Gabriella Blumberg and Jordy Sank on ‘Die Kwiksilwers’
Welcome to Talking Movies, I’m Spling. We’re talking about a road trip comedy adventure called Die Kwiksilwers (The Quicksilvers), a film that’s coming out at cinemas on 1 May. In this Zoom interview, I gleaned some special insights from writer-producer Gabriella Blumberg and writer-director Jordy Sank.
Welcome guys.
Gabriella: Thank you.
Jordy: Thanks for having us.
Great to chat with you. I understand you’ve both worked together on several projects already. How did you start working together and come to be involved in this specific project?
Jordy: Yeah, so it really all started with, Gabriella just finished a master’s in the UK and she came back to Johannesburg and we met for a coffee and I was also freshly out of a job in commercials. And I had this documentary bubbling in the background and I said to Gabi, “what do you know about producing?” And she said, “absolutely nothing.” And I said, great, we’ll figure it out together. Ever since then, we’ve been producing each other’s work and working on films together. And it’s just been the most wonderful collaborations. We always knew each other beforehand in social circles and from mutual friends, but finding a working partner early on and just very, very organically growing together, and having like-minded visions for the films we wanted to make, it was just really a blessing for both of us. And we haven’t stopped since and we have no intention of stopping now.
Gabriella: Yeah. And starting with how we started making this film, as Jordy mentioned, our first film together was a Holocaust documentary called I Am Here. We released it in 2021. It was quite remarkable because it was our first project. We really were just passionate about it and we just tried to get it out as much as possible. And it did really well in South Africa. It won some SAFTAs, and was sold internationally. But Jordy and I both also wanted to get into fiction films. We still love documentaries and what’s interesting with the work that we do at Sanktuary Films is we work across genre. We don’t only make documentaries, we only make narrative content. So then this film, Die Kwiksilwers, was a full commission by Kyknet and really just a wonderful opportunity. It’s a fun film. It’s a road trip comedy and great to do it with Kyknet. Yeah. So it’s really a story about this woman who’s late on in her years.
Jordy: She’s grieving her husband and they used to go on all these wild and wacky road trips across the country together. She decides to go on this road trip with three of her good friends for one last hurrah. And also at the same time, she’s escaping a son who, in a very loving way, has confined her and doesn’t think that she’s capable of doing certain things. So this is also her way of rebelling and proving to him that she has a few more chapters in her book that she’s wanting to write. The amazing thing about the story is also that she goes on this adventure with some of her best friends and they are completely different personalities. She’s kind of shoved in this very tight car, this vintage Ford Granada with these women who are complete opposites to her and it’s tension as they all try to get along and go on this road trip on their own terms.
And I noticed that it centres on elderly characters, as you mentioned. I wanted to find out, this seems like a recurring theme in your work. Is it something you hold dear? It just feels as though there’s a personal element there.
Jordy: You know what? I think there’s a lot of recurring themes that people tell us. It’s the older characters, it’s grief. But I think they’re very interesting to us just because of how universal they are. It’s all these things that we can’t really escape, getting older and dealing with grief. But also I think on the flip side, I think we also just love stories of resilience. When I think to all of our stories that we’ve actually ever done, they always have a character that overcomes obstacles and is extremely, extremely resilient.
Gabriella: And I also think sometimes it happens organically and then maybe you look back and you realise you were actually really focused on something, but it can actually happen organically. Like with Sanktuary Films, as I mentioned, our first film was a documentary and the subject was 98 years old when we were filming. So then when Jordy was writing our next short film, Leemtes en Leegheid, we had just been spending about three years on the subject of a 98 year old. So it felt quite natural that then the short film also had an older subject. And then the actress who acted in Leemtes en Leegheid was Lida Botha. And we so loved being on set with her and seeing how even when we’re on set, and it’s actually the same with our documentary, the subject Ella Blumenthal, who was 98 when we were filming, we were trying to plan the schedule that was accommodating. But then with Ella and also with Lida, they had far more energy than the crew. They were just always up for any challenge and have such zest for life. And we thought, we try to not be ageist and we keep working with these older actors, but actually maybe there are some elements and some stereotypes that we’re still buying into. So this film isn’t as heavy as our previous ones. And as Jordy said, that these four completely different characters from each other shoved in a car over three days and clashing and proving that age is just a number. And there’s still so much life to live and so much energy that these women have. So I think organically, each film we did, we were inspired by the people that we were filming. And that’s what just gets our creative juices flowing to write the next one.
