Gavin Hood
Gavin Hood
Gavin Hoodis a South African filmmaker, screenwriter, producer and actor, best known for writing and directing Tsotsi, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. He also directed the films X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Ender's Game...
NationalitySouth African
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth12 May 1963
although became famous finance hard holding onto period problem published setting written year
Athol Fugard became famous as a playwright, so although 'Tsotsi' the book was written in the '60s, it was only published in the '80s. It was then optioned pretty much every year by producers. I think the problem was that holding onto its period setting made it very hard to get finance.
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Although it seems to be a ghetto movie, it very quickly becomes a much more intimate story, the story of this young, teenage, lost, crazy, out-of-control kid and a baby that he hides from his friends.
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I was frozen in my seat. It was the first time I had ever seen people like me on the screen.
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One of the struggles and one of the exciting things for South African filmmakers is: What stories are we allowed to tell? I hope for the industry that more and more, it will tell whatever stories it likes.
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When you buy a ticket and when you buy a genuine DVD, you are an investor in South African film as your money is going back to people who invest in local films.
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I feel very, very proud to hold this (Oscar) because it tells me, and all of us at home, that we can do it.
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We arranged a meeting in Los Angeles with big name stars, but I had to drop the idea. I wanted to film in the local Soweto dialect that only Soweto youth can speak and believed that shooting in any other language would dilute the impact of the film.
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Without what you did, we would not have been able to make this film together as South Africans in a free country.
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We are excited to be in Cape Town.
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It's a rough mess, so anyone who buys it is getting a poor-quality version.
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We grew up watching American films and I hope that Americans will watch our stories.
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There's always a theme I'm drawn to, that we humans are not good or bad. We're all a mixture of both. We can have great compassion or commit great violence.
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The truth about people at every economic level of life is you get those who are kind and who are not, those who are greedy, whether they be rich or poor. That's a common thread through humanity on any street you go to.
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The reality is that art has often risen to greater heights than the people who created it. Many flawed artists have created great works of art. You have to decide if you are going to listen to Richard Wagner's music or not because he was very anti-Semitic.