Embeth Davidtz will be the first to admit she struggled with writing the screenplay for her directorial debut, “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight.” But according to the multi-hyphenate, switching up the point of view is really what “cracked the code” for her.
“Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” centers on Alexandra Fuller, a little girl growing up in Zimbabwe as it’s making the transition from Rhodesia, seeing the white people who have controlled the country for so long losing their grip. It’s based on Fuller’s own memoir of the same title.
The thing is, that memoir spans a total of 21 years. So, as Davidtz explained at TheWrap’s 2024 TIFF Studio sponsored by Moët & Chandon and Boss Design, she decided to hone in on one specific period of time to help her focus.
“I think that the hardest nut to crack was finding — because a 21-year memoir that spans someone’s whole life, which episode am I telling? And to me, the child was the most intriguing aspect of it,” she explained. “And I felt like I finally cracked the code of telling the story when I switched it to her point of view, because then she could say anything.”
“She could say what she really thought. She could say the outrageous things that other people maybe wouldn’t say,” Davidtz continued. “And I thought also, the more intriguing thing is, what happens to a child when they’re put in the middle of that kind of a climate? A climate of conflict, of war, of a troubled home life. I think you get honesty out of children in a way that maybe adults don’t have. And so I thought this is the way into the story.”
Davidtz also noted that using a child’s POV helped make the story a little more palatable and logical for viewers.
“If we are the third-person objective eye watching this happen, I feel like it would be so alienating to see horrible, racist people behaving badly,” she said. “That somehow a child who’s in the middle of it giving her version of things, skewed as they are, you understand where she’s heard the things that she retells. You know, she’s heard from adults around her and by the end, one hopes, she’s come to her own conclusions about what is real.”
You can watch TheWrap’s full interview with Embeth Davidtz in the video above.
