I don’t know what to call it. I never went to film school so I just make films from both an intuitive and intellectual perspective. I think at the time I was making it I was also trying to understand the world we live in. What’s fiction? What’s real? Fiction informs reality and vice versa. I think the film finds its truth in the middle ground where this two genres meet.

Johannesburg is currently celebrated in academic writing as a place of movement (the best example being the special issue of the academic journal Public Culture in 2004 when it published a special issue “Johannesburg – the Elusive Metropolis”), consumption and as a space where identity is malleable. What do you make of that view since your films are mainly set in the city?

Johannesburg for me has changed over the years. I am nostalgic about the years between President Nelson Mandela’s release [1990] and the first democratic election in 1994. It was a vibrant place. A place that had potential for arts and culture. A time of vigorous debates and intense discussions. There was also the music, the literature, the theatre and the documentaries. Now for me the city is more like a place to make cash, like the early gold rush [1886-c.1900] and that’s less interesting to me. I find that despite different people coming in, [one could ask] how many South Africans venture out into other cultures? How many have had Ethiopian or Moroccan food or Vietnamese? Every time I go out, I am surprised how many people I come across invite me for Italian food.

In Conversations of a Sunday Afternoon Johannesburg is a city ofrefuge. Is this your ode to the city?

I think it is a city of refugees but I must also admit that some of the people I brought them into the city like the Palestinian family that lives in Pretoria. Their story is true but their placement is fiction. I have started to have a conflicted relationship with the city, at once I love it and I feel safe, I feel love and loved and have great friends but also disorientated how conversations these days are mostly about materialism and also seeing some of the most brilliant people doing other work except what they always dreamt of when I first met them years ago. That’s tragic.

What is your take of Tsotsi? Of its success? And what of the recent and renewed appetite for South Africa, even as backdrop, in Hollywood; films such as “In My Country,” “Red Dust” or “Catch a Fire”? Are they all the same or should we distinguish between them?

I think all of us who want to make films should try by all means. I am not one to say that outsiders should not make films in my country. I don’t believe in borders. I would like to make a film about the United States in the United States because the country holds so much influence in global politics. I would like to put a camera and record Americans obsession with food. I am always amazed at how big a slice of pizza you can get for US$1, 99. I would also like to make a film about James Baldwin and Nina Simone. I love both of them and Mr Baldwin has had a major impact on me perhaps more than any other writer. To come back to Tsotsi, I just worked with [the lead actor] Presley [Chweneyagae], he did a cameo in my TV series set in 1976 [When We Were Black, and recently broadcast on South African public television], as the poet Ingoapele Madingoane. [Presley] is a national treasure. One of the greatest South Africans post-apartheid.

What filmmakers have influenced you most?

My grandmother who told me stories when I was young. Most fillmakers who interest me are those who spend their lives searching for a new way of telling stories. I am not interested in the perfection of cinema. Abbas Kiarostami, [Ingmar] Bergman, [Akira] Kurosawa, [Krzysztof] Kieslowski, [Ousmane] Sembene, [Martin] Scorsese, Lars von Trier and now Michael Haneke [director of Caché] and for different reasons Spike Lee and Abderrahmane Sissako. Spike is truly one of the most inspiring human beings period. To make films like he does – [he is] prolific and he has made some of the most important films about issues that are difficult to finance. He has stuck it out in moments when most of us would have walked away or given in. I know so many people who have [who have walked away], especially black filmmakers. It is tough making films but even tougher when you try to tell political stories about the black community. Abderrahmane is the same and he produces other African filmmakers like Maharat-Saleh Haroun who did Darrat.

Sean Jacobs is co-editor of Chimurenga Online