defeat the devil and save
the soul of the country.

1047
01:22:26,480 --> 01:22:32,620
If I can reduce the symbolic matrix of
the movie to something so simple, but

1048
01:22:32,620 --> 01:22:34,660
that's really what's going on in this
movie.

1049
01:22:35,120 --> 01:22:39,560
It's a spiraling voyage in which white
and black characters have to work out

1050
01:22:39,560 --> 01:22:43,940
their differences in order to try and
save the country.

1051
01:22:44,510 --> 01:22:46,430
stop South Africa from going to the
devil.

1052
01:22:48,950 --> 01:22:55,450
The vultures in the scene were two tame
vultures whose names were Blood and

1053
01:22:55,450 --> 01:22:56,450
Guts.

1054
01:22:56,710 --> 01:22:58,310
They were our unit vultures.

1055
01:22:59,130 --> 01:23:00,930
And they were great birds to work with.

1056
01:23:01,230 --> 01:23:04,050
Really civilized and surprisingly easy.

1057
01:23:05,090 --> 01:23:09,490
We only got them onto the set very late
in the production and if I'd known that

1058
01:23:09,490 --> 01:23:13,050
the vultures were so easy to work with I
probably would have dressed vultures

1059
01:23:13,050 --> 01:23:14,050
into every shot.

1060
01:23:14,410 --> 01:23:16,770
But as such, Blood and Guts were
wonderful.

1061
01:23:17,450 --> 01:23:21,010
Literally, they would sit there waiting,
and then when I said action, they would

1062
01:23:21,010 --> 01:23:27,730
settle into their position, and really
were very, very easy

1063
01:23:27,730 --> 01:23:30,170
and decorative creatures to work with.

1064
01:23:31,530 --> 01:23:33,650
That's Blood and Guts sitting up in the
background.

1065
01:23:34,910 --> 01:23:39,870
One of the tricky parts about making
this movie was that you can only do all

1066
01:23:39,870 --> 01:23:42,770
these shots once, because you leave the
moment.

1067
01:23:44,020 --> 01:23:48,820
And we kept having to find dunes and
places where there were no footprints

1068
01:23:48,820 --> 01:23:49,820
no car tracks.

1069
01:23:49,940 --> 01:23:52,580
And the moment you did one take, you
would completely fuck it up.

1070
01:23:53,260 --> 01:23:57,580
Which meant that, yeah, again, like
burning the house, a lot of the time we

1071
01:23:57,580 --> 01:23:59,700
doing things in one take.

1072
01:24:02,540 --> 01:24:04,700
Now we get a little bit of Mark's
backstory.

1073
01:24:05,710 --> 01:24:09,290
where we discover that he met Wendy
during a protest while they were at

1074
01:24:09,290 --> 01:24:16,250
university, that he's essentially got
once in a liberal, an urban bourgeois

1075
01:24:16,250 --> 01:24:17,530
liberal consciousness.

1076
01:24:18,650 --> 01:24:22,210
But at the same time, he's still a white
South African, and it's still

1077
01:24:22,210 --> 01:24:23,270
essentially a little uncool.

1078
01:24:24,090 --> 01:24:29,490
And this is very much about the
inability of the white and the black

1079
01:24:29,490 --> 01:24:33,670
to ever sort it out and cooperate.

1080
01:24:34,490 --> 01:24:38,170
Yet they have to cooperate if the nation
is going to be saved.

1081
01:24:38,730 --> 01:24:45,330
The only hope for South Africa and for
these characters is to forgive each

1082
01:24:45,330 --> 01:24:51,610
other, to show mercy and sympathy and
understanding, which is something which

1083
01:24:51,610 --> 01:24:54,610
almost everyone is incapable of in Dust
Devil.

1084
01:24:54,870 --> 01:24:59,530
Dust Devil is set in an emotional
drought. It's a wasteland. It's hell.

1085
01:25:00,190 --> 01:25:04,930
I would note also that this particular
hell, the moonscape behind them, was the

1086
01:25:04,930 --> 01:25:10,470
place where George Miller ended up
shooting Mad Max Fury Road many years

1087
01:25:11,510 --> 01:25:13,310
It's certainly an extraordinary place.

1088
01:25:13,670 --> 01:25:20,590
The whale song, of course, the whale
music on Lake's car stereo, that

1089
01:25:20,590 --> 01:25:27,150
again is all about the deep -sea fishing
theme, the promise of water, the

1090
01:25:27,150 --> 01:25:28,170
idea of...

