Gavin Hood

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.

In the early '90s, I was hired to write educational dramas about HIV and AIDS in the shantytowns. I did that for two and a half years, and then I was hired on other films. When 'Tsotsi' presented itself, I thought, 'This is not a world I grew up in, but I've spent a great deal of time writing about it and researching it in my past.'

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.

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