Embeth Davidtz Fell Out of Love With Acting—Then Took Matters Into Her Own Hands

Before her directorial debut, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, premiered in Telluride late on Friday night, Embeth Davidtz was asked whether she wanted to see the reviews on the other side—both the good and the bad. Without hesitating, she replied in the affirmative.

The morning after, sitting outside a bustling cafe on Colorado Ave., the actress-turned-filmmaker rounds up the responses. First, what she read last night: “Some blogger gave it a 1.5 out of 5 and said, ‘Can’t stand this little colonial cutesy child,’ so I was like, ‘Oh, good God, here we go.’” But the next morning, Davidtz woke up to strong reviews. “I can’t believe it,” she says of a Hollywood Reporter rave. “And this guy from AwardsWatch—I don’t know what that is—he really got it, and gave it a B+.” It’s a lot to take in, but Davidtz is reading everything.

“I’m educating myself,” she tells me after ordering a decaf coffee. “Maybe if I was a seasoned filmmaker, I wouldn’t. It’s hard on the heart, but I feel like if I didn’t listen, then I wouldn’t be opening myself up to the feedback. You’re pretty much bearing your soul and then letting people stab you in the heart or be kind to you. But I feel at least this time in my life, I have to hear it all.”

Until Don’t Let’s Go, Davidtz didn’t have any screen producing, writing, or directing credits to her name. She’s been a film and TV actress for more than 30 years, breaking out in big-screen hits like Schindler’s List and Matilda before, more recently, emerging as a kind of prestige-TV utility player, recurring in the likes of In Treatment, Mad Men, Ray Donovan, and The Morning Show. Although born in Indiana, she was mostly raised in South Africa to South African parents, and felt like an outsider in Hollywood. Over the years, once stardom eluded her, she found it difficult to land satisfying parts. “I’m so much less interested in acting these days—it’s been a long time coming,” she tells me. “I don’t love acting anymore.”

She never thought of directing instead. She never told herself, as she phrases it now, “I’m allowed to do that.” Even her interest in developing an adaptation of Alexandra Fuller’s best-selling memoir Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, about growing up in the Rhodesian civil war through to the establishment of Zimbabwe, had to do with acting. She saw an opportunity to play an actual great role as Fuller’s volatile mother, Nicola.

“I couldn’t find someone to write it—I waited and waited and waited, I looked and looked, but nobody understood the material,” she says. So over two years, Davidtz wrote the script herself. Then she couldn’t find a director; her husband, the entertainment lawyer Jason Sloane, suggested she helm the film herself. “At that point I thought, ‘Shit, I wish I could find someone else to play Nicola.” Davidtz sent the book to agents to help recast the role. She never heard back.

“Then I was like, ‘Okay, fuck it,’” Davidtz says. “I’m going to direct it and I’m going to be in it.”

On the fall-festival circuit, one tends to encounter a few successful actors trying their hand at directing for the first time. More often than not, it doesn’t go great; last year in Toronto, everyone from Chris Pine to Kristin Scott Thomas to Michael Keaton faced bruising reviews for their efforts. But for all that Don’t Let’s Go might elicit varying reactions—we’ll have a better picture of that when the movie screens for a much larger audience up in Ontario next week—it’s thrilling evidence that Davidtz is a born, gifted filmmaker. She brings vision, specificity, and an uncompromising sensibility to the material that’s more reminiscent of recent debuts by Regina King (One Night in Miami…) or Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Lost Daughter), fellow industry veterans who showed a bold new side of themselves as artists. In fact, watching The Lost Daughter was “the final nail in the coffin” of Davidtz convincing herself she could do it too. She said as much to Gyllenhaal’s husband Peter Sarsgaard the other day, on their first evening in Telluride.

Making this movie, in Davidtz’s case, required a personal touch. She describes her adaptation as 60% Fuller’s story—one specific chapter, anyway, that follows eight-year old Bobo (Lexi Venter) in the run-up to the transformative 1980 election—and 40% her own. “I was smack bang in the middle of South Africa at the height of all the racial tensions before apartheid was repealed,” Davidtz says. “Some part of me felt like I was telling my own story.”

There’s a lot of Davidtz in Bobo. She takes out her phone and shows me a picture of herself as a child; she looks genuinely, nearly identical to the young girl in the film, with wild, long blonde hair and a mischievous mien. She knows the aspect of overlapping memoir to the movie may be difficult for Fuller, who’s yet to see it. But they bonded in their shared childhood experiences: “I told her stories about my life. She’s like, ‘Me too! Me too!’ Our whole conversation was, ‘Oh my god, me too.’” Don’t Let’s Go’s exteriors wound up being shot in a small town hours outside of Johannesburg, right near where Davidtz’s parents live, because they closely resembled the story’s world.