1091
01:25:29,100 --> 01:25:34,200
Water being something almost attainable
that everyone is reaching towards.

1092
01:25:34,420 --> 01:25:39,040
Wendy is driving towards the sea, and
they are guided by the whale song.

1093
01:25:39,280 --> 01:25:44,020
They're guided by the promise of
redemption, of the hope that there might

1094
01:25:44,020 --> 01:25:48,780
something beyond the wasteland, that
they might somehow transcend hell and

1095
01:25:48,780 --> 01:25:53,880
escape the box of the material world,
the nightmare that they're caught in.

1096
01:25:57,840 --> 01:26:04,660
Here we see Hitch, the devil, raising
the wind, literally calling up a

1097
01:26:04,660 --> 01:26:09,860
storm. And of course, a movie called
Dust Devil. There had to be a dust storm

1098
01:26:09,860 --> 01:26:10,860
sequence in the movie.

1099
01:26:11,240 --> 01:26:18,080
And to realize the sequence, we got the
motor of a 747

1100
01:26:18,080 --> 01:26:19,260
jet aircraft.

1101
01:26:19,620 --> 01:26:23,280
We literally cut the motor off the wing
of a jet aircraft.

1102
01:26:24,080 --> 01:26:30,680
and mounted the turbine motor on a
little trolley, and then maneuvered the

1103
01:26:30,680 --> 01:26:33,300
into place and blasted the hell out of
Chelsea.

1104
01:26:34,020 --> 01:26:40,880
And this wind is created literally by
the 747 motor that we had, that was the

1105
01:26:40,880 --> 01:26:44,480
strongest wind machine we could possibly
master.

1106
01:26:45,480 --> 01:26:50,300
Like everything in the movie, it's a
fake, but I think it does a good job of

1107
01:26:50,300 --> 01:26:52,740
standing in for a genuine dust storm.

1108
01:27:07,180 --> 01:27:13,200
Zakes and Rupert Swart drive through the
night fighting their way through the

1109
01:27:13,200 --> 01:27:14,200
storm.

1110
01:27:15,680 --> 01:27:20,680
Both of them hopelessly ill -equipped
for dealing with the circumstance.

1111
01:27:23,780 --> 01:27:26,380
Movie's inadequate monster hunters.

1112
01:27:32,420 --> 01:27:38,890
The accident here is very
disorientating, which is intentional.

1113
01:27:40,130 --> 01:27:44,250
Most accidents are, particularly if
you're in the desert in the middle of

1114
01:27:44,250 --> 01:27:48,330
night, trying to work out what really
happened, or even that you had an

1115
01:27:48,330 --> 01:27:54,150
accident, is often difficult to figure
out. You're driving along one moment,

1116
01:27:54,310 --> 01:27:59,590
then something happens, and then
suddenly, as in Rupert's case, you find

1117
01:27:59,590 --> 01:28:04,650
suspended upside down, and maybe you've
got a pressure on your chest.

1118
01:28:05,240 --> 01:28:08,640
And then slowly you work out that, oh my
fuck, I've had an accident.

1119
01:28:09,140 --> 01:28:12,320
But it's not always clear in the first
few seconds.

1120
01:28:12,580 --> 01:28:14,920
It can be extremely disorientating.

1121
01:28:15,140 --> 01:28:20,500
Here Rufus plunges out of the vehicle
and realizes that the police car is now

1122
01:28:20,500 --> 01:28:21,880
upside down in the middle of nowhere.

1123
01:28:22,480 --> 01:28:26,660
And Zakes is firing into the dark.

1124
01:28:28,400 --> 01:28:32,700
Originally we wanted to have more
special effects. I wanted to have more

1125
01:28:32,700 --> 01:28:33,599
out there.

1126
01:28:33,600 --> 01:28:40,240
Dust Devil was so cheap, the production
company making Dust Devil, Palace

1127
01:28:40,240 --> 01:28:44,920
Films, actually was filed for bankruptcy
before the film was completed.

1128
01:28:45,360 --> 01:28:50,000
So by the time we got to post
-production, there was no money. The

1129
01:28:50,000 --> 01:28:53,780
-production process was funded out of my
own pocket, which is why we couldn't

1130
01:28:53,780 --> 01:29:00,580
afford to use licensed tracks beyond the
Hank Williams, the one Hank Williams

1131
01:29:00,580 --> 01:29:01,580
track.

