Actor Embeth Davidtz Heads Behind the Camera for Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight

As an actor, Embeth Davidtz has tangled with the undead (Army of Darkness), endured a brutal Nazi commander (Schindler’s List), nurtured a girl with magical powers (Matilda), and brought authenticity and body positivity to a breast cancer survivor (Ray Donovan).

Those varied voices and her childhood in South Africa helped shape her writing and directing debut, the biographical drama Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. Based on Alexandra Fuller’s 2001 award-winning memoir, the film follows an 8-year-old girl named Bobo (newcomer Lexi Venter) as White rule in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) collapses during the Bush War circa 1980.

“I’ve read a lot of screenplays. I realize I probably [absorbed a lot] by just percolating and macerating like berries in the juice of many, many, many screenplays that I’ve studied: the ones of movies that I’ve been in, the ones I’ve been in that work, the ones I’ve been in that didn’t work, the ones that I read that I didn’t get the job, the ones I read that I didn’t like ... I definitely had seen enough, but boy, writing it is a whole other thing,” Davidtz said.

Out this month, the film co-stars Davidtz as Bobo’s emotionally unstable mother, Nicola, a White tenant farmer and policewoman, and Zikhona Bali (Thando) as Sarah, a Black servant who cares for Bobo, risking retribution from soldiers viewing her as a collaborator.

The Alliance of Women Film Journalists named the film its July 11 Movie of the Week for how it tackles the complexities of colonialism and racism through a child’s lyrical perspective. (I’m a member of AWFJ, although not on this voting panel.) While the film raises “questions about whose stories are centered and whose are mythicized,” it’s a vivid and thoughtful debut where “Davidtz navigates the political and personal with a sensitive touch,” the reviewers said.

We caught up with Davidtz over Zoom to discuss her deep connection to this story, the directors who inspired her, and her creative process.

Born in Indiana, Davidtz moved with her parents to South Africa when she was 9 years old because of her father’s teaching post at a university. She graduated from high school in Pretoria and studied at Rhodes University in Makhanda before her film and stage work attracted Hollywood’s attention.

Though she’s played roles ranging from the 19th century (Mansfield Park) to well into the future (Bicentennial Man), reading Fuller’s book brought her back to her youth.

“We moved to South Africa in the middle of a big political conflict,” she said. “Our creative cells must just be hugely spongelike, because I feel like I took in so much and observed so much as a kid.”

Fuller’s voice spoke to her, looking back on her childhood and then segueing into the matter-of-fact tone that Bobo has. Bobo is a precocious girl, running around barefoot with dirty hair, riding a motorbike with a firearm, and strutting with confident entitlement. She pokes with curiosity through the offerings Black residents leave at loved ones’ gravesites and explains in voiceover that Black people don’t have last names, something she’s clearly heard elsewhere.

When her relatives watch TV footage of the nation’s conflict, thankful that their Black servants are the “good ones,” Bobo blurts out, “Are we racist?” Her grandmother and mother nearly fall over in shock.

“She [Fuller] has such a unique way of talking about the colonialism, the racism, describing her crazy, colorful, interesting, eccentric, racist family. She really walks the razor’s edge between loving her family but also exposing them for who they were, you know?” Davidtz said.

Meanwhile, Sarah calmly but firmly scolds Bobo for treating the Black children she plays with as if they’re her servants, among other matters.

“I love that actress so much, Zikhona Bali, because she has just this equanimity about her. Even when she’s cross with [Bobo], she’s like a glass of cold water. She just got the balance of both loving and raising this kid and trying to teach her really well.”

Davidtz first pursued the book rights around 2016, thinking Nicola would make for a meaty role. Nicola is riveting, all right, wearing negligees off-duty and shooting a snake in the kitchen with an automatic rifle before asking Sarah for tea. But this character was so larger than life, the observations Davidtz wanted to include about racism and colonialism became clunky.

“I needed the focus to be on this child, because I thought, That’s going to give us the most of a world view of what’s going on, and it’s going to tell the tale. By the end, you get more objectivity out of her, and you get an expanded world view, you hope.”

Although Fuller’s memoir spans 20 years, the film focuses on a particular time frame around the family leaving Zimbabwe. Davidtz took some liberties with the material, inserting some of her personal feelings about the continent she left behind.

“I might get hammered by people who love the book,” she said. “But the ending was necessary, both for me in terms of, what do I see when I look back at Africa? The child that was the scrappy young kid that was me living there, who was very similar to Alexandra Fuller’s young child self as Bobo. What do I think? What’s the image in my mind when I look back down that dusty road? ... It’s the one thing that I thought I could, as a filmmaker, add to the story.”

For her part, Fuller was encouraging. “I had her read the screenplay. I just said, ‘Look, I’ve taken creative license.’ … And it’s hard. You just feel like you’re taking somebody else’s story. It’s a big responsibility,” Davidtz said. “And, you know, she was OK with what I did—at the ending too, which I thought she really could hate, and she didn’t, thank goodness.”

Writing was “a painstaking task” for Davidtz, who used Final Draft but also loves pen and paper (a person after my own heart). “If you saw the littered desktop that I ended up having, it would be painful for anybody who was a very competent screenwriter to watch my process,” she said.

As much as her acting career helped hone her story sense, so did other filmmakers. A favorite screenplay is from 2005’s Junebug, the comedic drama in which she costarred with Alessandro Nivola and Amy Adams. “Just how [Angus MacLachlan] wrote, the domesticity and simplicity and love he had for those characters. I think he based them on people, or sort of combinations of people that he’d known and [director] Phil [Morrison] had known.”

She also drew on films from Terrence Malick; Steven Spielberg, who cast her in Schindler’s List; and Taika Waititi.

“What [Malick] did with something like Badlands and the use of voiceover in both Days of Heaven and Badlands, he’s a huge influence. And his sort of idea of the natural world, and this scope of us as these little beings, that we are within this greater context of nature,” she said. “I think that Spielberg’s depiction of children really stuck with me. [With] Empire of the Sun, the movie itself, and the Christian Bale character, the way we follow him entirely throughout the movie. You see that young, sort of pompous, spoiled child at the beginning, and that he’s so broken by the end when his eyes look up, when he’s finally back in his mother’s embrace. That made such an impression on me.

“I feel like the world that plays out through a child’s eyes is one that most resonates with me. Even Jojo Rabbit. Again, there’s a boy and his inner conversations with Hitler. The absurdity of that allows us, the adult, to look at a world where kids are so innocent within and even with the things they’re saying, which is so appalling.”

Filming with Venter, a novice who was just 7 years old at the time, was incredibly challenging, she added, “but the beauty of the whole experience, and the reason that it can exist, is because it was the voice of a seven-year-old.”

Completing this project fills her with pride—and respect for fellow writers.

“I think few screenwriters have been handed the gift of a book like that as source material with those characters,” she said. While she’s unsure about whether she’d write an original screenplay, the thought of trying another adaptation isn’t daunting.

“I think I will do it again. I’ll just do it slowly, like I did this time. Well, a day at a time.”