Mandla Dube on 'Heart of the Hunter' and Photographing African Skin Tones

Directors of great import, the likes of Mandla Dube, provide mirrors for Black, African people chiefly, and for human beings at large, to see our reflection, and to understand who we are. They craft opuses that defy categorization because they themselves don’t think in silos. Rather, they connect dots, they leave the screen littered with clues, they arrest you from the first scene and keep you guessing, they play hide-and-seek with your mind. Their productions are puzzle pieces, and every watch warrants a new set of eyes, to peel through the layers stacked onto each frame.

When OkayAfrica catches up with Dube, whose recent film Heart of the Hunter occupied the top spot worldwide on its first week of release — eleven million subscribers saw it between March 25 and March 31 — we find him amidst a dizzying schedule. “He’s got another Zoom meeting with people in L.A. at 6.15 p.m.,” his assistant tells us.

When asked how it feels to take the No. 1 spot, Dube, ever calm, says it’s great, another milestone to add to his storied career. “It’s a thing of saying, ‘with a great team, you’re able to achieve great achievements,’ you know?! It’s very humbling because not everybody does, and can get to this position.”

Dube is magnetic. A graduate of the Clark Atlanta University — a behemoth of the civil rights movement, the first graduate institution to award a degree to Black folk — he cut his teeth in filmmaking during the mid-nineties hip-hop revival, making music videos for everyone from Ice Cube to Outkast, Biggie Smalls, and Da Brat. He was an assistant cinematographer on F. Gary Gray’s The Italian Job. His directing credits also include Kalushi and Silverton Siege.

Heart of the Hunter | Official Trailer | Netflixyoutu.be

It’s a moment greater than him. It extends to South Africa, and the rest of the continent. “It’s good for decolonizing the narrative of who we are as far as our identity is concerned. It feels great to claim that space. What Netflix has done, they’ve revolutionized access for world cinema. We’ve now been given a loud hailer to say, hey, we exist here, and we can tell stories! Nobody knows our story better than us.”

We were struck by Heart of the Hunter’s visual alchemy when watching the trailer. The world-building, something that owes to the recurring motifs in Deon Meyer’s work, translated magically onto the screen. The movie is based on Meyer’s book of the same name, originally published in Afrikaans in 2000, and prominently features locations such as Cape Town and the Karoo.

“Heart of the Hunter” is based on Deon Meyer’s 2000 book of the same name. Photo courtesy of Netflix.

Photographing African skin tones

It turns out that a specially made set of prime lenses was employed for the cinematography. “The combination of the lenses, along with the camera sensor, and the make-up that goes on the actors and actresses is curated in a particular way to create standards on how we photograph African skin tones. These were special lenses that were brought in from France, they’re called Angéneux Optimo Primes, the first of their kind. So we brought them in specially for the project, and we did tests on it. That look was pre-visualised during the pre-production process. When you see Connie Ferguson, the way she looks, when you see Bonko Khoza, Masasa [Mbangeni], Tim Theron — those looks were curated intentionally at the standard that we are calling a South African standard.”

The South African standard bleeds in and out via strands that are peppered throughout the movie. Zuko Khumalo, played by Bonko Khoza, uses a spear to fight in some of the spectacularly-filmed action sequences. This choice casts him as an Afro-ninja of sorts, and historically, a fitting candidate in King Shaka’s Amabutho (Zulu regiment), specifically during the Difaqane wars that dispersed nations throughout Southern Africa in the nineteenth century.

Casting Bonko Khoza in the leading role

“My son was like, ‘You have to work with this guy, his name is Bonko Khoza. Find him, work with him.’ I ran into him at a bookstore while conducting research for the film. He came to me, introduced himself and said, ‘Hey, I hear you’re the director of Silverton Siege, my name is Bonko Khoza.’ I was like, ‘Oh shit, my son told me about you!’ I listen to my children a lot. When they tell me, don’t do this, I don’t do it.”

Mandla Dube (L) says his son told him he should work with Bonko Khoza (R).Photo courtesy of Netflix.

Dube’s process when approaching any new production is heavily reliant on hearing the work. He workshops the script, much like a director would approach a theater play, and either re-writes or eliminates the parts that don’t ‘sound’ right.

“We clean it up in the pre-production stage so that when we get into production, we don’t waste the producer’s money trying to figure it out. We know what we’re doing. By the time we start shooting, it’s just a formality, because we’ve already made the film.”