1132
01:29:01,950 --> 01:29:06,850
Simon Boswell, the extraordinary
composer who created the score for this

1133
01:29:06,990 --> 01:29:11,590
had to step in and basically score the
entire film simply because we couldn't

1134
01:29:11,590 --> 01:29:15,770
afford any music. But by the same token,
we couldn't afford special effects.

1135
01:29:16,330 --> 01:29:17,850
There are no optical effects.

1136
01:29:18,250 --> 01:29:23,110
Anything that was supposed to be done in
post -production was lost or abandoned.

1137
01:29:23,870 --> 01:29:29,010
And we couldn't afford to do ADR. We
couldn't afford to re -voice some of the

1138
01:29:29,010 --> 01:29:32,970
scenes that had generator sound or other
noises in the background because we

1139
01:29:32,970 --> 01:29:36,090
couldn't afford to reassemble the main
cast members.

1140
01:29:36,450 --> 01:29:40,710
So some scenes were literally left out
because we couldn't fix the soundtrack.

1141
01:29:41,890 --> 01:29:47,670
Other scenes, like where Zakes is firing
at nothing, are kind of effective.

1142
01:29:48,070 --> 01:29:51,050
It may be better that we can't see the
demons in that scene.

1143
01:29:52,590 --> 01:29:57,190
This scene was originally meant to be
shot in the middle of the desert.

1144
01:29:57,950 --> 01:30:00,750
But by the time we shot the scene, we
didn't have a desert anymore.

1145
01:30:01,470 --> 01:30:03,270
So we shot it in the cinema set instead.

1146
01:30:03,970 --> 01:30:05,730
That is a real sidewinder, though.

1147
01:30:06,750 --> 01:30:08,030
And it is deadly poisonous.

1148
01:30:09,430 --> 01:30:14,830
And we allowed the sidewinder to come up
as close as possible to Chelsea's head.

1149
01:30:15,520 --> 01:30:17,980
The idea being that the snake is the
demon.

1150
01:30:18,280 --> 01:30:23,580
The snake approaches her and it's a
human hand that reaches out to touch her

1151
01:30:23,580 --> 01:30:24,580
hair.

1152
01:30:24,640 --> 01:30:29,440
Again in the dream, when she wakes up,
she finds she's still in the desert.

1153
01:30:30,740 --> 01:30:37,620
Yet when she looks, she sees the
sidewinder track, the track left by the

1154
01:30:37,620 --> 01:30:39,180
in the sand.

1155
01:30:41,580 --> 01:30:44,180
And these strange marks, the...

1156
01:30:44,970 --> 01:30:51,210
the trail of the snake, the sidewinder
marks, are also the shape

1157
01:30:51,210 --> 01:30:58,130
that you see around the halo on the head
of the night walker figure in the rock

1158
01:30:58,130 --> 01:31:04,130
painting. These tongues of fire, which
are really like, they're not only like

1159
01:31:04,130 --> 01:31:09,010
Hebrew tongues of fire, but they're
really the shape that the sidewinder,

1160
01:31:09,010 --> 01:31:11,350
desert snake, leaves in the sand.

1161
01:31:19,630 --> 01:31:25,510
Yeah, and here Chelsea comes to the
ghost town.

1162
01:31:27,050 --> 01:31:32,690
This is one of several towns on the
Skeleton Coast that have become sanded

1163
01:31:32,810 --> 01:31:39,290
where the sand -clearing crews have
stopped bothering to keep the dunes from

1164
01:31:39,290 --> 01:31:44,650
marching over the road, and have
literally become cut off, engulfed by

1165
01:31:44,650 --> 01:31:45,650
desert.

1166
01:31:46,270 --> 01:31:48,830
This is a town called Coleman's Cop.

1167
01:31:49,960 --> 01:31:52,360
It was once the richest town in Africa.

1168
01:31:54,160 --> 01:31:58,660
Now, silence is the lawn with the dunes
marching right into the houses.

1169
01:31:59,480 --> 01:32:04,460
At the time when it was German West
Africa, this was a diamond town and

1170
01:32:04,460 --> 01:32:05,460
wealthy.

1171
01:32:06,020 --> 01:32:09,740
There were a lot of atrocities under
Germany's rule.

