Women in Horror Month Spotlight: Nosipho Dumisa
Nosipho Dumisa. The name carries weight. And her mind, well, its in a league of its own. Dumisa stood out at last year’s Fantasia Fest with her directorial debut Number 37, an homage to Hitchcock’s Rear Window, but set in Cape Flats with eccentric characters converging into chaos. Number 37 has made its festival run worldwide, increasing the demand for Dumisa and her team on upcoming projects. Luckily, Dread was able to get an opportunity to chat with this South African powerhouse.
Check out the inspiring conversation below.
Dread Central: It is such a pleasure to speak with you, Nosipho. I can’t wait to talk about Number 37 and other projects. First, I read that your top movies change all the time. What are your top three general movies? And then, what are your top three horror movies?
Nosipho Dumisa: For horror, we have to go old school. I kind of linger in that era a bit. But for general, I’ve always loved August Rush. It’s a film that I love watching again and again. And I would probably say The Departed. And last would be Any Given Sunday.
DC: Would you say those are your “comfort” movies? Like after a long day, are those your go to movies that help you relax?
ND: It’s awkward to call it comfort movies if you think about at least two in those three. I wouldn’t say they release good feelings within. (laughs) I don’t feel warm and fuzzy inside when I watch them. When I watch them, I go, “This is really great filmmaking and great storytelling.”
When it comes to horror, my list is pretty much films that I grew up on. They are films that are still so brilliant, even now. I would say, Seven, although it’s not really a horror. It’s a thriller. But it has so many elements of horror within it that I love. I would kind of place it at the top for me. I would also throw any Hitchcock film in there. Hitchcock played with that tone that kind of leaned on being horror. Most of my films and most of what I love leans close to being horror. Every now and then, I feel like horror can go a bit too far. But I love The Conjuring. That film has given me many sleepless nights before, which is great.
IT is pretty up there as well. Both versions really. I grew up on the first one. I think it was the first film that I remember ever seeing in my whole life. I was like three years old, and my eyes got so big. I will always remember those scenes, and I will always remember how I felt. My sister and I rewatched it a few years later. I remember we would always tell our cousins, “This is the scariest movie you will ever see. Oh my gosh, it’s so crazy.” I think we were probably eleven or twelve by then, and there were quite a few horror movies that had come out by that point. We invited all of my cousins and gathered everyone to watch the movie. And I have a lot of cousins, so there was a room full of people who had the highest expectations. So we watched it. And we just watched people fall asleep. (laughs) It was so embarrassing because when you watch it now, I think it’s still a really good film. But because of the slashers that were being made years later, it didn’t really live up to those. Then obviously, the remake now is really great.
DC: I love your list. Truthfully, I was late to watching the original IT. I think I was a teenager when I first watched it. It still creeped me out, although I did laugh at parts that I probably shouldn’t have laughed at. I do believe that it would have had a bigger effect on me as a child.
ND: I think as consumers of stories and films, we are so aware of what makes something great and all the elements involved. There are certain films that will hold up regardless of what era you’re in or how old you are. Then there are some where because of how smart we are as consumers, we expect a lot. This is why you may have found yourself wanting to laugh at moments. I think the story itself is so solid and creepy. And it played this amazing line between something that is really grounded, but also has a supernatural element to it that creeps you out because you don’t understand it. And it doesn’t really try to explain much to you.
DC: I love that half of it, where things happen and you don’t get an explanation. I also loved that you mentioned Hitchcock. Do you have a standout film of his that really inspired you?
ND: I love Rear Window, which was a reference for Number 37. I’ve watched it several times since thinking about making Number 37. But my personal favorite is Birds. I absolutely love that film. I love it because it starts off as one thing and becomes something else. I think Hitchcock is a master of tension and entertainment, and of subverting your expectations. I think Psycho is another example of that. So, those would be the ones that I would recommend. I know a lot of people have a different list.
DC: I love Rear Window and Birds, especially Birds.
