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| Death Of A Whistleblower |
It might not be among the biggest name offerings at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, but Ian Gabriel’s Death Of A Whistleblower is definitely one of the highlights. Few countries can hold a candle to South Africa these days when it comes to thrillers, and this film finds its substance in the country’s own history. Set 37 years after the death of a young white woman (played by Inez Robertson) at a secret military testing facility, it follows Albert (Irshaad Ally), the soldier who leaks information about the cover up, and Luyanda (Noxolo Diamini), the journalidt who unexpectedly acquires it. As she pursues the story, hitman Mohale (Anthony Oseyemi) pursues her. There’s also some strong supporting work from S’Thandiwe Kgoroge as a corrupt major general whose activities in the present may be connected to the secrets of the past. Though Inez was delayed, the other five of them connected with me to discuss the film in the run-up to the festival.
Although it’s fictional, the film is based upon a real, horrific secret from the country’s past, Project Coast. It’s little known elsewhere in the world, and I begin by asking if part of the intention of the film was to bring it to the attention of the wider world, or if the film was aimed mainly at a South African audience.
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| Noxolo Diamini as Luyanda in Death Of A Whistleblower |
“No, this is aimed at an international audience,” says Ian. “I think we all need to see things and all need to know stuff. Project Coast is mainly understood as a South African story, but I think a lot of people do know about it. One of the things that was only half resolved at the time of the TRC was what happened to the military, and what the role of the military had in the past and what it would be in the future. A lot of the people who went in front of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee were able to walk away, as we talk about, although there had been a great number of crimes committed. We picked up on one of those crimes and just said, ‘Well, what would happen if a piece of evidence came out now, that revealed a whole load of stuff in the present? And that's the fictional part of it.”
Was it difficult interweaving facts and fiction, from a political or legal perspective?
He shakes his head. “You know, as a South African, I feel very free. And I feel free to talk about whatever I want to talk about in this country. Some of the details about Project Coast are, in fact, true, and, as you mentioned, there are real people who exist, who acknowledged that they had a role. We've also created fictional characters to carry this story in another direction, into the present and into the kind of problems we have now. So what I'm really doing, in part, is connecting the problems of our past to the problems of our present, because I do think there's a cause and effect relationship between them.
“Even before we get to the privatisation of the military, there’s been an escalation of private security in South Africa. We mentioned in the film that the private security industry is twice as big as the South African army. It has at various times been involved in mercenary projects in the rest of Africa. I think it's very dangerous when you give a whole lot of people weapons and say ‘You've got authority.’ Now, of course, you do that with armies anyway, but that's one bad mistake, and then privatising it beyond that is even more of a mistake.”
Coming to the cast, I ask Noxolo how this compared to her previous experience of thrillers. It was a little different, she says. “But I absolutely appreciated it, especially because of the subject matter. And I am very big on South African politics, and especially the past. Obviously the story is fictional, but the events are real. And I'm big on learning about the history of South Africa, so it was it was really exciting. I think it's an important story too, so I was happy to be on board.”
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| Irshaad Ally as Albert in Death Of A Whistleblower |
There are a lot of thrillers out there which have early scenes like this one does, in which a man and a woman flirt in a bar, only to have the female character disappear or be relegated to a minor role whilst the male characters goes on to be the focus of the action. Here the genders are reversed, which makes sense, because Luyanda makes a big impression.
“I absolutely loved that,” she says. “I think that was my favourite thing in the beginning – how spicy she is, and assertive and outspoken, and the way Ian directs that as well. It's crazy because I didn't realise I had her in me. What I loved was that Ian was really able to bring that out of me and I love how her story progresses and how she kind of loses the person that we see her as of the beginning, and how serious the situation gets and how serious she gets with the situation too. So yeah, it was definitely a fun character to play. I love how free she is and how you're not sure what she's going to say.”
She's also a very physical character and there are some good fight scenes in there. Did she have a stunt double or do that herself?