1172
01:32:10,190 --> 01:32:13,610
I mean, Germany more or less tried to
wipe out the local population.

1173
01:32:14,050 --> 01:32:18,990
There were mass graves found behind some
of these towns containing thousands of

1174
01:32:18,990 --> 01:32:23,890
people, of Avambo and Herero tribal
people who had been executed back before

1175
01:32:23,890 --> 01:32:27,630
World War I at the time when Germany was
basically

1176
01:32:27,630 --> 01:32:34,530
stealing the diamonds from this place. I
mean, the whole reason

1177
01:32:34,530 --> 01:32:37,310
that they were there in reality was for
the diamonds.

1178
01:32:38,080 --> 01:32:40,680
which is why the houses were so
sumptuous and rich.

1179
01:32:41,400 --> 01:32:47,780
And when the diamond trade started to
become unprofitable and they'd basically

1180
01:32:47,780 --> 01:32:51,900
found everything there was to find in
the area, the town gradually became

1181
01:32:51,900 --> 01:32:58,620
unviable and slipped slowly into the
status of being the ghost

1182
01:32:58,620 --> 01:32:59,680
town that it is today.

1183
01:33:00,740 --> 01:33:03,520
It's certainly one of the eeriest places
I've been to.

1184
01:33:06,760 --> 01:33:09,800
The place has a distinctly bad vibe, it
should be said.

1185
01:33:10,620 --> 01:33:16,420
The man from the Diamond Company told us
that whenever a movie shoots in Colmans

1186
01:33:16,420 --> 01:33:19,500
Coppola, that area, the movie always has
a down ending.

1187
01:33:19,940 --> 01:33:25,100
You always know something dark or
violent is going to happen if you're

1188
01:33:25,100 --> 01:33:26,100
in a place like this.

1189
01:33:27,180 --> 01:33:30,900
Again, the sequence is done in a
continuous take.

1190
01:33:31,500 --> 01:33:32,760
That's one of many...

1191
01:33:33,360 --> 01:33:40,240
lengthy tracking shots involving a
mirror again, and Zakes

1192
01:33:40,240 --> 01:33:44,960
is lured by the sound of the ringing
telephone deeper into the house.

1193
01:33:45,700 --> 01:33:52,220
The ringing telephone is really his ex
-wife and his guilt,

1194
01:33:52,400 --> 01:33:57,800
Zakes' crime, the thing that he has to
make up for, which is

1195
01:33:57,800 --> 01:34:01,120
luring him deeper into hell.

1196
01:34:04,010 --> 01:34:08,490
And I like to imagine that this is
because of the way that the desert wind

1197
01:34:08,490 --> 01:34:13,390
through the telephone lines, that all of
these ghost telephone calls are created

1198
01:34:13,390 --> 01:34:18,670
by the wind moaning and keening in those
thousands of miles of line.

1199
01:34:20,390 --> 01:34:27,250
And from this call, Wendy, Chelsea's
character, can see at once that

1200
01:34:27,250 --> 01:34:28,250
Zakes is doomed.

1201
01:34:28,710 --> 01:34:29,910
Zakes is clearly damned.

1202
01:34:30,889 --> 01:34:36,590
and he doesn't trust him or want to go
with him because wherever Zake is going,

1203
01:34:36,710 --> 01:34:40,650
it doesn't look like a very healthy
place.

1204
01:34:46,110 --> 01:34:51,570
Zake penetrates deeper and deeper into
the ghost town and as he does so, the

1205
01:34:51,570 --> 01:34:57,450
rooms become smaller and more filled
with dust, more filled with sand and you

1206
01:34:57,450 --> 01:35:02,420
can imagine the air literally becomes
thick and hard to breathe.

1207
01:35:04,920 --> 01:35:11,880
I was in some respects inspired by the
afterlife portrayed in the Epic of

1208
01:35:11,880 --> 01:35:14,140
Gilgamesh, the Sumerian afterlife.

1209
01:35:15,020 --> 01:35:21,180
The house of the dust, described in the
cuneiform tablets from the Epic of

1210
01:35:21,180 --> 01:35:22,860
Gilgamesh 7 ,000 years ago.

1211
01:35:23,780 --> 01:35:27,660
Dust is the food and clay is the meat of
the people of this house.

1212
01:35:28,650 --> 01:35:30,990
They see no light. They sit in darkness.

