Dust Devil

As far back as when he was a teenager, filmmaker Richard Stanley dreamed of the image of “the dark man, his face hidden, his hat pulled low, his coat gathered around him, standing alone in the wasteland.” For years, he dreamt of this man while the town of Bethanie, Namibia was during a years-long drought with several locals murdered in gruesome fashion that some attributed to local superstition of a black magician known as the “Nagloper.” Stanley incorporated this mythology with his dreams of “the dark man” into a student film that ran out of money before it could be completed but was ultimately fully realized in Dust Devil (1993), his feature film follow-up to Hardware (1990).

The Dust Devil (Robert John Burke) emerges from the hazy desert like a cross between Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name gunslinger and Rutger Hauer’s nightmarish hitchhiker in The Hitcher (1986). With his piercing eyes he hitches a ride with a woman (Terri Norton) driving alone and seduces her into taking him home with her where they have sex, killing her at the moment of climax. Wendy Robinson (Chelsea Field) leaves a dysfunctional marriage by traveling from Johannesburg, South Africa to the small town of Bethany, Namibia, encountering the Dust Devil, a serial killer that ritualistically dismembers his victims and takes their fingers as trophies.

Sergeant Ben Mukurob (Zakes Mokae) is the police detective investigating these murders and discovers that they go back decades before their suspect would’ve been born! Realizing that he is out of his depth, he enlists the help of Joe Niemand (John Matshikiza), the local witch doctor, to track down the Dust Devil. Unaware of his true nature, Wendy travels with this enigmatic hitchhiker to a town ravaged by drought and decimated by the closure of the local uranium mine. It might as well be the end of the world and it is this unlikely place where she confronts the Dust Devil with Ben in hot pursuit.

“You got to keep your eyes open when you deal with magic.” – Joe

Neither Wendy or Ben believe in magic. She believes in nothing, her grief over her increasing estrangement from her husband (Rufus Swart) causes her to nearly commit suicide. He, on the other hand, is in a profession that deals in facts and believes only in what he can prove, He experiences a dream within a dream that shakes his belief system while she encounters the Dust Devil who speaks of magic, myths and legends. At one point, they have a fascinating conversation about the belief in a higher power. When he tells her about God, the Devil or the idea of a soul, she says, “I don’t believe in that any more than I believe in magic or Peter Pan.” This is rather amusing as her name is Wendy and she is very much a “lost boy” with an emphasis on the lost. Both she and Ben have dreams that hint at their checkered pasts and continue to haunt their subconscious. They are both adrift in life. She is so down in it that at one point she nearly slashes her wrists. He wakes up every day with very little purpose in life, given garbage assignments by his superior and enduring thinly-veiled racism by his fellow co-workers.

The Dust Devil is a shape shifter that practices black magic and seduces Wendy by preying on her weaknesses and vulnerability. He feeds on pain and such people as Wendy who have nothing. He takes people’s souls but is trapped in the material world, bound by flesh until he can perform enough ceremonial murders to build up his power and return to his realm. He pushes Wendy to her mental and physical limits as he pursues her across the desert, threatening her physically and manipulating the environment by summoning a sandstorm to torment her.

The Dust Devil arrives in Bethany on an old fashion train like a gunslinger straight out of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) as the narrator intones, “He can smell a town waiting to die.” With his intense stare, Robert John Burke requires little dialogue to convey a commanding presence and this only enhances the character’s mystique. He is a very physical actor and lets his actions define his character. The Dust Devil is a wonderfully low-key boogeyman and a far cry from the chatty Freddy Krueger and much cleverer than the lumbering Jason Voorhees.

Burke doesn’t play the Dust Devil as a stereotypical monster but rather as an old soul that has existed for countless years, still exhibiting human frailties such as the moment when he cries after making love with Wendy. He tries to articulate his internal pain and how it has tormented him for as long as he can remember. Joe sums up the character best when he says, “He seeks power over the material world. Through the ritual of murder…He feeds off our light. He preys upon the damned, the weak, the faithless – he draws them to him and he sucks them dry.”

Zakes Mokae and John Matshikiza are also excellent in their respective roles. Ben and Joe make for an unlikely yet compelling team – the believer and the non-believer. To succeed they must find common ground for, like Wendy, Ben is a lost soul and it takes Joe to awaken his faith by showing him what they are up against. Ben must tap into his dreams and pay attention to them if he has any chance of defeating the Dust Devil.