I think it’s actually so refreshing because these days a lot of programming is designed for sort of millennials and the younger generations. I know that Die Kwiksilwers is not a 40 plus film specifically, it’s actually a mainstream film and a crowd-pleasing film and one of those feel-good films as well. So it’s a great one for people to go and watch in the cinema. It’s also a really spirited and heartfelt coming-of-age comedy-drama. I wanted to find out from you, does comedy writing come easily to you? And what were some of the inspirations for this film?
Jordy: One thing that we just figured out in the writing is that I think comedy is actually a lot harder to write than drama. I think one of the things that we really love is that pairing of the comedy with that heartfelt element and with the drama because you see it a lot in like Taika Waititi’s films like Jojo Rabbit, Hunt for the Wilderpeople… Often the drama is so much more enhanced when the audience is able to laugh and let their guard down a little bit. I think as far as comedic inspirations, there’s just so, so many. And I think also just culturally in both of our Jewish heritages, I think laughing at pain and comedy is just kind of like inherent in, it’s almost like a part of the culture.
Gabriella: Jordy and I co-wrote this with Marissa van Eeden, who’s a very strong comedy writer. When we were workshopping this, it’s also about having input. I think it’s also really important understanding culturally what works and what is authentic. But then we also just had some fun when we were writing. We spoke to our different parents’ friends who had been on road trips and got all of their stories.
I wanted to find out a little bit more about the Ford Granada. It’s a very big part of this film. When people watch this, they might remember films like Little Miss Sunshine with the yellow VW.
Jordy: Yes. So I think the Ford Granada really, when we were looking for the right vehicle, we actually went to a few different people who have vintage cars. It’s almost like a physical representation, almost a vessel for this memory that she has of her husband, the time spent together, the road trips, the fun… the good.
Gabriella: So as Jordy is saying, what the car represents, her husband and just the beauty of the car, that maybe to be understood by everyone, but then also for the specific age group to actually get the reference and to feel nostalgic of, I remember my family trips in that car.
Yeah, it’s kind of like a time capsule and a blast from the past. Another thing that really works well is the setting of the road trip. I know that the Karoo and its landscape is quite iconic and I thought that really worked well as the backdrop for this film and to contribute to its atmosphere… did it present any challenges?
Jordy: Yeah, it added so much to the story because it almost felt like a character on its own. And I remember there was a moment when we were actually out there, I was speaking to Lida and some of the other actresses in the film, and they were saying like, we completely understand why you had to schlep all of us here. Not only for them just being actors to be in that environment… makes it so much more immersive, but they said for them, it feels like this element of the film that is just so, so important. And yeah, it really just became a character of its own in the film.
Gabriella: Yeah, I think that also the stakes are higher, like for the son who’s chasing his mom, she’s literally in the middle of nowhere with no signal, he doesn’t know where she is, there’s no clear landmark. But there’s also something magic that happens when you’re in this empty landscape and you get a bit of humbleness and perspective on humanity. And, you know, in this road trip, they’re going to Sutherland to look at the stars. There’s really this feeling, and especially because this film is also a bit about grief, but this feeling of how small we are compared to the universe, and there’s no better place to set that than in the Karoo. But from a production standpoint, there were so many challenges. What we did do that helped us is that we shot most of the Karoo scenes, we actually shot on a farm in Willowmore. So we found a farm that had lots of different variety of landscapes, but we’re in South Africa, so we’re on the farm, there’s load-shedding, okay, that’s fine, we have generators, okay, there’s a cell phone tower, so we’re going to still at least have cellphone signal, but then the batteries from the cellphone tower, because the cellphone tower was solar powered, the batteries had been stolen. So now we’re on the farm at 12 o’clock at night, we can’t communicate with any of the crew, and they don’t have the call sheet for the next day, it was the first day we had arrived at the farm, the one day we were filming, and it was so windy, we had to bring in trucks just to actually house crew members, because our catering tents were getting blown down. So we definitely were in the elements, but what was remarkable was we had a crew that was just committed to getting this made, a team to make sure everyone was as comfortable as possible, and a cast that were just so full of energy. You’ll see in the film, there’s a scene of Lida jumping on the back of a bakkie that’s filled with goats, and she just jumped on it and sat between these goats, you know, they just have such energy, and that because it’s such a small town, all of the people who live there banded together, so the one woman was doing all the laundry of the costumes, and someone else opened up their guest house so that the actors could stay in a bit of a nicer place, and the other person was doing the catering and cooking everything, and the person who we probably gave the most business to was the tyre shop, because of all of the burst tyres along those roads. So it really felt like a team effort.
