In the film, director Steven Silver tackles the ethnic black-on-black violence that erupted in a divided South Africa towards the end of apartheid as seen through the lenses of real-life photographers Kevin Carter (Kitsch), Greg Marinovich (Ryan Phillippe), Joao Silva (Neels Van Jaarsveld), and Ken Oosterbroek (Frank Rautenbach). Based on the non-fiction book The Bang-Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War (co-written by Marinovich and Silva - the two remaining members of the group) The Bang Bang Club pulls few punches when it comes to the violent images of war, many recreated from actual photographs, that these men captured up close on film.
[Spoilers follow]
In real life, Kevin Carter hit rock bottom due to substance abuse (a coping mechanism for the emotional trauma and stress of the job, the film suggests) and traveled to Sudan in 1993 to photograph a U.N. humanitarian mission. A resulting photograph depicting a starving Sudanese girl being stalked by a vulture won him the Pulitzer Prize for photojournalism but courted controversy over the girl's subsequent fate, leading to debates over a journalist's moral obligation to intercede on behalf of their subject. Weeks after winning the Pulitzer, Carter's friend Oosterbroek was killed in the line of duty. A few months later Carter took his own life.
Kitsch, needless to say, felt an extreme responsibility to honor not only Carter's life and legacy but the lingering emotional scars of the people who lived through the horrific and senseless violence of apartheid. He spoke of the high stakes, personal risks, and difficulties of returning to normal life after undergoing arguably the hardest role of his career -- and how his next films, 2012's John Carter of Mars and Battleship, presented their own new challenges.
The Bang Bang Club is available on VOD now and opens in limited release on April 22.
You've said that part of the appeal of playing Kevin Carter was that it scared you. What was that fear all about?
Man, so many things from a personal standpoint. I think the biggest thing that scared me was doing what it takes to play this cat honestly because the stakes are so high. It's a true story. Going there and working with the guys he actually worked with, the two remaining Bang Bang Club members, and just taking that challenge. I mean, if you take on a project and you're like, "I'm gonna kill this," where's the risk? Where's the challenge? I think that's what makes you prep so much; that's what makes you push the envelope and do whatever you can to play this guy honestly. Because everyone that is going to watch you is going to go, "Oh, that's who Kev Carter was." You can derive so many assumptions through the way I play him, so you take that to heart.
This film in particular carries many different responsibilities in its execution. On one hand, it's autobiographical, but there's also the devastatingly violent larger conflict that it portrays. And you filmed on location in the townships where these events actually happened, so it seems especially important to pay respect as you're telling this story.
I think so. Even doing this film... of course it's an escape, it's a film. But being that this is such serious content, for me personally the way I took it was that I keep going back to just doing this honestly. I didn't play Kev certain ways in certain scenes to entertain. If I was honest to who I felt he was in these situations, that alone was going to be entertaining. Because this guy, to me, was an incredible guy; an empathetic, endearing guy with a great sense of humor. And to show that whole spectrum was the challenge.
Within this group of photojournalists, Kevin's the one through whom you most feel the impact of this lifestyle and this job and this war. It's sort of strange to talk about what happens to this character because clearly we know what really happened to him in real life, but under normal fictional circumstances that might be considered a spoiler.
Yeah, I mean, it's up to you. Him taking his own life is something that, if you know anything about these guys, you know it's inevitable. But I think the journey there is what's intriguing.
What aspects of that journey engaged you most? A few facts are most widely known about the real Kevin: His famous Pulitzer-winning photograph of the Sudanese girl and the vulture, and how he subsequently took his own life.
Therein lies the challenge! You Google, YouTube the cat and it's about the drugs, the mandrax -- that intense drug that you take and it's more powerful than heroin. And it's like that's what Kev's remembered by, and him breaking from that vulture shot. So it's my job, I felt, with the scenes given and his arc, to show the whole spectrum of him. And by the way, you'd get quite bored if you just watched me do drugs in every scene. I think the reason why you do it is a lot more important than the sake of doing it, and that as an actor was the challenge as well.
Kevin has a line in the beginning in which he advises Ryan Phillippe's character to ditch his long lens --
"It only looks good up close."
Yes, exactly. And that, of course, is a metaphor for the emotional distance that these guys had to their subjects.
Glad you picked up on that.
So that's how we're introduced to Kevin. He seems somewhat cavalier about the job, at least at first.
I think, too, just an open, exciting guy. "Oh, a new guy? I want to meet him!" That's who Kev was.
At what moment do you think that the constant immersion in tragedy and violence, the emotion and moral conflicts inherent to a war photographer's work, began to chip away at him?
I think the big one was, for me, where you take him out of his element. Where you take everything he lives for in that moment, you take his three best friends from him. You fire me, I've got nothing left to live for. I've got my daughter, which was a huge thing for Kev that not many people know. I put a tattoo [above his heart] of Megan - MC. He didn't have that, but I put that on there for her, who I met while I was working there as well. But I think that was the biggest thing that started his downfall. It was sort of a wake-up call. Then you go to Sudan and take that picture, and even during that picture what it was that crushed Kev was that he saw the lack of a father to his daughter. There's a string on his wrist that falls down that was something that his daughter gave him. That was a little thing I had. I think that really started his fall.
