Brian Heydenrych on his role as Inspector van Zyl.
What drew you to Land Of Thirst? I'm always behind South African stories. I really liked Meg, the director. I liked the way she thought, the way she directed me in the audition process. In terms of this character, it's quite out of my usual range. I've never really seen myself as an evil bastard police officer, so it is a good stretch.
I am not Afrikaans-speaking but because I've been involved in theatre in the last 10-12 years and a lot of mentors have been Afrikaans, you pick it up and start to speak it. As an actor you also learn to deal with accents.
What is your character, Inspector van Zyl, like? Charming but very driven on a specific goal, and that's the goal of the old South Africa. I think some of his charm gets lost a bit in that drive - but with any "evil" character you have to find what makes him attractive. It's exactly that, if people understand that attractiveness, then the character flaw of the evil becomes that much stronger. I like him - I like his edge, it's nice to play bad characters sometimes.
Why? I suppose we're given a safe space as actors to really explore. Everyone holds a range of goodness to bad, and as actors we are given an opportunity to explore this in a safe environment - and it's a gift. So you can let yourself, you can be that negative emotion in a safe way - it's the same with him.
I think you have to, as an actor, be able to relish the emotions that your character holds. It doesn't mean that you have to translate that into the real world, and go around being racist - but while in that character space, to make it ring truthful and honest you need to be able to relish it.
I think the strange thing with my character is that his overall relationship is his aggression to the world - it's not really one person that he has a real in-depth relationship with, it was more his overall environment that he tries to control and manipulate.
There are periods of history that have been periods of change, where one environment flips over into another environment - and part of the reason for my character's drive, his edge, is to do with the fact that in this change comes uncertainty. The uncertainty is heading towards an environment that he wants - but even if you think it's going to be positive, uncertainty for anyone is destabilising.
I've placed him fairly in control of his world and I think that's what he represents, in terms of the white supremacists at the time: a group of South Africans who were pretty much in control, in that period. So when he loses control, that's where his edginess would come from.
With the Native Land Act, people like van Zyl were looking at a future that was supposedly going to be positive for them, but even in that "positive" future, in that moment of change it creates an edginess for all - it's not just those to be downtrodden who'll suffer.
In effect I think what we have done is try to tell a story about people. You have got to tell a story of people first, then the environment and the times are secondary. You fail if you forget to tell the peoples' human side.
How have you related to the fact that Land Of Thirst is a period piece? This is the first period piece I've done, and I like it. I've always thought I'd be quite suited to period work, it was just an instinct, that it suited my style of acting.
I enjoyed being on location in Matjiesfontein. It was fantastic, it felt a bit like living in a past history, I found it quite fascinating. It's also quite nice to be away from your area, your base - and to really sink into a place where you're shooting in, you start to live it a bit as well - as opposed to going home every night and have to find that space again when you come back in the morning.
It was a first for me to do a location shoot before - it was really nice. It helped that the people were nice - the ones I know and the ones I've met - the crew, creative people, producers and all, I found them very nice people to be around.
It was fantastic working with the actors in Land of Thirst. They were all top class South African actors. That's another reason the project was interesting to me: who was involved in the cast.