Nine years ago filmmaker Zola Maseko began what he describes as an arduous journey toward the making of The Whale Caller – based on Zakes Mda’s novel of the same name, the film won the award for Best African Film at the inaugural Joburg Film Festival in November 2016…
The poignant portrait of a man, his loneliness and his beloved whale, is a break from the norm for the famed filmmaker, best known for making films of a political nature, with his 2004 feature Drum having screened at La Semaine de la Critique in Cannes. On the contrary, The Whale Caller, falling under the genre of magical realism, primarily seeks not to account or teach, but to entertain. “I’ve spent nine years of my life obsessed with trying to make this story to the detriment of all my relationships… I think that a lot of these stories choose me,” says Maseko. “But I think that with Zakes Mda’s book, what made me want to make it is that firstly it’s a fantastic story… But why I really wanted to make this film is because the story took me back to my childhood when this dream of being a filmmaker was first born, or the seed was first planted.”
A self-described “lonely, fearful, and very introverted child” who read books a lot, Maseko says that when he saw his first movie at the drive-in in Swaziland, that was the moment that he knew he wanted to be a filmmaker, because his dream world had been actualised. “It was love at first sight,” he remarks. “A lot of my work before The Whale Caller has been very political. People that come from marginalised backgrounds or minorities have a responsibility to tell the stories of their people and it’s very easy to get stuck in that genre of trying to tell important stories or stories that retell our history, but making The Whale Caller was an opportunity for me to go back to my childhood and just dwell in a movie that was magical, that was a very big motivation…” says Maseko. “A very big lesson I’m learning right now is that people don’t only want to go to the movies to be lectured. People go the movies to escape, they want a story that will engage, entertain and relax them.”
After reading the book and purchasing the rights to make the film – which he has spent the past nine years paying off – Maseko asked Mda to write the screenplay, a practice somewhat uncommon when adapting a book for the screen, but the visual interpretation required the writer’s whimsical voice inherent in the story. “I asked Zakes Mda to write the screenplay because he writes very poetically and very visually and I wanted the script to be as poetic and visual as his novel,” explains Maseko. “We have a very wonderful relationship. Zakes is a very generous man, generous in spirit, and generous as an artist. The film is different from the book. Obviously it is based on the book but for instance the end is different… And when I told Zakes that I needed to change the ending, never ever was he precious about his ending. He understood that these are two different art forms and he had no problem in adapting my vision. So it was a really great working relationship… he always encouraged me saying, this is your interpretation of my book.”
Set in the Western Cape town of Hermanus, the film tells the story of the whale caller, played by Sello Maake Ka-Ncube, whose seemingly futile existence and life in seclusion is centred around the return of the southern right whales year after year. He shares a special bond, a true romance, with one such female whale, Sharisha – and she dances to the sound of his kelp-horn. This uncommon romance continues year after year until one day he meets Saluni, played by Amrain Ismail-Essop, the eccentric town drunk, and an unusual love triangle ensues between man, whale and woman.
Maseko says that there was no casting process for the character of the whale caller as in his mind Sello Maake kaNcube has always been the title character. The difficult casting was for Saluni, who “is really the protagonist in the story,” explains Maseko, “We spent four years looking for Saluni and a week before we started shooting in came Amrain Ismail-Essop and in typical Saluni fashion she grabbed the role by the scruff of the neck and owned it. She told me at the screening that she could identify so much with the character because she had been going through her own personal and spiritual growth that made her relate very deeply to the character. So it was serendipitous that she would walk in and grab the role weeks before we began shooting.”
A Black Roots Pictures production, shot on location in Hermanus over 19 days in November 2015, the initial plan was to capture footage of real whales for the film, but “there’s a rule in filmmaking where they say never use children or animals because they are terrible at taking direction,” Maseko laughs. After spending a month trying to film the whales with no success, the decision was taken to create Sharisha using special effects, which George Webster at Johannesburg-based Loco VFX headed up. The film underwent a lengthy post-production process, eight months to be precise, from January to October 2016.
DOP Miles Goodall, who shot the film on the ARRI Alexa, worked together with Maseko to find a dreamlike colour palette that would reflect a world of magical realism: “I really felt that I needed to create a magical world that my characters live in and it had to be a world where it is believable that a man could be in love with a whale…”
The ARRI Alexa was selected for its likeness to a 35mm film look, which he still prefers. “When I studied we used to use film, if I could have shot this film in 35mm I would have loved to but technology has changed so much. However they have developed digital cameras now that can give you the look and the feel. So the Arri Alexa was the camera that could come closest to giving us the look, feel and texture that we would get using 35mm film.”
When asked what he thinks the message of the film is, Maseko earnestly said that for him, films are not about messages, they’re about storytelling. “We all bring our subjective world views when we watch a film, so everyone is going to take something different from the film. However it is a film about loneliness, about a man that found it very difficult to integrate and form meaningful relationships because of the death of his parents when he was younger. He says in the film that ‘whales always come back just like clockwork’, which means he wanted something dependable, without the risk of loss. The minute you open your heart up to another human being you stand the chance of being hurt, of being rejected, of feeling shameful. So I think a lot of people can identify with those feelings,” he concludes.
Co-produced by Maseko and Dylan Voogt of Stage 5 Films, The Whale Caller is funded by the Industrial Development Corporation, the National Film and Video Foundation, and the Department of Trade and Industry. The film will be distributed in South Africa by Ster-Kinekor.