ND: Yeah. I’m a huge fan of that film. And because I’m a huge fan, I try not to watch it to the point where I get exhausted of it. I’m one of those people who when I’m obsessed with something, I’ll watch it a lot and then eventually lose interest in it. So I give myself time now. I haven’t seen it in about six years, so it would be good for me to go back, watch it and say, “Oh yeah! I still love it. This is why.”
DC: Oops. I usually watch a movie over and over until I’m completely done with it. I’ll have to try your approach.
ND: It’s a new practice I’m trying because I feel like I’ve killed my favorite films. I want to try to give them life inside of me again. So I want to give it time and forget things.
DC: You have inspired me to change my ways. So, what inspired you to get into film? I know you went to AFDA in Cape Town.
ND: Filmmaking kind of happened to me. It wasn’t necessarily a decision I made. I grew up in a really small town with very academic parents and a very academic family. We watched movies all the time because we weren’t really allowed to play outside. But the concept of filmmaking, the people who actually brought these stories to life, was never something I considered or understood was an industry or an option for me. What was drilled into all of us as kids is that you are going to become a lawyer or a doctor. Or, you’re going to study for years and years and get all the doctorates and whatever else. I really thought that I was going to be a doctor. But I was always hearing about school plays and taking extracurricular drama because I grew up loving that.
My sister would put on plays at her school. She was in boarding school, but she would come home with written scenes that she would test out on my other sister and me when we were really young. I started loving acting. In my last two or three years of high school, I had a drama teacher who had been in the industry in Johannesburg. She kind of identified about five of us and thought, “Jeez! You guys are special. I think you guys will be amazing in this industry.” She started this group called Star Factory, and she would bring filmmakers from Cape Town who were working on the big Hollywood sets. They would come to talk to us. She actually took us to Johannesburg on one specific trip, where we got a tour of what was going on in the industry. She was basically trying to lure us in, which I am grateful for.
So at the end of high school, I decided to apply for film school, but for acting. Then somehow, something went wrong with my application, and I was involved in what they called the Motion Picture Medium School, which is essentially everything other than performance. The option was, you can wait a year and come back for performance, or you can try this out for a year and see how it goes. I thought, “Well, let me try it out.”
Directing, writing and producing were the only ones I really understood. I found that I loved it. Then, we got another female student at the end of second year in my directing class. She was kicking butt, too. So I thought, “You know what? I can probably do this.” That’s how I kind of fell into directing.
DC: Do you still have that love for acting?
ND: I love it, but from a completely different perspective now. In film school, around second year, I had the choice to change over. I remember looking at the performance students because we had to work with them for our short films. It was always this thing where they had to come and ask us as the writers or producers for roles. I thought to myself that I’m a storyteller. I want to be able to take control of what stories are told and how I tell them. There was a limitation as an actor that I felt you had in how you controlled the narrative. So, I love what I do now because I get to work with actors. I think that there is a certain performance element that comes with being a director. As a writer, I’m constantly thinking as the actor, right? Then as the director, I’m talking to them. I get to work with them. There is a specific way that still fulfills that side of me that gives me the sense of urgency that I want as well. But what’s great is that in my own time, I do play around with a little drama—in our improv crew that we have. I get to let that out every now and then.
DC: I feel that your understanding of acting shows through your characters.
ND: I feel what actors bring to a story is so important. A great script is the foundation. You’ve got a great script, you’ve got something incredible. If you’ve got an amazing director with a great script but a really horrible cast, you’re in trouble. Actors carry the emotional weight of the narrative. That’s what engages an audience. That’s what gets the audience to remember. So, as an audience member, I can walk in and see some really cool stuff. I can see exploding cars and buildings, I can see a bunch of super heroes flying everywhere, then walk away having been entertained but unaffected. In a few months time, I will forget the experience. I can forget what it that was about. I can forget the moments. But if an actor is truly engaged and there is a connection with the director, I think that’s when magic happens. You can have average cinematography and editing, but when there is an emotional weight, the film becomes believable. When people watch a film and believe the actor’s struggles and what they go through, it doesn’t matter what genre we are speaking about because people will remember. That’s what I love about the films that I mentioned earlier. I remember how I felt. I don’t necessarily remember them scene by scene all the time. It’s how those films made me feel and why they made me feel that.