Kevin's also one of the characters who most clearly embodies a dominant issue in the film and in photojournalism: The line between helping a subject and exploiting their pain, or keeping a necessary distance when people are being killed literally in front of you.
Greg Marinovich as well, in the film. It really is an endless debate -- the vulture shot, the moral ground that you stand on when you take pictures. And Joao [Silva] told me in South Africa, because we would have these debates, quite heated, on set. I think a lot of it is that you put other people in jeopardy, too, when you take so many things upon yourself in the heat of the moment. You've got to recognize that as well, because there are people there to do that job, and once you're trying to do this vigilante shit of saving everyone and getting a photo, then it's just utter chaos. And in those situations we already have so many people scared shitless. The police that were there at Ken Oosterbroek's death weren't even trained, and it was friendly fire that shot him - a cop shot him because they panicked. So that's a perfect example. I think it takes a lot more to know where you stand in that situation than to just grabbing straws and panicking. Because someone else is going to die, if not you. It's a fine line, like you said.
Do you see parallels between the moral conflict of the combat photojournalist, whose livelihood depends on getting footage of others' suffering, and going yourself as a filmmaker into Johannesburg to make a feature film about these events?
I guess so, but we're telling a story and raising awareness. Hopefully, if anything, you're going to be educated about apartheid and what these guys did and represented. That's my motivation, and it really doesn't go farther than that. The challenge as an actor to get there and do that, it is very similar.
What did it feel like to film on location in and around Johannesburg, especially during the huge, chaotic re-stagings of violent skirmishes that really happened, filming with locals who lived through it?
To have these recreations, it's hard not to be present. I mean, you've got to make an effort to get out of that scene. It's a lot easier that I've been doing a lot of green screen lately, where literally a star on a hundred-foot green screen is a ship or something. So I felt so lucky to be in South Africa in these townships, working with people that have marched and fought. People that had relatives killed. All that just raises your game to do it, and do it right.
Did it ever feel dangerous?
There's one scene, actually. We had these tanks, they're like six feet high, and they're coming around the corner. You know they're fake bullets, like the sound. But there was one time where I thought I was gonna... and I fell pretty hard one day, because I was just going all out and there's this grassy knoll and Kev is leading the way with Marinovich, and I slipped so hard into glass and cut my whole leg up. Everyone stops and I'm like, bleeding out or whatever. And it's just like, this is nothing compared to what people were actually going through.
In the exact same place, just 15 years or so ago...
Yeah! So you just kind of just laugh at it. But like I said, we were very lucky to be shooting near the townships and the killing fields and that kind of stuff.
[Pause] That's so --
Raw. And it shows in the film, you know? I don't think you could do it anywhere else - it would be an injustice to do that. Especially if you knew a quarter of what actually happened.
You filmed this two years ago. Did it take much time or space to decompress emotionally afterwards?
Absolutely.
How did you do that?
[Pause] Slowly. Consciously. Just surrounding yourself with people. I live in Austin, and I think that's a huge part of it, staying out of the shit. Surrounding yourself with people that understand who you were before you left is a lot of it. And then just, you know, really being conscious of it and being okay with what you did. Letting go of it was a big thing for me, because it took a lot for me to do this and to play him the way I wanted it. I think it's okay to take your time to let it go, as well, instead of like, 'Cut, wrap, check the gates, you're good, you're out -- I'm done, I'm not Kevin.' But I think a movie like this is a lot harder to walk away from. Even when I watch it I get very emotional, because I do care what people are going to say about Kev. It's very personal to me.
While watching the film I wondered, "How do you even get away from the headspace of being in the moment?"
You don't, when you're there. And I don't want to. It's a choice you make when you take that role. Look, you're gonna probably get kind of fucked up while you're doing this, but hopefully that pays off and doing it justice is going to be worth it.
In the few years since filming The Bang Bang Club you signed onto a few larger Hollywood productions. Does it help to switch gears after such heavy material? Is that a conscious part of your thinking?
I don't know. Nothing's going to touch this in regards to heavy material, but, you know, [Andrew] Stanton has presented me with incredible challenges in [John Carter of Mars] as well, so I think they're all their own entities. Different journeys that you're going to partake in with these guys and this director and these other actors. I know this has made me a stronger person and I've grown as an actor and a person through it just because of what I did and sacrificed for it. Then hopefully you can take little tools and put them into your next thing, you know? At least the discipline or whatnot to keep that alive.
By contrast, looking at something like Battleship which seems like a huge Independence Day kind of affair -- what did that project offer you?
Personally, I think so much of it was just re-engaging with Peter Berg, who I admire as a filmmaker.
Was that Friday Night Lights connection the secret to you getting cast?
Absolutely. We've been very close since FNL, and he's been, unbeknownst to me, trying to figure out the right opportunity to re-engage. This came up and I became available and we talked a lot about it, had a lot of fun kind of just figuring out where we wanted this guy to go.
Tell me this: Is the story more complex than a Battleship movie sounds on paper?
Absolutely it is! To me personally, doing it and being part of it - look, it's called Battleship, it's a naval film on water, and that's the only correlation I could really tell you about that is close to the game. You know, maybe there's a strategic thing that they actually do use in the Navy that I'm sure 99 percent of people don't know.
Do you get to say the iconic line, "You sank my battleship?"
I can't tell you that. [Smiles] You can guess.