1213
01:35:32,610 --> 01:35:37,170
And in the heart of the ghost town, in
the heart of hell,

1214
01:35:38,030 --> 01:35:39,350
is, of course, a cinema.

1215
01:35:40,590 --> 01:35:45,270
It's mentioned briefly earlier, the
Empire Cinema, where Joe Nobly used to

1216
01:35:45,730 --> 01:35:48,430
Of course, the Empire is dead and has
landed in.

1217
01:35:50,030 --> 01:35:55,310
And here, as Zakes approaches the limits
of its reality, we get the sense that

1218
01:35:55,310 --> 01:35:56,850
he almost starts to realize

1219
01:35:57,600 --> 01:35:59,040
that he's a character in a movie.

1220
01:35:59,760 --> 01:36:04,220
You start to hear laughter of the
audience as if people are being

1221
01:36:04,220 --> 01:36:08,660
his pain and his suffering is somehow
entertainment for something.

1222
01:36:09,260 --> 01:36:12,960
He is, of course, trapped in Dust Devil.
He is in the movie.

1223
01:36:13,380 --> 01:36:19,280
And just as our characters might realize
we're trapped in the material world, so

1224
01:36:19,280 --> 01:36:23,160
the movie characters start to realize
their own artificiality.

1225
01:36:23,770 --> 01:36:27,450
The vision he sees of his wife sitting
with the child in the football is

1226
01:36:27,450 --> 01:36:32,830
deliberately evoking the Black Madonna
and the image of the Madonna and child,

1227
01:36:33,050 --> 01:36:35,190
again, as a counterpoint to the devil.

1228
01:36:36,410 --> 01:36:43,410
A sense of some force of good or the
prospect of redemption, the

1229
01:36:43,410 --> 01:36:46,170
light that Zakes is reaching towards.

1230
01:36:48,730 --> 01:36:51,610
Of course, Zakes' journey is...

1231
01:36:51,920 --> 01:36:56,160
towards freedom, towards redemption, is
a journey towards death.

1232
01:36:58,460 --> 01:37:02,180
In Dust Devil, the only freedom from the
material world, the only real

1233
01:37:02,180 --> 01:37:05,600
redemption, the only real release, is
death.

1234
01:37:23,880 --> 01:37:28,540
The hitchhiker Rob John Burke's
character deliberately evokes not only

1235
01:37:28,540 --> 01:37:33,860
of no name, but also Henry Fonda's
character from Once Upon a Time in the

1236
01:37:35,960 --> 01:37:41,500
In the original Leone movies, I don't
think there was any metaphysical

1237
01:37:42,120 --> 01:37:48,320
Leone intended the man of no name, like
the figure from Who Killed the Cyclops

1238
01:37:48,320 --> 01:37:52,140
in the story of Ulysses, to represent
the little man who stands against the

1239
01:37:52,140 --> 01:37:58,850
system. To some extent, it was a
socialist metaphor of how one person can

1240
01:37:58,850 --> 01:38:00,370
difference or stand up to giants.

1241
01:38:01,270 --> 01:38:06,310
And the figure of the man of no name
became more mystical after Eastwood

1242
01:38:06,310 --> 01:38:09,890
out most of the dialogue in the script
and decided not to say the lines.

1243
01:38:10,110 --> 01:38:15,150
His character actually had a name in the
original Leone movies, but Eastwood

1244
01:38:15,150 --> 01:38:20,410
said so little that he became the man of
no name, an idea that was popularized

1245
01:38:20,410 --> 01:38:21,810
by the marketing of the...

1246
01:38:22,640 --> 01:38:26,920
spaghetti westerns when they appeared in
America, which really put this notion

1247
01:38:26,920 --> 01:38:29,160
of the man of no name out there.

1248
01:38:29,940 --> 01:38:35,720
But it was only really later when he
started directing himself movies like

1249
01:38:35,720 --> 01:38:42,380
Plains Drifter and Pale Rider that the
figure of the man of no name started to

1250
01:38:42,380 --> 01:38:47,540
adopt an occult or an esoteric
significance, where we started to sense

1251
01:38:47,540 --> 01:38:50,000
figure was really an angel or a devil.

1252
01:38:50,760 --> 01:38:56,560
Something we also see in the Terrence
Hill movie, My Name is Nobody, where

1253
01:38:56,560 --> 01:39:00,380
Terrence Hill's character is very much
positioned as the angel of death,

1254
01:39:00,540 --> 01:39:04,040
watching over Henry Fonda and waiting to
claim him.