DC: With attending school in Cape Town, how do you feel that shaped you as a filmmaker?
ND: Cape Town is an incredibly beautiful city. Because of that, we get incredibly skilled crew and filmmakers who come out to the city to make films and commercials and whatever. I was exposed to a lot of that, and I got to work on some international films early on in my career, whilst I was preparing my company. I actually worked a lot in the casting department. I think what helped me there is that I got to interact with the directors and actors. In that space, there is such a hub of creativity, excellence and filmmaking. There is a striving to meet a greater standard than what we may be used to on television, which is the main media that South Africans consume. I think it elevated my own status. It made me kind of want more because I was seeing what was possible around me. On Number 37, I got to work with the best people—people who were really kind and wanted to lend their skills to the film. People that I really couldn’t afford at all, but they helped because they believed in the film. These are people who were working on things like Tomb Raider and doing other incredible work. Cape Town is a hub for that. So that’s what helped shaped me. The access to skills.
DC: I have to fangirl a little. Number 37 was one of the standouts for me at last year’s Fantasia Fest. The whole audience I watched it with, raved about it afterwards. What was the process like for making this film?
ND: It’s interesting because it started off as a short film, which I co-directed with my business partner. The process of the story itself started quite a while before the feature. It started in 2014 as a short film that we made for a competition. Then, it won some awards there. But almost immediately we were writing the feature script, based off of something that my other partner had been thinking about for a really long time. So we spent a lot more time in development than production.
We only started filming in 2017, and we had four and a half weeks to film. It was extremely tight. For me, that was the part that made me the most nervous. I knew the script so well. I knew how ambitious it was. I knew what I wanted to achieve. And, I knew what it would demand of the actors and the crew, filming on location in a really tiny apartment. I knew that we would be in this really tight space with lights, crew, and equipment, for weeks on end. So a lot of the tension you saw, we were kind of feeling it ourselves. The location you saw was so real. As much as we created an imagined suburb within it, it’s based off of a combination of very real areas like that, in the Cape Flats itself.
The crime side of it was always there. We were always fully aware of it as well. I think that added to the performances, but it also put a lot more pressure for a director’s debut film, I was definitely aware of the weight I was carrying. It did help that I had an amazing crew who were so kind and generous. As the weeks went on, it became a love/hate relationship. Being stuck in one place for that long, everyday, dealing with kinds of things we were dealing with was incredibly difficult. But I think that’s what is amazing. As much as it became so difficult for us, everyone was so invested in this story because we knew that not only was it going to be entertaining, it was also important in the context of our country. It was really important for the subculture that we were dealing with, all while trying to make it a really entertaining film.
For post-production, we wanted to take our time. That’s where I had the most fun. I worked with one of my really good friends Simon. He is also my business partner. We all kind of started together wanting to make films, and he edited the hell out of the film. I was in production on a tv series at the time, so I would kind of pop in and he would have just completed some critical things.
Sound was also a blast. Most of what you hear was created in post-production. It was just so much fun sitting with that team. And they are the best people that I’ve ever worked with. But yeah, that was the process. And that was about three to four months.
DC: I love your ambition and diligence. Are there any women, in or out of film, that inspire your work ethic and creativity?
ND: Quite a large number of women in general inspire me. I’ll start with the women closest to my life, because these are the women that I’ve grown up with. I was raised by mother, who I think is amazing. My aunts are amazing as well, but my mom had five kids and essentially raised seven. What she always told us as kids is that we can be anything we want to be in the world. But the one thing you need to know is to love God and love yourselves because when you love yourself, other people will know how to love you, too. And you’ll know what that means. And the thing she always told us was chase everything you want. If you want to chase marriage, then chase that. But always know that your independence and your dreams, should come first. Fight for those things. Don’t give up on those things.
I remember telling her this horrific thing of wanting to be a filmmaker. At the time, I actually told her I wanted to be an actor. She wanted to cry. She was like, “Oh, no. You’re going to be kissing all these boys.” Even when she knew that, she was so supportive. Because she knows what we want, she drives all of us, even to this day. Definitely, my mom is in that category of inspiring women, along with my aunts, and the other women who raised me.