There are several things that make Dust Devil stand out from other horror films. There is the film’s exotic locale, the deliberate pacing, and the emphasis on spiritualism. It has a distinctly European sensibility with an importance on symbolism over gore – although, it does not shy away from the red stuff, it just doesn’t revel in it, such as a lingering close-up shot of a fly on a blood-splattered window instead of cutting away to the gruesome murder scene nearby. Stanley wisely opts for a low-key approach to the supernatural elements with most of the effects done in camera and with clever editing techniques.

Stanley immerses us in this world with stunning establishing shots of the vast, unforgiving deserts of Namibia and the burnt-out, nearly abandoned town of Bethany with African music playing on the soundtrack, which culminates in Wendy and the Dust Devil arriving at the “end of the world,” a Grand Canyon-esque place that is simply breathtaking in its scale and scope.

The idea for the story came from the most inexpensive, simplest film he could make at the time: two characters – a woman driving a car and a “crazy hitchhiker.” Some ideas came from his mother’s book, Myths and Legends of South Africa about the “Nagloper” and the urban legend of the Vanishing Hitchhiker, an often-told tale about people picking up hitchhikers only for them to disappear out of the passenger’s seat.

It was a strange case of kismet that Stanley’s recurring dreams of “the dark man” dovetailed with the “Nagloper.” Even stranger still, he found himself passing through Bethanie while the murders were occurring and was beaten by a paranoid railway policeman. In 1984, the 15-year-old aspiring filmmaker returned to the town with a 16mm camera, a homemade crane and five friends with a 45-page screenplay entitled Dust Devil. They spent two months shooting on the Skeleton Coast until it had to be abandoned when the money ran out and two of them were hospitalized after a freeway accident.

Stanley continued to dream about “the dark man” and seven years later he decided to flesh out the script, taking out many of the hitchhiker elements to avoid comparisons to The Hitcher and placing less emphasis on the killers, and gave it to Jo-Anne Sellar who had produced his previous film Hardware for Palm Pictures. Its success enabled the production company to pre-sell Dust Devil and secure a $2 million budget from Miramax. Palm mistakenly thought that Stanley was making a serial killer movie like The Silence of the Lambs (1991) but that was the farthest from his mind, thinking more along the lines of the films by Dario Argento or Andrei Tarkovsky.

Stanley originally considered Nicolas Cage for the Dust Devil but the budget wasn’t big enough for someone of the actor’s caliber and ultimately, he didn’t think he was right for the role. Stanley had seen Robert John Burke in Hal Hartley’s The Unbelievable Truth (1989), liked the actor’s intensity and felt he was right for the role. The filmmaker could return to Namibia and shoot on location thanks to elections in March 1990 when a socialist government was voted in. The production arrived in July 1991 but Stanley met with resistance from the financial backers over the casting of the female lead. Miramax executives Bob and Harvey Weinstein wanted Chelsea Field, who had just come off a part in The Last Boy Scout (1991), as they thought she had more star power than Stanley’s choice, Kerry Fox. They pushed hard for Field and Stanley relented but in retrospect felt that she didn’t play the character as mean as written and never quite got the South African accent. The studio also tried to convince him to set the film in Santa Fe, New Mexico and use American Indians instead of black South Africans.

The shoot was a challenging one as Stanley shot the film on the actual locations of the original murders, requiring the production to cover 1500 kilometers of road during the eight-week shoot. The pre-production period pushed the shooting schedule to the start of the windy season with gale force winds making it impossible to stand upright. Cars had to be weighed down with sandbags lest they be blown off the roads. Despite these setbacks, he enjoyed filming in Namibia, comparing it “shooting on the face of Mars. I like being in landscapes where humans have no sane reason to be there.”

Three quarters of the way through the production, Palm was gradually going bankrupt and Stanley only became aware of this when equipment they needed failed to show up and the crew began leaving. By the end of production there were only eight crew members left! In December 1991, Stanley delivered a 120-minute cut of the film that was subsequently edited down to 95 minutes and shown to a test audience in April 1992 to a not-surprisingly confused response. Palm went into liquidation and any further post-production was shut down. Polygram took over British distribution rights and promptly shelved the film. Miramax produced their own cut that gutted all the supernatural elements and restructured the narrative completely. In January 1993, Stanley managed to track down all the original elements of the film and spent 40,000 pounds of his own money reconstructing his edit of the film. He went bankrupt trying to complete Dust Devil, losing his apartment and living in a spare room above the ticket office of a movie theater.