Rewinding a little bit, I wanted to find out about the collaborative process of actually co-writing the script, because you guys have worked on a few projects already, and I also wanted to find out if the story had evolved…
Jordy: Yeah, it feels like so long ago, but there were definitely a lot of changes. We actually pulled also a lot of writers to come in just for like a day workshop, just to help us workshop different ideas and, you know, get that kind of ironed out. And we were very, very open to letting the story be kind of malleable to what it needed to be.
Gabriella: Yeah, I think a difficult thing was actually dropping stories, like in some of the writers’ rooms, or when we were doing research, we would pull together all these hilarious road trip stories, and what happens if this happens to them, or what happens if they make this decision, they take that path. But then comes the difficult point when you have to think, how does this help our character arc? And we had first a short synopsis, then we had like a beginning, middle, end, then we actually had the story beats, then we actually wrote the script, then we rewrote the script… then we rewrote the script. When we were in the edit, I would say we stayed quite true to what we had shot. And I think that’s mainly due to the amount of planning that we had to do, because with a South African film, that’s quite a contained budget. You know, we could only shoot for 17 days. It was an ambitious project for quite a small budget. When we got into the edit, we actually, I think, had already seen the film in our mind from the script stage, and we’re also on the same page of what the edit would look like. And we also work with Esther Badenhorst, who’s been our editor on all of our films, from our documentaries to our shorts.
Jordy: There were no like sizable chunks that were cut out or scenes that were dropped, to be honest. There were only little moments or like some dialogue here and there that was taken out.
Gabriella: But it can be really hard when you’re working with such a talented composer. You want to just put every piece that they’d composed into the film. Composing it is such an element of the storytelling, because it’s thinking, do you need music here, comedic music, to enhance the comedy? Or is it spelling out to the audience what to think? So which moments are you not going to have music and just let the dialogue play.
I just wanted to find out more about the casting process and how that all worked?
Jordy: Yeah, so we took a very long time to cast. It took a good few months of searching. And it was kind of like a thing to pair people up, because you had like Lida’s character, then you had her next door neighbour, Anna, who was complete opposite with her. And there’s this big power dynamic and struggle for control between those two characters. Then you have Katie, who’s the very reserved, shy, quiet one. And then you have Minky, who was played by Susanne Beyers. She’s the wild card, a crazy, wired-to-the-moon character. And we were very aware, I think Lida, we knew for a very long time that she was going to be Elsabe, the main character. It’s always great to know that you’ve done a good job at the casting, but the story really just bounced off the pages and came to life. And before we even started shooting, I knew that these ladies were the perfect fit to counterbalance one another and play the characters.
Gabriella: We know we’re so privileged to work with such veteran actors that have such range, and each of them could have actually played each other. But even when we were conceptualising the project, as I mentioned, we had just worked with Lida on a short film.
So we always had her in our mind, even when we were writing.
I feel like she’s an unsung hero when it comes to South African films. You see her in so many different productions and she’s always memorable. And so I’m really glad that she got such a great opportunity to actually play a lead role and did such a great job with it as well. You really gave her wings. So, you know, Die Kwiksilwers is really an audience favourite kind of film. And I know that it kind of was viewed like that at the Silwerskermfees as well. It was my favourite film from that year of films. And, you know, what do you hope viewers are going to take away from this film?
Jordy: I think the main message for me is just to think, live life to the fullest and realise that like, you know, it doesn’t matter who you are or how old you are, like you’re never too late to sort of start a new chapter and to, you know, make life memorable.
Gabriella: So it’s been interesting speaking to people who are speaking about their relationship with their elderly parents and how or how they perceive their parents to be and what chapter they perceive their parents to be in of their lives. So it’s been really interesting hearing that tone of feedback. But also for me, what I love about this film is that there’s also this intimacy in female friendships. And we have these four women who are all in their eighties and how they, the spoken and unspoken bond and roles that they play in one another’s lives is something that I think is really relatable and really beautiful.
It’s got a bit of a Mamma Mia kind of quality, I suppose you could say?
Gabriella: Yeah. And it’s also actually releasing around Mother’s Day. So it’s also a fantastic opportunity for everyone to just grab their mom, go on a road trip to the cinemas and enjoy this film together.