I would say that I surround myself in general with people that inspire me. My friends are women who are go-getters. They are trailblazers. That’s all they do.
I think in terms of role models from afar, there are women like Oprah. It may be a cheesy choice, but it’s cliche and cheesy because she is who she is. To work as hard as she worked, to go after every opportunity, and to then inspire others to do the same and empower them as well is amazing. And then to bring them along I think is incredible. Then, to get to a point to own your own network, knowing there will be those who are going to try to shut you down constantly makes her an inspiration. She’s faced a lot of adversity. For me, I think she is an incredible woman.
I’m also a big fan of Shonda Rimes because I’ve grown up consuming her work since 2005 with Grey’s Anatomy. I kind of decided that I wanted to know everything about her, watching her path and studying it. I find her to be incredible. I think I’ll leave it at that because this could go on. Really for me, the women that inspire me the most are the women that are closest to me.
DC: What advice would you give to women who want to follow a similar career path to yours?
ND: I’m always wary of saying this because it is based on the context of where I’ve lived and where I’ve grown up, but I think there is a general consensus that as women, we need to fight for our voices. We need to be aware of what we have to say and then fight for that. And I think for women who are trying to get into film or who are trying to start their own company or whatever, the biggest thing I could encourage them to do is not forget the thing that makes them special. Conforming to what any male-dominated industry would ask them to be, would be to lose what makes them special in the first place, what’s going to make their work stand out, and what makes them authentic.
All my partners are men. I work with so many men, as the industry is. When I started out, I felt this pressure to be a certain way as a director, to come at it from more of an aggressive place. But I found through the process of the last two years of working on this film that what really brought quality performances, what really brought the quality of work, what made me happy and what made people want to work with me again and again, is the fact that I embrace the fact that I am a woman. I embrace the differences in me. I embrace that I am black. I embrace that I understand all these different elements of the world, and I see the world differently to what my counterparts may see it. But that’s what is going to also speak on screen. I think if anyone else had written Pan’s character that isn’t the protagonist of the story, it would have been a completely different role. It would’ve looked different. For me, it is important that women are presented in an honest way. So that’s what I will tell women. Fight for your voice, and fight for what makes you authentic and different.
DC: If you don’t mind me asking, what other pressures have you felt in the industry?
ND: When I first started, people expected me to be in love with romantic comedies, dramas, and coming-of-age films. That’s what everyone would try to get me to come onboard for. As much as I enjoy a good chick flick, I’ve never found an inclination towards that storytelling. I never found that’s what I wanted to do. I love genre films. I love sci-fi. I love action. I love horror. That’s what I used to watch when the family went to bed and I could watch what I wanted to watch. I would find those films. And I felt a lot of pressure to have to be this woman who did a romantic comedy. There was a time and space where I thought, I don’t want this.
It came in the commercial space as well. A lot of what you are allowed to pitch on are your softer ads. Like, this is for women’s hygiene, or we are doing these ads for food or skin care or makeup or weight loss. And I did a lot of weight loss ads. I think there was a lot of pressure to try to be a specific type of woman.
With Number 37, there was a point in time where a producer who was kind of a partner on it made a suggestion that perhaps I wasn’t ready to direct the film, despite the fact that I had written it. He thought that I should maybe go to my male counterparts, because they made more sense for it. And then having to fight for that. Yeah, this is my film. I know it. I know what I’m doing.
DC: You definitely showed the world. This movie excels in every way. Do you have any upcoming projects you can share with us?
ND: Nothing that I’m allowed to share just yet, unfortunately. What I can say is that I’m working on an exciting new project, a local series, which is really great. There’s a feature script that I’ve been developing with an American writer. We are starting to go uphill with it and trying to see how we can put that together. I can’t really give details beyond that at this stage, but it’s an exciting time. Within a year, new projects will be out.
DC: Can’t wait to see them. Thank you so much for taking the time out to speak with me.
ND: Thank you so much!
Categorized:News
