Dust Devil Production Diary

Dust Devil Production Diaryby Richard Stanley

‘I wake up, screaming’ - Originally appeared in Projections 3, 1994.

The Dust Devil Diary02

I keep seeing the same thing over and over. The last split second before it all went dark. The glowing halo of flying glass fanning out in the air before me so slowly that I can see every

individual fragment in sharp focus as they rush up to meet my face. My thoughts turn towards the shoot and the still uncompleted film. I begin to feel afraid.

“ “

03The Dust Devil Diary

PrologueThe dreams came first. The dark man, his face hidden, his hatpulled low, his coat gathered around him, standing alone in thewasteland, staring towards the lights of the town, a stormbrewing somewhere not far behind him.

His image found its way into my early student films and followedme in my sleep as I grew away from my homeland, riding withme as I deserted the army and fled South Africa and its politicsof oppression, hitch-hiking across the Namibian border on myway to Windhoek and a plane to Frankfurt and the imaginedfreedom of Europe.

The dark manʼs shadow followed close behind me all the wayup the Skeleton Coast, hinting in my dreams at some terribleconflagration to come, next to which all the suffering that hadever been would be the merest taper.

In Bethany district it was the seventh year of a seven-yeardrought and a shadow was on the land. Everywhere peoplewere dying, their mutilated remains turning up in the boots ofburned-out cars and strewn out across the remote farmsteads.

The local police hunted in vain for the killer, finding no clues,their enquiries met by silence. In the towns people whisperedabout a conspiracy to drive the black farmers off their land, inthe bush the sangomas muttered about a black magician alliedto the desert wind, a ʻNagtloperʼ come out of the wasteland toclaim the souls of the damned, and in the local church thedominie ranted about the devil and his cohorts Azazel, Buzrael,Beelzebub and Belial, heralds of the baneful pestilence whosebreath is the drought that withers the crops in the springtimeand whose kin is the famine that slays the cattle in their fieldsand blights the land.

Behind all of it, I sensed the dark manʼs hand, the murdersfollowing so close behind me that at times I feared for my sanity.

Sleeping in a dry river bed near Keetmanshoop one evening, Iwas caught in a sand-storm. The column of dust against thesetting sun seemed transformed into a writhing pillar of living fire.

I hitched a ride with an armoured column to Bethany, where Ihopped a steam train that wouldnʼt have been out of place in aLeone western. A day later I heard that the body of a prostitutehad been found near the platform, and when I reached LuderitzI was beaten senseless by railway policemen driven mad withparanoia.

Even after I left the country the shadow stayed with me, andwhen a few months later I heard that a man suspected of themurders had been killed in a gun-battle near the canyons, Iresolved that I would have to return to the Skeleton Coast oncemore to exorcise this demon from my dreams.

Although the murders apparently ceased after the shoot-out,the suspect involved was crucially disfigured by a shotgun blastand never formally identified, leaving the case open to this veryday.

In 1984 I returned to Namibia with a 16mm clockwork Bolex, ahome-made crane, five friends I had fired up with the idea, aforty-five-page script and a title, Dust Devil, derived from thename the locals give to those small, violent, desert winds thatblow from nowhere.

After two months on the Skeleton Coast, shooting wasabandoned when our funds ran out and two of our party had tobe hospitalized following a car smash on the freeway nearKeetmanshoop.

For seven years the dreams continued to haunt me, and in1991 I dusted off the script, fleshed it out to feature length andtook it to Jo-Anne Sellar at Palace Films, who had produced myfirst feature, Hardware, in the winter of 1989. Shooting inNamibia had finally become feasible following the elections inMarch 1990, when a socialist government, the South WestAfrican Peopleʼs Organization (SWAPO) came to power and Iwas able to return to the Skeleton Coast without fear of arrest.Hardwareʼs healthy performance at the box office enabledPalace to pre-sell the film and secure a promised £2 millionfrom Miramax and British Screen Finance.

A surprising additional investor turned up in the shape of DavidAukin, the head of drama for Channel Four Television, whoacquired Dust Devilʼs rights for British television. Jo-Anne wasable to secure the use of South African personnel andequipment with the aid of the ANC-affiliated Allied WorkersOrganization, while flying in the cast and heads of departmentfrom Britain and the United States, thus making the filmfinancially viable without selling out to South African politics ofmoral compromise.

In July 1991 I flew back to Namibia to finish what I had begunso many years before, praying that, with the support of aninternational co-production and the resources made available to

me by the highest budget I had ever been entrusted with, Iwould finally have a chance to beat the jinx and capture thedemon that was the soul of that bleak country on film.

From the outset it was apparent that shooting would be anightmare. I had experienced the worst Namibia could hurl atme before, but the rest of the crew still awaited their baptism offire. The filmʼs backers seemed to be dangerously out of touchwith my true intentions for the project, refusing to agree on afemale lead and suggesting, even at a late stage, that we resetthe script in Santa Fe and use American Indians in the leadroles instead of black South Africans.