She smiles. “I wish I could say I did it. I did have help. But I did most things!”
“She did much of it herself,” Ian confirms.
“I definitely did the most hectic things,” she adds. “But yeah, I did have a stunt double, who looks eerily close to what I look like.”
“She will be doing her own stunts entirely, if she's allowed,” Ian says.
Anthony also enjoyed the chance to do stunts.
“I think I did about 70% of what I was meant to do,” he says. “I was basically sparring with Nox so I spent my time kicking Nox’s ass, which was great. I really enjoyed it. The characterisation, the story, the stunt work. I do love a bit of stunt work. Tell a guy to run around on set and he'll just run around screaming like he's a five year old again. It was brilliant.”
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| S'Thandiwe Kgoroge as Major General Thuli Yiza in Death Of A Whistleblower |
A fair bit of his role involves just standing there and being intimidating with his presence, without doing anything active, though.
He acknowledges this. “The job of an ex military man is to just be still, be intimidating and look like you know what's going on in the room, even though you don't really care because your job is to seek and destroy it. He is that character, you know? Ex-army, now mercenary working as a hired gun. He's the guy you send to dispose of the whistleblowers, for want of a better term. I was going to say rubbish, but they're not rubbish. We need them. Without them nothing gets uncovered, and this is the basis for our entire film. So yeah, as a character he was a lot of fun.”
How did he research the role?
“I did a bit of reading and also, because I love certain kinds of films and movies and TV series, I just modelled myself after certain performances, you know? I mean, for example, I'm sure you know the film No Country For Old Men, where the assassin is so still and calm and just tick, tick, tick. I think the only time you see my character get slightly annoyed is when he’s being blamed for something. I think it's the boardroom where I say ‘Listen, I do everything I'm told. It's a process,” because the guy is looking at it like numbers, he's not emotional about it. And then the other time is with Nox because her character actually gets under his skin.”
Of all the characters, Albert probably has the most complex history. I ask Irshaad how he got to grips with that.
“Yeah,” he says. “I mean, what Nox said about having an interest in South African politics – I think it interests all of us as South Africans. I think we’re still trying to find our feet from what happened, 30 years later. And I think we delve back into history quite a lot. To prepare for building this character, I've been reading about people that were killed by the security police, people that have been thrown out of the John Foster Square building – people have just been murdered in South Africa. And it's like what happened in the past is still informing what's happening today.
“It's very weird. We voted and we have our freedom, but still, these things are happening. I mean, I can talk about many corrupt things happening in our country. I read many books about journalists who now have left the country because they blew the whistle about this. This is happening in our country right now, so it wasn't difficult to create that.
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| Anthony Oseyemi and Noxolo Diamini in Death Of A Whistleblower |
“They say, art imitates life – well there you have it. We have made a piece of art that really shows what's happening in South Africa, not just for South Africans, but for the greater world to see.”
I put it to S’Thandi that she has an interesting role to play because her character comes across very much as believing in herself or having a clear sense of what she's doing, but she's also a bad guy from the point of view of the audience.
“I’m excited for Ian to believe that I can play a character like that,” she says. “In the past, I've always played goody goodies, the mother hen, the provider, so when I saw that she's this hardcore, no nonsense major general, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, that's a role that any actress would do anything to play.’ And we know these type of movies. These type of characters would always be male characters. So for Ian to put the female characters where he did, and I applaud that, absolutely. Because for me, it was so exciting.
“I wish I had stayed on set longer. I won't give away what happens. But I just think, because like we've all said, it being a political story, and living in a country that's highly political means we're also very highly political people in our own right – I think it was really exciting for us to finally get the opportunity to tell our own story ourselves.”
She’s also interesting because she's really strong and has the experience of being in charge all the time, but there are a couple of different situations in the film where she finds herself out of control suddenly, and she's not sure how to handle it. Those struck me as fantastic material for an actor.
