Interview: Oliver Hermanus on Moffie and the Making of Men in South Africa

To those who hail from outside South Africa, the title of Oliver Hermanus’s fourth feature, Moffie, might roll softly and smoothly off the tongue. But it only takes one utterance of “moffie” in the film’s apartheid-era military setting to understand the venom with which the word is spewed by figures of authority. The Afrikaans slang has no exact English equivalent, but the closest translation is “faggot.” As Hermanus depicts, the conscripted soldiers in the South African Defence Force wield the term not merely to denigrate gay men. “Moffie” functions to police an appropriate display of masculinity.

Hermanus’s film closely tracks a gay teen, Nicholas van der Swart (Kai Luke Brummer), as he navigates his two-year army conscription while attempting to hide his sexuality from his peers. Without short-changing Nicholas’s character development, Moffie trains its lens on how institutions like the military impress themselves on individuals by breaking them down and regimenting a limited range of acceptable behaviors. The perspective necessitates limiting the film’s point of view to that of young white South African men, an unusual and often uncomfortable one through which to experience the horrors of apartheid. But under Hermanus’s steady direction, Moffie sheds light on the mechanisms that turn boys into brutes.

I spoke with Hermanus prior to the film’s stateside release, which comes over 18 months after its premiere at the Venice Film Festival. In our conversation, the filmmaker discussed how he found his way into a story about white men as a mixed-race South African, why he was so restrictive about the portrayal of sexuality in the film, and where people have projected influences and interpretations onto Moffie that he did not intend.

How did you triangulate the portrayal of racism and homophobia without necessarily drawing a false equivalency between the two? The forces are definitely intertwined in a form of toxic masculinity, but their expression and impact are quite different.

I think maybe because I’m not white myself, I approached the whole process of untangling the dynamic of the setting from that kind of outsider perspective. I think it probably gave me a little bit more freedom to be confident in positioning the racial perspective of the form because my lens wasn’t from the perspective of a white South African man. I didn’t really think about it because I felt like it was just natural for me to be interrogatory on the setting.

When you’re getting inside the headspace of men accultured to perpetuate racism and other forms of bigotry, how do you find points of empathy and connection without tipping over into excusing and justification?

I think that’s often the challenge of a film, especially in the context of South Africa. We’re a people trying to understand each other, our perspectives, and how we operate in the past. I think there’s a common ground in a sense of humanity. That was what I latched onto, going, “What is the humanity of these young men? What is the thing about them that I understand and connect with and find to be connected to me?” I think with all of those characters, including all the other guys, it was about knowing that it’s true of any human being that there are positive and negative attributes. It was about finding the balance within those young men.

What was the goal of portraying violence against black men by really lingering on the victim following an attack?

The South African narrative of racism is kind of world famous; we had one of the most restrictive societies in the past known to many, many countries. I’m a product of that. There was an intention, of course, to make the perspective of the film that of white South African men. But as a film, there’s definitely a commentary on the nature of racism, the shame of racism. For me, personally, what lingers is this feeling of being dismissed and just being othered in a very profound way. I wanted at least each interaction that we had [to capture that], in particular the vomit-throwing scene. That scene needed to end on the face of that man. The last beat needs to be his perspective on what we’ve just seen.

Your films are great at capturing how men communicate so sparsely with words but convey plenty with gestures and other body language. How do you calibrate the way characters express themselves and ensure that the performers are equipped to act that?

Each one is a gamble. In one of my films [2011’s Beauty], the protagonist is more challenging because he ultimately commits atrocities with sexual violence. But, in the same way, I had to find an “in” with that character, and the actor had to find an [entry point] with the character in a way that was connective and honest. It’s the joy of filmmaking, for directors and for actors, the opportunity to step inside of other people’s minds and, without a sense of judgment, navigate and see the world from their perspective in a kind of non-biased way. Ultimately, just to demonstrate that in so many ways, who we are is rooted in similar things.

It’s my understanding that you fought hard to shoot Moffie in Academy ratio. Why was that so central to your vision of the film?

In my research, I found the South Africans collected Kodak [photos]. The Kodak generation of the ’80s had all these personal memories that I uncovered from different soldiers and families. It just felt natural to me that we would tell the story with that aspect ratio. Everything about the photography is reflective of Kodak: the saturation of the colors, that aspect ratio, the nature of the blue in people’s skin tones. Jamie Ramsay [the film’s cinematographer] did a great job referencing not just the photographs, but how they aged over time.

There’s a duality to your shot selection, alternating between emotionally resonant close-ups of the conscripts and longer shots where we view their bodies almost like objects. How did you find a balance of these two ends of the spectrum in the edit?

There’s always the fear of making a film that’s about the coming of age of a gay kid that’s superficial in its treatment of physicality. A film whose story is set in the army, featuring young men in the prime of their lives, is going to unfortunately—because the film is set in the ’80s—going to have a lot of people in short shorts. It’s a dance of visualizing this and representing their youth and physicality without it being indulgent. I was quite severe about that; I didn’t want the audience to be distracted by a fantasy. In fact, one of the strangest things that came out of the film’s Venice premiere is that many critics thought I had an homage to a volleyball scene in Top Gun in there. But I can’t even remember that film, because it kind of predates me. People apply these things as the male gaze, and there was an argument that I was reclaiming the volleyball scene with that setting. But obviously, I wasn’t, so it’s always up for interpretation. But, from my point of view, I was trying to be as restrictive as possible about the sort of visualizing of their bodies.

