U-Carmen eKhayelitsha trailer Watch the trailer for Mark Dornford-May's radical adaptation of Bizet's opera.

Mark Dornford-May is an unlikely film success story. He grew up in Yorkshire and Cheshire and spent the best part of 25 years directing for the stage. It was his move to South Africa in 2000 that ultimately triggered his transformation to film. After setting up a lyric theatre company in the Cape Town township of Khayelitsha, his stage adaptation of Bizet's Carmen, U-Carmen eKhayelitsha, became a worldwide hit. In 2004 he transferred the opera to the screen and in 2005 it won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival. A year later his second movie, Son Of Man - casting Jesus Christ as a black man - premiered to great acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival. He spoke to Film Network from his home in Cape Town...

What were the biggest challenges with U-Carmen?
First of all to translate a grand opera in Xhosa, which is the language it's sung in [Xhosa is one of South Africa's 11 official languages]. The nice thing about Xhosa as a language is that it's, in a funny way, quite like Italian. It's got lots of open vowel sounds so it's quite an easy language to sing in, so that helped us enormously.

What are the logistics of filming opera?
[Laughs] It's a nightmare! One of the things that works very successfully is the way we've used the sound world. Often in filmed opera what you get is quite an undoctored sound, so it's literally the sound of the orchestra and the singer and it has no reference to where a singer is delivering a particular aria or passage of music. What we tried to do was locate it in the place. So although we did work to playback and used pre-recorded song, we also recorded live, and when it came to the mix we put those two together. It's complicated, because you're not just dealing with getting a particular shot, you're having to check that syncing is working and you have to spend a lot more time in set-up to make sure that the singers can hear the orchestra on the tape.

So long did it take to shoot?
We had five weeks, so it was extremely hard work!

It was probaby easier shooting in Khayelitsha than it would be on a suburban street in London.

You shot on location in the Khayelitsha township. What was that like?
We wanted to show the realities of the township. Often townships are wrapped up in sensational news events - usually to do with crime - and although that is a fact of township life, it's not the only fact of township life. Actually shooting on location was absolutely fantastic. It was probaby much easier shooting in Khayelitsha than it would be on a suburban street in London. There was the sense that everybody was prepared to help out. Often when we shouted "Standby!" and "Action!", a whole section of a township would go silent. And I think that's because everybody there wanted the film to work, and some of that spirit of Khayelitsha comes across.

The film's final shot - tracking from the ground into the skies overlooking Khayelitsha - is particularly stunning. How did you achieve that?
We wanted to put Carmen's story into the context of the township as we leave the film, so that was a helicopter shot. One of the local helicopter films helped us out and we just pulled back and back and back in the helicopter until you can see the whole of Khayelitsha and the sea in the distance. That's what a lot of people don't know, that Khayelitsha runs down into the sea, so it's almost a beach settlement.

We wanted to show the size and the scale of Khayelitsha, really. If you think that Cape Town's got a population of approximately three million, about a million of those people live in Khayelitsha so it's a big part of the city. And its character, I think, influences the whole of Cape Town. In British terms Khayelitsha feels a lot like Liverpool and the traditional values one associates with there - humour, musical talent, people often making the best of difficult circumstances.

Another South African film, Tsotsi, was warmly received in the UK recently. What's the state of the industry there?
I was delighted with Tsotsi's success, because with us winning the Golden Bear at Berlin the year before and Tsotsi winning the Oscar, it feels like it's not just a flash in the pan. Something's actually happening here - maybe like what happened with Australian cinema 25 years ago. It feels like there's a sudden emergence of cinema as a voice for people here. The history of cinema in South African was blighted terribly by Apartheid, but what grew up as soon as democracy happened was a massive service industry for commercials. When I come to London and switch on the telly, a lot of the beach scenes are filmed in Cape Town. That worked very successfully, especially when the Rand was very weak. Now, as the economy stabilises, it's a less easy place to film for outsiders. So that forced everyone to realise that sustaining an industry simply on foreigners coming in and working with a service company wasn't actually going to build an industry. And out of that grew the industry for films like ours and Tsotsi, and Forgiveness before that.

How have you found the transition from theatre to film?
I was very fortunate in that one of my oldest and best friends is Stephen Daldry, who was a theatre director and then made Billy Elliot and The Hours. So when the film of Carmen became a possibility, I rang him and said, "Look Stephen, is it complicated?" And he said, "Nah, it's easy! Just carry on as normal." [Laughs] His confidence helped a lot. There's obviously a lot of technical stuff you have to learn, but the basic skills of getting a team together, motivating performers, and hoping that everyone's going to share your vision and making that vision as collective as possible - those skills are the same in either medium.

Your film is very visually-driven though...
Well, I've always loved watching films. In fact, I've probably watched more films than I've seen plays, so that's obviously helped. I'm also a great believer that film is a great way of getting across social statements. I'm a great fan of the films of Ken Loach and people like that. If you're quite clear about the story you want to tell, then the visual impact of that story almost becomes part of that narrative. And what I've tried to do on Carmen is make Khayelitsha a major character in the narrative, Khayelitsha is a protagonist. It's because of the character of Khayelitsha that Carmen is what she is, and because of the nature of Khayelitsha that the events in the story happen the way they do.

U-Carmen eKhayelitsha is released in UK cinemas on Friday 21st April 2006.

Adrian Hennigan | Published 13 Apr 06

send to a friend 

start a new discussion