The frank depiction of racism at the time was also rooted in memory. Bobo’s white, working class farming family—desperate to hold onto their power amid sweeping social change—don’t think of themselves as bigoted, and Davidtz highlights their dangerous delusion. Bobo parrots racist musings in innocent voiceover, an indication of the banal ingrained reality of prejudice in her world; she fails to grasp the full humanity of her Black neighbors. There’s a clear-eyed realism to Davidtz’s approach, which she admits remains limited to the colonizers’ perspective. “Being a little child in the middle of that, watching it—I could speak from that point of view,” she says. “That’s the only gaze I have. It’s the one I can shine a light on all of it with. People used to talk like that. I want to take it, amplify it, and freaking put it out there.”

The movie plays out entirely from Bobo’s point of view. The camera always follows her, and first-time performer Venter lights the screen up with a magically natural expressiveness. On screen, you can easily see the influences Davidtz mentions: Jane Campion’s Sweetie and The Piano, Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun. Don’t Let’s Go certainly maintains its own identity, but like those movies, employs childlike wonder to illuminate brutal circumstances.

Davidtz always wanted to shoot more intimately, way up close, on Bobo; cinematographer Willie Nel favored distancing wide shots. Their disagreement went on for awhile. “Her face is the reason someone’s going to watch this or not,” Davidtz says. She’d bring up her feelings quietly, to no avail, until one day on set when she let loose. “I was like, ‘Just do it! Just do it. Please just do it.’ I was on the verge of tears, and I said, ‘No, closer. No. Even closer. Okay, you’re there and you’re even closer.” She ended up using those exact, uber-tight shots.

Call it her director-is-born moment? Davidtz nods. “I mean, it’s a South African thing, it’s a female thing,” she says. “I’m very polite. I don’t like being impolite.”

In 2013, Davidtz was diagnosed with Stage-3 breast cancer and underwent extensive, intensive treatments in order to survive. “That was a near-death experience,” she says. “There was a six-month period there where we didn’t know what the outcome was going to be, and it was far more serious than I knew at the time.” She left the industry for about a year. When she felt healthy enough to go back to work, she stayed a few steps back; she had already been frustrated enough with it. “I went, ‘Life’s too short to do anything that I don’t want to do.’”

Davidtz looks back on that initial, post-Schindler’s List moment in her career with some regrets. “I thought everything was going to be like that. I really was a dummy,” she says. “I wasn’t thinking commercially. I was not tough enough, not smart enough about it. Then the parts started to be less. And then if there’s a less compelling part and a less compelling director, you don’t love what you do.” Even the rich work, like her superb pairing with Amy Adams in Junebug or her devastating turn as an executive in a crumbling marriage on In Treatment, seemed more anomalous, unable to move the needle. She increasingly settled for small jobs that were, frankly, dull. “I just can’t be on set and be like, ‘I’m so bored. I’m bored standing around. There’s not enough to keep me busy.’”

Davidtz talks like a filmmaker now. She’s ready to adapt more, eager to keep pushing herself. But she’s had a lot to learn. In prep, she spoke with Schindler’s List D.P. Janusz Kaminski for advice. “He said, ‘This will be the loneliest journey of your life, the loneliest and hardest journey’—and boy was he right about that,” she says. “There’s a sweet picture of me on the first day of shoot, where I’m smiling. I didn’t know how hard it was going to be. When I look at that now, I almost want to cry as I see myself with my little folder under my arm, walking to set for the first day.”

Just before Don’t Let’s Go’s first-ever screening, she decided to sneak into another movie. She texted her old friend from Schindler’s List, Ralph Fiennes, letting him know she was going to see his own Telluride world premiere, the Vatican thriller Conclave. She sat in the theater quietly, and overheard a “sweet, nerdy, film-lover kid” chatting someone up nearby. He talked about coming to Telluride on his own for the second time. He was bristling with excitement. After the movie ended, he exclaimed, “What a way to start!”

As Davidtz acts the scene out, this moviegoer’s glorious enthusiasm seems to have all but possessed her. “Bless him, I just wanted to hold his hand—very young, so idealistic, and I think for him, he’s like, What a world we live in,” she says. “But then you do feel like film does that to you, right? It makes you feel anything is possible.”

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