And, even still, the film picks up on a lot of the latent homoeroticism in these spaces.

It’s unavoidable, isn’t it? If I’m going to put men in tight outfits on the screen, the context is sexualized. There’s nothing you can do to stop the audience from making those assumptions.

It helps that you avoid ironic distance. The camera never seems to be objectifying them.

Thank goodness, because you have to actively work toward that. It can so easily become that. One of the very first scriptwriting decisions that I made for Moffie was that [I wouldn’t make room] for an intimate sex scene. My version of a sex scene in the film is somebody touching somebody else’s face because of the nature of the army, particularly in South Africa. I knew it was such a fear-mongered environment that that act of softness, of interhuman gentleness, would have been transgressive. It was about how you retained that tension that any sense of being human, any sense of sensitivity would be the greatest kind of gesture.

The shower room is such a fascinating, almost liminal space in the film. How did you approach the way you’d portray it and make it such a dynamic setting?

The shower scenes are supposed to represent their own little narrative. There’s a shower scene in the beginning where [the guys are] all being very playful, and it’s kind of like rugby. It’s this completely innocent context. And then it changes after they’ve been brutalized, and they’ve experienced a really difficult 24 hours. Then the [next] shower scene is the silent, traumatizing kind where no one’s speaking. The guys are standing in lines, all changed. Before they were in this little bubble of freedom, but it changed because their headspace has changed. That was the intention: You sense that they’ve internalized something, and so the party’s over.

Which ties into the flashback at the pool that gets to the root of Nicholas’s trauma.

There are many theories that I have an obsession with water, but I really don’t. [laughs] It’s more the theme of trauma!

At what point did you realize it was necessary to break with your visual rhythm through the rest of the film and do the scene as an extended, single-take tracking shot?

That’s a scriptwriting decision. When I was approached to make this film, I didn’t immediately connect with the narrative because it was about white men in the ’80s suffering trauma, which is a very difficult idea because, given the nature of apartheid, we expect films set during the time to be about the trauma of black people. And so, when writing the script, I had to find something that was connected to me, and that flashback sequence is something more personal to me. It happened to me not in such an extreme way, and that scene is the most personal moment in the film for me, and so I wanted to shoot it in a way that unfolds in real time. The tension of it is real because it plays out as this difficult six minutes of an innocence that’s lost.

The shower scenes seem like the journey of the film in microcosm—taking an innocent person and watching what brutality and shame takes away from them.

We were interested in how men are made. This question of white men and the problem of white men globally, the question of entitlement and white privilege—all of these themes, I think, are at their root about how people’s viewpoints of the world are established. There’s something about these kids, about how, when they arrive, they’re completely uninformed. They don’t have these hard-wired views, but by the time they’ve done two years of [military service] in which they could have gone to the border, they might have killed people, hardened themselves, developed an absolute sense of racism, hate, and conservativism. This happens all over the world; militaries are used to limiting people’s individuality.

As a white man, I grapple with this. On the one hand, our stories have dominated culture for so long, and we should really be centering the impacted in these narratives. But at the same time, addressing the damage done by white men in the world does require introspection and analysis of them, too, if we want to break the cycle.

South Africa is a country of 11 languages and multiple races that had a regimented, racialized political system for half a century. The nature of how we reintegrate is about having to acknowledge our perspective and our perceptions. It’s not like the problem lies entirely with white South Africans, who must reform themselves to understand and integrate with black, mixed-race South Africans. We all arrive, in the South African context, in interactions with each other with a racial perspective. It’s about how we transcend the limitations on integration and post-racial thinking. The way in which societies reach a new point of view is through a collective kind of introspection. Because racism is a particular thing, but racial prejudice is quite specific. I always say that when South Africans of different races get into a car accident, when they get out of their cars, it’s not two people meeting. It’s two different races, and it’ll influence how that interaction happens. It’s going to be loaded with history.

In South Africa, you’ve got a majority of black people who are policed and restricted by a white minority. In America, there’s an institutionalized racism, but it’s a minority black population that is [contending] with a white majority. And institutionalized racism takes a very long time to tear down. I think what’s happened in the last year has been particularly seismic because we’ve all just had an opportunity, globally, to look—because we’ve been sitting at home—at the nature of those institutions, of racial profiling, of how we’re not acknowledging that we do arrive at pre-judgments. We’re in a very difficult time, particularly I think for Americans because you’re having to face a very entrenched way of being.

Some have said that the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission should be replicated in America, particularly after the Capitol insurrection.

I’m meant to make a film set during the commission about Eugene de Kock, who was the death squad leader of the Security Police in South Africa and nicknamed “Prime Evil.” But the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, its idea was that it didn’t want to be Nuremberg. Its idea was that, after the Second World War, the nature of Nuremberg was that if you were convicted of war crimes, you were killed. You were hung, or you were shot. There was this idea that the nature of the Holocaust was beyond forgiveness. And in South Africa, our structure with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was to create an environment where we were prepared to forgive. If you told us what you did, if you were honest, if you relieved victims’ families of the unknown of what happened to their loved ones, if you just told the truth, you would be forgiven. It’s a big question whether, as a society globally, we value forgiveness enough.