“The moment you start dealing with God, the Devil, the big issues, you end up in the genre, whether you like it or not. So in some bizarre way the horror genre has become the last place where you can really deal with these things. If you’re trying to actually do something which is about those kinds of issues, that is where you end up.” – Richard Stanley

Was it all worth it? Stanley pushed himself to his physical and emotional limits making Dust Devil with the result being a fascinating struggle between the good and evil aspects of a woman’s soul filtered through the lens of the horror genre. He isn’t interested in making a straight up genre exercise but something else, something more deeply felt, something that resonates and stays with you long after the film ends.

SOURCES

Dust Devil liner notes. Subversive Cinema. 2006.

Rowlands, Paul. “Richard Stanley Talks to Paul Rowlands About Dust Devil.” Money into Light. July 2012.

Totaro, Donato. “Richard Stanley Interview: The Dust Devil.” Off Screen. August 1997.

Simple Men

"When you're approached by a studio, they say 'We want you to make your own films' – and then they describe how the project will get financed. These are well-intentioned people; they're not stupid. But the amount of money they want to get, and the way they want to get it, prohibits me from making my kind of film. That's why most big movies today are so homogeneous."– Hal Hartley


It is this sentiment, coming from independent filmmaker Hal Hartley, which may explain the decidedly un-Hollywood kind of films that make up his eclectic body of work. He emerged on the scene in the late 1980s with films that explored the banality of suburban life mixed with the bizarre, often with hilariously ironic results. The stories and their settings that he explored were realistic enough (i.e. the boy-meets-girl tale of The Unbelievable Truth) but they were then contrasted by stylized dialogue delivered in a deadpan style reminiscent of the great stone-face Buster Keaton. His characters often talk in philosophical terms but in very mundane situations that challenge the audience. The way the dialogue is delivered by his actors appears to be awkward but this is done to illustrate the irony of the context that is spoken in.

This is evident in Simple Men (1992), which marked Hartley’s most expensive feature at that time with a meager (by Hollywood standards) $2 million budget. The film concerns two brothers on a quest to find their eccentric father and saw the filmmaker exploring the theme of desire: surviving it, suppressing it, and understanding it. As one character remarks, “there’s only trouble and desire, but the funny thing is, when you desire something you immediately get into trouble. And when you get into trouble, you don’t desire anything at all.” This is just a small sample of the weighty philosophical musings contained in this film as the characters discuss the primary themes of life: trust, truth, love, guilt, and human existence in general but never in a dry, boring way – always with an amusingly quirky spin but with poignant resonance. It’s a tricky balancing act that Hartley gets just right with Simple Men.

Bill McCabe (Robert John Burke) is a professional thief betrayed by his girlfriend (and partner-in-crime) for the other guy in their crew in what has to be one of the most laid-back break-ups among criminals put on film in recent memory. Hartley said of this sequence, “Yeah, well anyone can film a stick-up. I just wondered what happened afterwards, if the guy obviously had no intention of ever shooting anyone.” Bill is bitter and upset but he doesn’t do anything about it. Meanwhile, his younger, more contemplative brother Dennis (Bill Sage) is trying to track down their father (John MacKay), the legendary Dodgers shortstop who allegedly threw a bomb in the front door of the Pentagon 23 years ago killing seven people. As a result, he became a fugitive and was finally caught by the authorities after suffering a stroke.

Dennis finds Bill and when they go to visit their dad in the hospital a nurse tells them that he’s escaped. Their mother gives them a phone number but it’s disconnected. The area code is Long Island and so they go there looking for clues as to his whereabouts. Along the way, Bill gets involved with Kate (Karen Sillas), the beautiful owner of a diner, and cross paths with the mysterious Elina (Elina Lowensohn) who may know where their father is hiding out.

Hartley populates Simple Men with troubled people, like Ned Rifle (Jeffrey Howard) who can’t get his motorcycle to work (“There’s nothing like a machine to make a man feel insignificant.”) or Bill who suffers from a broken heart. There’s Kate, whose ex-husband was in jail but is due back any day now, and Martin (Martin Donovan), a bitter fisherman who has a thing for Kate but she won’t give him the time of day. Hartley proceeds to bounce these oddballs off each other in absurd set pieces, like one that starts off with Bill and Ned engaging in snappy banter and ends with a nun and a police officer fighting on the street while Ned dazedly repeats, “There’s nothing but trouble and desire,” which could easily be the subtitle of this film.

