Biography

Directed 1 actor to an Oscar nomination: Bill Nighy, who was nominated for Living (2022).

My background is in still photography. They always say that directors have one other department that they really obsess about, and for a lot of filmmakers it's apparently production design, but for me it's definitely photography. The joy of coming into this film [Living (2022)] from South Africa, not being English, was that I was able to approach it with a certain freedom as an outsider that was not too bogged down by my own historical understanding of a lived experience of the UK. I was able to pour over images of photographers who I love and whose work I had seen, a lot of them Americans who had gone to England in the early 50s. [Dec. 2022]

[on the visual design of Living (2022)] I had shot my previous film [Moffie (2019)] in a made-up aspect ratio I invented called 1.48 : 1. I wanted to do the same thing again and I was waiting for Film4 and Lionsgate to say absolutely not, but then they said yes, and that was amazing because that aspect ratio lends itself to portraiture. Then Jamie [Jamie Ramsay] [the cinematographer] came on and I shared all my images before we shot. We had worked together 4 times before. He understands my obsession and is very good at managing it. He looks at all references and says I get it, and then we go forth from that point. It was a joy to think very photographically. One of my other secret obsessions for "Living" was [American painter] Edward Hopper. That scene in the café where we first meet Tom Burke was chosen because I felt I could put this man in black in a room that was very white and have a very washed-out window and have a lonely man in a hat walk by outside. [Dec. 2022]

[press conference for The History of Sound (2025) at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival] The interesting thing about synesthesia is that every person experiences it in a different way. There's not a single combination of things - you can have taste and colour in your eyes or you can see complete colours and not have any vision at all. We tried many things, we went up to Provincetown, we shot a lot of different ideas and it was something we explored. But then I decided in the end I was going to play with the actual sounds that Lionel is escaping into when he feels and hears certain sounds that trigger memories.