1255
01:39:04,740 --> 01:39:05,880
Nobody was faster.

1256
01:39:07,240 --> 01:39:13,480
And this scene in the ghost town street
obviously evokes the ending

1257
01:39:13,480 --> 01:39:18,000
of a spaghetti western, but it's a
completely...

1258
01:39:19,240 --> 01:39:22,380
dreamlike, surreal version of a
spaghetti western.

1259
01:39:22,880 --> 01:39:25,800
But it still evokes those great
shootouts.

1260
01:39:27,880 --> 01:39:34,600
As Wendy and the devil stand off over
Zakes

1261
01:39:34,600 --> 01:39:35,600
McKay's corpse.

1262
01:39:35,660 --> 01:39:38,320
Zakes is still just in the land of the
living here.

1263
01:39:41,760 --> 01:39:48,060
Zakes' last act is to position the magic
stick, the Kiri, which roots the...

1264
01:39:48,590 --> 01:39:51,290
wandering through the ground and robbed
him of power.

1265
01:39:51,810 --> 01:39:57,850
That's making him vulnerable for Wendy
to dispatch him and hopefully release

1266
01:39:57,850 --> 01:39:58,850
energy.

1267
01:40:01,070 --> 01:40:05,190
The head explosion, like all great head
explosions, was fired by Scanners.

1268
01:40:06,090 --> 01:40:10,330
And I wanted to go one better than
Scanners. I didn't want to have a

1269
01:40:10,330 --> 01:40:13,570
wanted to show his head explode in a
continuous shot.

1270
01:40:14,150 --> 01:40:15,370
So we...

1271
01:40:16,600 --> 01:40:20,480
tried pioneering a new approach to the
head explosion there, which I think

1272
01:40:20,480 --> 01:40:21,820
worked pretty damn well.

1273
01:40:24,780 --> 01:40:30,540
Essentially what we did is we did a
trace -off from the lance position of

1274
01:40:30,540 --> 01:40:36,300
John Burke's head, then stopped the
camera, replaced his head with a

1275
01:40:36,300 --> 01:40:42,880
pyrotechnic dummy packed with meat, then
did a sort of...

1276
01:40:43,390 --> 01:40:50,190
half a second dissolved between his rail
head and the dummy, so the dummy

1277
01:40:50,190 --> 01:40:52,110
itself is never actually on screen.

1278
01:41:02,450 --> 01:41:09,230
And yeah, final confrontation between
the lead couple, between Wendy and her

1279
01:41:09,230 --> 01:41:10,230
husband.

1280
01:41:11,240 --> 01:41:18,200
Which again shows the absolute inability
of any of these characters to ever

1281
01:41:18,200 --> 01:41:23,780
work it out or forgive each other.
There's no way Wendy can forgive Mark.

1282
01:41:23,780 --> 01:41:27,420
Mark hasn't learned anything. He's still
hoping they're going to take her home.

1283
01:41:27,580 --> 01:41:29,620
But home doesn't exist anymore.

1284
01:41:30,320 --> 01:41:35,820
I mean, whatever sense of home or real
life these characters might have had is

1285
01:41:35,820 --> 01:41:42,560
futile. And Mark's got no future. He's
obviously handcuffed to a dysfunctional

1286
01:41:42,560 --> 01:41:46,580
police state, to white South Africa,
which in this case is represented by an

1287
01:41:46,580 --> 01:41:52,440
upside -down police car, which is, for
me, a symbol of authority.

1288
01:41:54,249 --> 01:41:59,630
of the structure and the state
incapacitated and out of control.

1289
01:41:59,870 --> 01:42:04,430
And Mark is still full of hope. I mean,
he's the one character who doesn't meet

1290
01:42:04,430 --> 01:42:08,430
the devil. He never gets to meet the
hitchhiker because he never gives up.

1291
01:42:09,510 --> 01:42:13,510
Right to the end, he's still convinced
that somehow he can make it work.

1292
01:42:14,430 --> 01:42:18,730
Whereas I think Wendy and Zagos have
gone beyond despair.

1293
01:42:20,520 --> 01:42:27,520
And this final scene, Wendy has adopted
the praise of the Nightwalker,

1294
01:42:27,700 --> 01:42:29,340
of the wandering demon herself.