Robert John Burke and Bill Sage do a good job of playing slightly estranged brothers whose friction comes from their broken home thanks to their fugitive father. It is Hartley regular Martin Donovan that comes off the best because he knows exactly how to deliver the filmmaker’s stylized dialogue, playing an angry man due to unrequited love. He had previously been in Trust (1990) and Surviving Desire (1991) and was, in some respects, Hartley’s cinematic alter ego, but in Simple Men he plays a very different character than in those previous efforts and it demonstrates his impressive range as an actor. Yet for all of the deadpan acting, the end of the film, when Bill and Dennis finally come to terms with their estranged father, is surprisingly moving, as is the relationship that develops between Bill and Kate. This is due in large part to the palpable chemistry between Burke and Karen Sillas. Initially, Bill remains cool and aloof towards Kate but soon finds himself irresistibly drawn to her earthy charisma. The looks they exchange throughout the film convey their growing attraction towards each other.

Hartley adopts a simple style consisting mostly of static shots and long takes befitting of a dialogue-driven film such as this one. I’m sure this was done more out of budgetary limitations and lack of experience than an aesthetic choice but it is not distracting because the characters are so interesting and their dialogue is so well-written. The film’s show-stopping sequence comes when several of the characters break into an impromptu dance routine scored to “Kool Thing” by Sonic Youth. It comes out of left field and is completely at odds with the rest of the film and yet strangely works because of that reason. It’s the moment where the film temporarily breaks free of its rigid aesthetic and has a little fun. Hartley had tried a musical sequence previously for a short film he made for PBS but the one in Simple Men is more ambitious because it is being inserted into a feature-length film. It worked and is probably the one scene that most people remember from the film.

Hartley wrote the screenplay for Simple Men shortly after he left college and before he made Trust. The $2 million dollar budget was the biggest one he had worked with up to that point – a considerable leap from the $70,000 budget of his feature-length debut The Unbelievable Truth (1989). It successfully screened at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival but I think it’s fair to say that Simple Men was not well-received among mainstream critics. Roger Ebert led the charge, giving the film two out of four stars and felt that, “The problem with postmodern movies like Simple Men is that they seem to consider us fools for watching them and, on the basis of the evidence on the screen, it's hard to disagree.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “The people in Simple Men are functions of a long shaggy-dog story, composed of purposely flat dialogue that, from time to time, leads to a purposely flat punch line.” USA Today also gave the film two out of four stars and Mike Clark wrote, “Writer-director Hal Hartley may be the most self-consciously monotonic U.S. filmmaker since the late Jack Webb, his verbal rhythms as numbingly droll as Webb's were numbingly staccato.” The Washington Post’s Rita Kempley wrote, “Simple Men has plenty of plot, but no design. There's a forced serendipity to the tale, amplified by the zombielike performances of the actors.” Entertainment Weekly gave it a B- and Lawrence O’Toole wrote, “But self-consciousness is the style of Simple Men, and soon the unwavering tone of playful existentialism wears very thin. For all his talent, Hartley talks a better movie than he makes, proving once again that the gift of gab is no guarantee of a good film experience.” In one of the rare positive notices, the Globe and Mail’s Christopher Harris wrote, “Like Hartley's other films, Simple Men is an engaging, amusing and faintly baffling tale. Hartley is a master of indirect storytelling, of revealing things on the edges more than at the centre.”

At times, the dialogue in Simple Men veers dangerously close to film school posturing but what saves it from being nothing more than pretentious twaddle is the way the actors deliver it – often as natural as possible or in an ironic way that is funny, like the burnt out existential local cop, or the gas station attendant who plays guitar and is learning French to, y’know, impress girls. If his characters often speak in aphorisms it is because Hartley wants them to “say what they mean. Exactly what they mean, which rarely happens in life.” Simple Men is a quintessential Hartley film and one that is arguably the best example of his particular aesthetic and worldview more than any other film. It may also be his most accessible populated by several actors who have gone on to distinguished careers, most notably Martin Donovan (The Opposite of Sex) and Robert John Burke (Rescue Me). Hartley continues to make films, adopting digital camera technology in 1999, and hasn’t looked back since. He remains fiercely independent, refusing to sell out in Hollywood in favor of making his own, deeply personal films.


Also, check out Sean Gill's excellent take over at his blog.

SOURCES

Pall, Ellen. “This Director’s Wish List Doesn’t Include Hollywood.” The New York Times. October 11, 1992.

Peachment, Chris. “Young, Gipped and Frugal.” The Independent. November 1, 1992.