Jenna Bass has written, directed, produced and lensed her indie love story “Love the One You Love”, as her calling card, discovering an unexpected freedom to create within the confines of no-budget film-making, writes Theresa Smith
FOR YEARS now, Capetonian director Jenna Bass has been trying to make a feature called Toktokkie. Everyone who sees her script agrees it is good, but financing a large production is impossible when you have no sugar daddy or track record in making films.
Realising she had to get out of the vicious circle of no money, no film so no money, she hit on the idea of Love the One You Love.
Inspired by being of two minds when watching formulaic romantic comedies which dictates people have to hook up, she wanted to question the status quo.
At the Busan International Film Festival Q&A in South Korea last year, she was surprised that people weren’t as interested in the film-making process as they were in treating her as an agony aunt, asking her questions like “what is love?”
“And I think, if you’ve just seen the film, surely you don’t want my advice, because I’m very confused myself,” laughed Bass in an interview in Cape Town. “There’s a dedication at the end, ‘to my family, my love is forever’, which is ironic because the film questions this idea of love as a thing that is forever. It is a call to look at the world around us with a little more clarity, rather than just take the messages that society, government and our country gives us. ‘You are living in a rainbow nation, you are supposed to seek out a soulmate.’ To critique these things more – that, if anything, is the message,” she said.
It takes months to put together a script, so Bass wrote characters and an outline, allowing the actors to improvise their dialogue. She wrote the Terry character for Chi Mendi (“she identified with the character as someone with a yearning to be someone and see the world”) and loved the way Louw Venter individualised his lonely techie character.
Some of the screen characters weren’t acting; they really are a sangoma or private investigator and the magic teacher in the film really was her magic teacher back in the day.
“If you do improv, you can only ask so much of people. It was a rich experience for the people who were actors because the world was so real.”
The film was shot guerilla-style around Cape Town in 2013 on a budget of R50 000 with an almost year-long edit – the first cut was five and a half hours long – but the National Film and Video Foundation came to the rescue with funding for the post-production process.
The 28-year-old handled the camera work herself.
Bass loves small cameras and the freedom it gave her to get right into the actors’ space, though she always had this idea that she wanted to work on a huge shoot: “I used to want to be South Africa’s answer to Francis Ford Coppola and I’ve revised that. Essentially, whatever film-making I do, I want it to be a response to the environment I’m in. That’s the responsibility of any artist.
“You can’t just copy and paste what someone else has done. The film-making world is stuck in conventions and sometimes you can only access resources if you play by those rules.
“Now I’ve made a film and I feel that people can see what I do. I’d love to make films that don’t limit my imagination,” she said while admitting that she still wants to make a movie on a big set with lots of people and money.
For Love the One You Love she had to look at what she could do right now, and consider what she did have. The first thing she realised was that Cape Town offered a myriad possibilities.
“I could go crazy, I had this giant set. A lot of times, Cape Town films are sub-culture driven, so a film will be a Cape Flats movie or a township movie, and my experience of Cape Town has become much more diverse as I don’t just live in the suburbs, but in a city with all these parallel universes, which is something Toktokkie was about.
“That’s just my greatest inspiration… discovering this whole world beyond your dreams.”
Love the One You Love is screening at The Bioscope in Joburg and The Labia in Cape Town.