1295
01:42:30,860 --> 01:42:37,060
And to an extent has become the next
iteration, the next avatar of

1296
01:42:37,060 --> 01:42:38,300
the sport.

1297
01:42:39,820 --> 01:42:44,500
I mean, the witch doctor did say
something about how you have to burn the

1298
01:42:44,500 --> 01:42:47,480
to drive away the wandering shadow.

1299
01:42:47,740 --> 01:42:49,300
Otherwise it will claim you.

1300
01:42:50,200 --> 01:42:51,840
its murderer to be its new host.

1301
01:42:52,300 --> 01:42:59,240
And in this scene, we suspect that Wendy
has taken on an aspect of

1302
01:42:59,240 --> 01:43:05,320
the demon, or maybe the demon itself. I
wanted the scene to be ambiguous, the

1303
01:43:05,320 --> 01:43:10,180
same as originally we were meant to see
Wendy rescued by the police when she

1304
01:43:10,180 --> 01:43:14,600
reached the freeway. But I thought, what
if the police or the army vehicles on

1305
01:43:14,600 --> 01:43:17,140
the freeway were themselves so
terrifying?

1306
01:43:17,770 --> 01:43:20,690
that we couldn't be sure that they were
actually coming to rescue her.

1307
01:43:21,190 --> 01:43:25,830
And she's so terrifying that I'm not
sure she deserves to be rescued.

1308
01:43:26,990 --> 01:43:29,490
So it lends an element of ambiguity.

1309
01:43:30,130 --> 01:43:35,790
And we see also the sky has become red,
that the color wheel has clocked all the

1310
01:43:35,790 --> 01:43:38,790
way around into the time of the red
light.

1311
01:43:39,450 --> 01:43:44,990
And the vehicles now, rather than old
-fashioned vintage cars, look almost

1312
01:43:44,990 --> 01:43:45,990
science fiction -y.

1313
01:43:46,650 --> 01:43:53,630
riot control vehicles or armored
vehicles from the near future. The

1314
01:43:53,630 --> 01:43:57,470
the future that is bearing down on
Wendy. The terrible place that these

1315
01:43:57,470 --> 01:43:59,910
characters will be spending the rest of
their lives in.

1316
01:44:01,590 --> 01:44:03,710
There's no escape from hell and death,
though.

1317
01:44:04,290 --> 01:44:09,350
There is no sea. None of the characters
reach the beach or the ocean. They talk

1318
01:44:09,350 --> 01:44:10,390
about it, but they fail.

1319
01:44:10,850 --> 01:44:11,850
It never rains.

1320
01:44:12,230 --> 01:44:14,410
They pray for rain, but rain doesn't
come.

1321
01:44:16,940 --> 01:44:22,180
Now in the final scene, we see Joe
Nobody alone in the drive -in, turning

1322
01:44:22,180 --> 01:44:25,720
the lights, or turning on the lights,
the house lights.

1323
01:44:26,300 --> 01:44:32,060
And it's the end of the show, and it's
down to the projections to close up the

1324
01:44:32,060 --> 01:44:33,060
movie theater.

1325
01:44:33,940 --> 01:44:38,120
This entire movie is very much a drive
-in movie made in hell.

1326
01:44:39,020 --> 01:44:43,140
And as such, it combines elements of
several drive -in genres.

1327
01:44:44,240 --> 01:44:45,640
It's not just a horror movie.

1328
01:44:46,300 --> 01:44:50,780
It's also a western. It's also a police
procedural road movie melodrama.

1329
01:44:52,380 --> 01:44:56,680
And it's kind of the movie I might have
dreamed.

1330
01:44:56,920 --> 01:45:01,800
If I'd fallen asleep, it would show
there's a driver somewhere in the South

1331
01:45:01,800 --> 01:45:02,800
African desert.

1332
01:45:05,000 --> 01:45:11,600
I hope you've enjoyed it. And next time
you find yourself driving alone at night

1333
01:45:11,600 --> 01:45:13,460
between towns...

1334
01:45:14,090 --> 01:45:20,130
and you think you see a hitchhiker just
up ahead, remember to tell yourself

1335
01:45:20,130 --> 01:45:23,210
there really are such things.

1336
01:45:24,990 --> 01:45:30,170
This is Richard Stanley, wishing you a
good night and a pleasant journey home.