“Absolutely. The scene with Luyanda when she approaches me in the office where she's so used to just talking the talk, and this is what happens. She probably even has cue cards for how she talks to generals, and for the first time a young person who’s not scared of her and goes straight for the kill, in terms of everything that she's always thought is hidden and is not known and even if it was brought to the fore, not by a young, black female. So I think those beautiful moments between Luyanda and I, and with Albert in the car as well, those were quite challenging and they took me out of my comfort zone of the mother hen figure.”
The film is also beautifully shot. There’s a sequence near the start which I loved, and I ask Ian about it.
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| Noxolo Diamini and Kathleen Stephens in Death Of A Whitstleblower |
“There's a very predictable thing about a woman and man who go home together, they fall into bed, and wake up in the morning, and everything's hunky dory or not whatever it may be,” Ian says. “So you're going to get out of that little system a little bit. And so we designed the shots where you saw them tumbling into the bed, and the camera moved around, and very mystically and magically, at that very moment, there was a huge thunderclap and lightning, which was not set up by us at all, it was set up by the powers above. So that was fantastic.
“The intention had been to move around, and then we had a light on a crane, and that was going to slowly light up and light up the interior. So it was going to suggest the transition from night to day. The thunder and lightning was great to have thrown in as a bonus. And it's a kind of little film trick which is lovely to pull off if you can do that without distracting from the story. In this case, I think it gave oil to the story and just moved it ahead very nicely, so I loved it. And I do love the kind of cinematographic tricks that work for the storyteller, as opposed to those that ignore the storytelling and dialogue.”
There seem to be a lot of opportunities in this film, with the way the story is structured, to be creative like that. Did he do a lot of storyboarding beforehand?
“I do like storyboarding,” he says, “but in this case we were moving very fast. We were shooting around six minutes a day and we did not have that kind of budget available at that point. And so I did not storyboard it. I wrote a shot list for every scene and we'd very much stick to those but might have to throw a shot out along the way. That was our way of working through each day.”
“There were so many new experiences for me on this film. I think leading really allowed me to experience everything,” Noxolo says. “Because I was there so much of the time, but firstly, getting to be the one character that meets all the other characters. Meeting the actors was one thing and getting to see how they interpreted the characters was another, and having sometimes to meet people on the day, because we would have rehearsals over Zoom. But when we met on the day, it's a whole different kind of energy, you know?
“I absolutely enjoyed experiencing different people and how they interpreted the characters and the stories they had about the times when some of them had experienced similar things. I think that's why Ian had them on board, is because they knew the story, they knew what had happened and then sharing that information with me was crazy because I was just like ‘This actually exists. This actually happened.
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| Righard van Jaarsveld as Martin Bezuidenhout and Charle Bougueno as Wouter Basson |
“That was one of my favourite things, but also I love the action part of filming. The late nights can be really gruelling, but I absolutely love the action. And the set was incredible. Some sets were built from scratch, and getting to see how everybody worked, all the other crew members. My favourite thing is working with human beings, and so it was really it was a treat.”
Anthony figures that it’s obvious what he enjoyed most.
“When Ian went ‘Action!’ and I'm running down the hallway with a gun shooting at somebody, but I'm like, ‘This is my job’.” He grins. “ And then one of the coolest days was myself and Nox in a fight scene. We'd rehearsed this beast of a fight scene, right? But some of the things that we’d practiced were not there. Ian was just like, ‘Yeah, no, it's not there anymore. We're going to do this, this and this.’” He admitted that the new scene looked cool, he says, but pressed for the chance to use all his other cool moves, and eventually Ian gave in.
They both laugh. “I mean, that's the thing I love,” Anthony adds. “You're a big kid on the set getting to play. I mean, obviously, there’s the very talented cast and talented director. When I showed up in SA, my first job was with Ian on an ad actually, back in the day. So for me, those were the highlights, those stunting days where things didn't quite go according to plan and we had to adapt and improvise. Because also, your creativity is tested, your patience is pushed, your ability to adapt to creatively, but also try and stay with the honesty and the truth of the story, the character, the structure of the piece, and how you're engaging with other performers and actors in the space to tell the story. That's what gets me going.”
