With television and film images so inculcated into our society, it is hard for most to remember the first film or TV show we ever saw, and nearly impossible to imagine a world without television.
But for South African director Gavin Hood, who will screen his new film “Rendition” on campus tonight, television was a pleasure far from reality until his teenage years.
“I never saw a television set until I was 13 years old,” said Hood, an Academy Award winner for his foreign film “Tsotsi.” “When I was at school, I did a lot of plays and I wanted to study film, but it seemed like something people overseas did. When I finished high school I thought that was a pipe dream so I did a law degree.”
But at the age of 29, after getting his law degree from the University of the Witwatersrand, he made the decision to come to the U.S. to study film. He then enrolled in film courses at UCLA Extension.
“I said either I go back to being a lawyer or I’m going to go to America and really immerse myself in film. (UCLA Extension) was really brilliant ““ for the first time in my life, I was 100 percent absorbed with no sense of wanting to be doing anything else,” says Hood.
After his first film, 1999’s “A Reasonable Man,” put him on Variety’s Top Ten Directors to Watch list despite never having been shown commercially in this country, Hood was able to obtain a U.S. green card. Today, he travels between his two homes of Los Angeles and South Africa. As he puts it, “That’s what I’ve been doing, moving between two worlds.”
Splitting his time between these two very different places may seem difficult or inconvenient to most, but it has in fact only helped Hood’s vision as a director and screenwriter.
It brings a strong and insightful international focus to most of his work, inspired by the famous political problems of his home country, as well as the career he left behind for film.
With his eye on politics, Hood is able to bring his native roots as well as his background in law to his work.
“When I was at law school, that was during the 1980s when South Africa’s Internal Security Act was being enacted in order to combat a genuine fear of the rise of communism in Africa. But of course it was a way of propping up the Apartheid Government.” During that time, Hood and other law students looked to the American Constitution as an example of how their country could succeed.
“Rendition,” follows the aftermath of the detention of a foreign-born United States citizen, believed by the CIA to be a terrorist suspect. The film’s characters are mostly American, but it takes place in part in South Africa as well as northern Africa, specifically Morocco. In “Rendition,” Hood investigates the political issues he thinks are important to discuss.
“(“Rendition”) asks questions about how we might be chipping away at the Constitution for the sake of security,” Hood said. “I do think it’s something we have to ask about whether diluting the power of the Constitution is a good thing. It’s a question we need to debate because it seems to me that the Constitution is a great document that’s served this country for several hundred years,” Hood said.
Hood’s international approach to film reflects not only his foreign upbringing but also his time at UCLA.
“The extension program had an enormous number of people from different countries, so we learned from one another,” Hood said. “It was great to be working on scripts with people from other countries because today we talk a lot about how people are very different, but we don’t talk enough about how people are the same. You really find out that people deep down want the same things ““ to be with their families, to have a laugh, to have friends, (and) to take care of their kids.”
Hood also partially attributes his success in the film world to the knowledge he gained at UCLA Extension.
“To study rigorously with great teachers and students from all over the world really set me apart because I was really close to giving up and going back to being a lawyer,” Hood said.
This international perspective gained from the extension program has helped Hood make sense of conflicts going on throughout the world. “It’s not “˜us’ versus “˜their’ world; it’s “˜we’, human beings, challenged with extremist thinkers.”