Was playing Bobo’s mother difficult for you?

In so many ways. I had to do that whipping scene [Davidtz’s character tries to expel Black squatters from her farm], and I had to play a woman who talks in a certain way to the African women who come to her for help—all of it deeply uncomfortable, deeply saddening. You know, the body doesn’t forget. The body keeps the score and hobbles all that stuff inside of you. I was standing with my all-Black South African crew, reenacting things that some of them were of an age to remember.
So it was very difficult, but at the same time, strangely cathartic and victorious to come back and tell the truth, and not stand there as a white woman and say, “This didn’t happen,” or be too scared to confront the racism of the past. It’s still there, in the DNA of the place, and what they inherited too.

In the book, there is that painful confrontation with the racism of the parents, and their mental health and frailties. But the book also has a romance to it.

Alexandra managed to show both her love and her unease—the disconnection from the way her family might think versus how she ultimately began to think as she grew up. And the same thing holds for me. It’s always both: there’s loss and the return is a refueling. Alexandra coined the term when I was busy writing—she said, “You know, this is the anti-Out of Africa.” And that’s what I set out to do.

One of the amazing strengths of the movie is the African setting, which is so visceral and disordered. I gather it was shot in South Africa?

I really wanted to shoot in Zimbabwe, but we didn’t have the money and we didn’t have the infrastructure. But the topography is different, and I think Zimbabweans might really sort of hold my feet to the fire, but God, I tried. Even in the final mix, when I was adjusting the color, I asked, “Can we make it more green?”

I got a great set designer [Anneke Dempsey] who understood the brief, because I said it’s all broken, decaying. There’s nothing shiny and clean about the Fullers’ house. In fact, I think the actual Fullers’ house was probably more organized and tidy than the one in the film. But I needed to tell a lot with the location.
Working with my cinematographer [Willie Nel], I just said, “I have to see the dust and the dirt, because it tells a story.” Bobo’s feet are unwashed, her hair is unwashed. Her mother has drifted away from her and is not washing that hair. Her grandmother says, “She smells.” I had to show the audience what I could visually: How does something smell and look when a system is in decay?