Irshaad reveals that he too has worked with Ian before.
“I'm a big fan of working with him,” he says. “But I remember after moving to three different locations on this one day, he was just to calm. The set started developing in front of me, the sound and everybody, and locations, and he was just calm. I was like, ‘How do you do this? And he said ‘You just do it, man. You just do it.’
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| Inez Robertson as Emma Louw in Death Of A Whistleblower |
“So I was I'm amazed at how quick this was. The script changed here and there and we had to change some dialogue on the day, and that was, to me, very interesting. Again, the freedom that he gives you to work with what you think will go, that was amazing. But also, as an aspiring director I just looked at the whole big machine and went ‘Oh my God. ‘ It's really scary to see people do these things, but Ian’s been doing it for so long, he makes it look like nothing.”
I ask if there’s a project that he’s working on, and Antony advises him “Just shoot anything, bro. That's the way you do it. Once you’re in, there's no escape.”
“That’s absolutely right: once you're in, there’s no escape,” Ian confirms.
“Yeah, do it bro,” Anthony urges him again.
“I've been working in the industry for now almost 20 years, and I tried to do something else, but I'm here,” Irshaad acknowledges.
S’Thandi didn’t get the same opportunity to mix with the rest of the cast because she wasn’t on set for as long, but she’s still passionate about the film.
“I was aware every time I was on that set, like Anthony said, that this was a special one. It felt important that we South Africans were finally really telling all these stories about fear, which is so special. South Africa has a lot of beautiful stories so the fact that we're at that level now, and we're telling them, instead of the crew is coming in is we're all sending messages in terms of ‘Have you been cast? Did you hear the this sort of production is in the country?’ and we're all hoping to get a call to get auditions. Now we’re telling our own stories.
“Like everyone has said about Ian, it's been just like just an honour, honestly. I've always been jealous because my husband has worked with him before.” She laughs. “But I think we're all obsessed because he's like those beautiful directors that you don't find anymore who, as much as he talks to the technical crew and talks the technical language, as actors, we feel heard, we feel given an opportunity to play.”
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| Death Of A Whistleblower poster |
They really didn’t expect the film to end up at TIFF, Ian reveals.
“We had just done our first cut of the film around the end of June, and our producer, who had seen one or two of the members of TIFF just a week or two before in Cannes, saw the film. He hadn't seen a cut at all until that time, but he was very excited and he said ‘We’re going to send it to TIFF.’ I said ‘No. They closed for entries a long time ago.’ And he said ‘Don't worry.’ I said ‘Well okay, carry on.’ And he contacted whoever he did at TIFF and they said ‘Send the film.’ And they said, ‘Well, if you can be ready in time, we'd like you to come.’ So of course we said ‘Yes, we will be ready in time.’ And if the truth be told, we finally locked everything down, including the last bit of captions and stuff like that, yesterday. We're just in time.”
As far as our chat is concerned, we’re just about out of time, but at the last minute, Inez Robertson arrives, so I ask her is she has any thoughts she wants to share.
“I play Emma Louw,” she says. “When I originally cast for the role, it was presented as this small part that had a lot of meaning. And obviously, without seeing the full script, you don't know exactly what that means. But the moment I got in the room, I understood the gravity of this character's role in the bigger story. She really is this little kernel, this root that grows into the bigger tree of the story. When everything that happens to her happens to her, she doesn't necessarily matter to anyone else, except the people who love her. But when Luyanda discovers her, she becomes this catalyst for something that needs to be uncovered for every single victim of this thing.
“It felt like a very important task that Ian gave to me, which I'm very appreciative of, and I think Emma represents every individual victim of any sort of horrible atrocity like this. We don't think about individuals. We think about mass victimhood. And I think every single victim whose family has to live on past them, and live with whatever has happened to them, I'm trying to carry their memory. That’s who Emma is in the story.”
