Unsung Auteurs: Oliver Hermanus | FilmInk

Oliver Hermanus does not shy away from difficult topics. Having caught the world’s attention with his 2009 debut, Shirley Adams (about a mother caring for her disabled son in the face of poverty and isolation), his 2011 sophomore effort, Beauty, cogently and intelligently dealt with a closeted mid-forties Afrikaans family man’s obsession with an old friend’s son. “I get very excited about the idea of someone putting a face or an image to a topic, but some people never want to visualise anything like this,” the South African writer/director shrugged while chatting to FilmInk at The Sydney Film Festival in 2011. “That’s been an interesting thing with the film, because at The Cannes Film Festival, people thought that it was really interesting, but when I went to Switzerland, the audience was mute. They all stayed to hear me speak at the end, but they had nothing to ask me. I realised why Switzerland is Switzerland. They don’t take a side on anything.”

Born in Cape Town, Hermanus paints himself just like every other filmmaker who went through university and wanted to make films, only his movies have been showered with critical acclaim and festival awards. Beauty won The Queer Palm at Cannes, and was South Africa’s Official Selection for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars. With deeply emotional films his forte, Hermanus says that the filmmaking dream started early in his life. “I remember seeing a French film called The Bear when I was about nine or ten,” Hermanus told FilmInk in 2011. “It has a live action grizzly bear, and the story is about him and this little bear. It was just a very powerful film. That was probably my first memory of identifying the impact of cinema in some way. My interest in film is the power of communication.”

One of the most striking things about sitting down with Hermanus is his good humour and quiet intelligence. He’s a thinking man’s director, and his early experience with the emotional power of film has resonated throughout his career, and shaped him as the filmmaker that he has become. “Once you’ve seen one hardcore emotional film, you go, ‘Wow, I really enjoyed that’ and then you try and find more. When I saw Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher for the first time, I was obsessed with this idea of [lead actress] Isabelle Huppert, and how real she seemed to me, and how courageous she is because the character was 100% in her. She wasn’t guarding anything. That emotional experience is really incredible. It’s more exciting than watching things explode or having seven superheroes in the same film.”

Beauty is no exception, following the troubled and self-destructive Francois, played by Dion Kotz. Married for several years and living a stagnant home life, Francois keeps to himself, successfully hiding his homosexuality from his wife and friends, and attending all-male orgies to quench his lust. That is until he sets sight on an old friend’s son, Christian (newcomer Charlie Keegan), who becomes his obsession. At times, Beauty becomes an essay on the generation of South Africans who are trying to find their place in a post-Apartheid South Africa, after having lost much of their political power.

Deon Lotz and Charlie Keegan in Beauty.

With such huge issues on the table, Hermanus was interested to find that one of the most resonant parts of the film was Francois’ relationship with his wife. “That was probably the main part that resonated with a South African audience, because they identified themselves. Not that their husbands or wives were of a different sexual orientation. One of the greatest achievements when we made the film was that people would sit in some of those scenes with their husband or wife, and it would be a spitting image of either their own life or someone that they knew. That was more chilling than some of the other stuff in the film, because they saw a reflection of someone in their lives.”

Hermanus followed up Beauty with 2015’s The Endless River (a quietly slow-burn about two people dealing with grief in their own way) and 2019’s Moffie (the tough but tender story of a gay man serving in South Africa’s military. “Moffie, was set in South Africa in the ‘80s, and was very much about white men during apartheid; it felt foreign to me because I’m from a mixed-race family and I’d never made a piece of work about apartheid,” Hermanus told FilmInk in 2022. “I’d always made contemporary work. So, the offer to go in that direction felt like I had to learn a lot, and that I’d have to really absorb a lot of information and generate an interest in that world. I really valued that in the end. It was a great experience.”

Bill Nighy in Living.

Though both strong, characteristically brave, and deeply moving works from Hermanus, The Endless River and Moffie didn’t make a huge impact on the international stage. Unfairly under-celebrated, these two efforts speak of a filmmaker really perfecting his craft, and working with themes that obviously emanate right from his creative core. Gaining much more traction internationally was Hermanus’s next effort, the 2022 drama Living, starring Bill Nighy. A reimagining of Akira Kurosawa’s revered 1952 Japanese drama Ikiru, from a script by Nobel Prize-winning novelist and screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro, Living is the story of an ordinary man, reduced by years of oppressive office routine to a shadow existence, who at the eleventh hour makes a supreme effort to turn his dull life into something wonderful – into one he can say has been lived to the full.

Surprisingly, Hermanus conceived of Living as being a Christmas film, despite the fact it has little seasonal reference beyond snow. “It was sort of my insistence,” Hermanus explained to FilmInk in 2022. “I really don’t know why. Particularly at the beginning I had to go, ‘Okay, what are the period films that I like and would watch like this?’ and one of them was It’s A Wonderful Life. And then I asked myself what do I like about It’s A Wonderful Life? And I have watched it so many times and watch it at a particular time of the year, and it gives me a certain kind of feeling. And so the egoist in me was like: ‘How do I make another film which people will want to watch during the holidays, whether it’s sad or not sad?’ Somehow the film had to operate as a warm embrace. So, by the end of it, even if you’re crying and it’s sad, it needs to feed you with something where you feel emotionally connected to your family or to your life.”

Oliver Hermanus on the set of Living.

Hermanus knew it was a tall order. “My other films are not an embrace. My other films are kind of like a punch in the face or a slap across the chest. So the thing in my head was, ‘How do I make something that is inviting to an audience and for me?’ Christmas is the ultimate challenge because that’s when everyone stops and they’re looking to watch things with their families and to celebrate things. And the hope is that Living fits into that world somewhere, even though it’s about a man dying.”

With a collection of intense, muscular films to his credit, it’s no surprise that Oliver Hermanus sees directing as a tough business. “Filming is like gladiator combat. You have to get to the other side. The challenge for me is always to elevate my craft in every way. I always want to make the best thing I’ve ever made, in terms of my choice of actors, collaborations, the storytelling. That’s always the big pressure that directors put on themselves.”

Oliver Hermanus

His Living leading man Bill Nighy astutely describes Oliver Hermanus as “super prepared and endlessly courteous. Oliver has a great overview, which I’m very grateful for. I tend to disappear into each day’s business, and he schedules the information very cleverly. He’s a very smart, very cool director. He has great ideas.”

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