My insistence on shooting the film in precise locations, followingthe trail of the original murders, meant that we would have tocover over one and a half thousand kilometers of road duringthe eight-week shoot and for the sake of an easiercommodation deal, Jo-Anne and Daniel Lupi, the productionmanager based the production in the mist-shrouded, Bavarian-style resort town of Swakopmünd, hundreds of miles up thecoast from Bethany and our main locations. All our stock wouldhave to be flown back to Britain for processing, resulting in aturn-around of almost two weeks on the rushes that meant, ineffect., that our sets would be struck without admitting thepossibility of our ever having to reshoot a single frame.

Weather insurance was beyond the limits of our budget and theconvoluted pre-production period had pushed our shoot right upagainst the start of the windy season. At their height, the gale-force winds that lash the Skeleton Coast make it impossible tostand up straight, and cars have to be weighted down withsandbags to avoid being blown off the roads. Even then, at thevery beginning, I must have been a little insane, confidentlyleading a celluloid safari into hell to search for a demon that Isuspected was both very real and hungrily awaiting us.

On Thursday 8 August, I was precisely one week away from thefirst day of shooting and still had not reached an agreementover the casting of two of the most important roles: Wendy, thebeleaguered South African housewife; and Joe Niemand, theenigmatic projectionist, witch-doctor and story-teller who wouldlead the filmʼs nominal hero, South African police detective BenMukurob (played by Zakes Mokae), on his quest for the dustdevil.


Thursday 8 August 1991 Friday 9 AugustI come awake in my narrow bunk, still trying to scream. Thesheets are sticking to my body. I half-remember my dream.Something about fire and flying and falling. Burning ships or oilplatforms, black clouds hanging beneath me in greasy columns.Then the sound of a fog-horn comes to me and I rememberwhere I am. Although Jo-Anne and Daniel wanted me to staywith the cast in the Cafe Anton, a decrepit resort hotel on thebeach-front, I have elected instead to lodge with the rest of thecrew in the grim tract of military-style concrete bunkers thatpasses as the local trailer park.

At least here I have privacy and space, including a doublegarage that will come in useful as an impromptu studio for thesecond unit. Jo-Anne and Daniel have never been too keen onthe idea of running a second unit, and when the chips aredown, I know I will have to give their crew all the help I can.Steve Chivers, our director of photography, is garrisoned in theneighbouring bunker and Mad Mike Jay, a science-fiction writerand science programme researcher who will be acting as mypersonal assistant on the shoot, is billeted in the room next tomine. The sky as usual this morning is grey and listless, a thicksea-fog shrouding the town. There is a taste of salt andcorroding metal in my mouth. My bathroom window faces on tothe freeway that runs behind the bunkers, and as I brush myteeth, I look out over the sandbagged barriers that mark theborder of the South African enclave of Walvis Bay. A row ofsoldiers are stopping cars, lazily waving their AK47s, theiroutlines softened by the mist. The road beyond them is hazyand indistinct, as if they are guarding the perimeter ofTarkovsky’s Zone.

Later, I drive inland with mad Mike. The sea-mist comes to anend in an almost solid curtain some twenty kilometres inland,and beyond that, the day is hot and airless. I inspect theprogress of the work on our main set, the farmstead belongingto the killerʼs first victim, Saartjie Haarhoff, which is beinglovingly reconstructed from a gutted ruin in the bottom of a dryriver--bed near the Kaiserʼs ostrich farm, the very farm thatprovided so many of the plumes in the helmits of World WarOne era Germany. The work is being cheerfully supervised byour production designer Joseph Bennet, Jo-Anneʼs boyfriendsince Hardware, whose work on that previous film contributedimmeasurably to its success. Today heʼs looking relaxed,wearing the crumpled white suit and confident swagger of aclassic colonial.

After a reassuring guided tour of the works we return to town,

didgeridoo music playing on the car stereo, my spirits falling aswe re-enter the dank wall that surrounds Swakopmünd. I am onmy way to my first meeting with Chelsea Field, the onlyavailable actress whom all the financiers would approve, aftermy efforts to cast first Kerry Fox (the New Zealand actress fromAn Angel At My Table) and then Stacey Travis (the star ofHardware) had failed to win their favour. The backers are lessthan happy with my emphasis on black South African actorsand feel that Robert Burke, who will play the killer, is notenough of a name to carry the film. Chelsea is deemed to beʻhotʼ on the basis of the three unreleased films she hascompleted the year before: The Last Boy Scout, HarleyDavidson and the Marlboro Man and George Romeroʼs TheDark Half - although the only videotape Palace has madeavailable to me that features her is the Renny Harlin filmPrison, which I detest. Being left with no choice in the castingof such a crucial part is a compromise that I am loath to accept,although I faced a similar situation before over the casting ofthe male lead in Hardware.

I smoke my first cigarette in six months on my way to herbunker, and hate myself for it. Chelsea is plainly as nervous as Iam, besieged by Lisa Boni, our make-up girl and unofficial unitpsychologist, who is testing burn make-up on her, and MichelleClapton, our wardrobe mistress, who is taking hermeasurements and trying out costume ideas. We make smalltalk about her flight and her feelings about the script, but weboth know from each otherʼs eyes that we have more questionsto ask than either of us can easily answer right now. There istoo much on my mind for me to be able to give her myundivided attention. The completion bond guarantor came in onthe same flight as Chelsea, and even as we speak I know he iscombing through the budget and schedule with Jo-Anne andDaniel back at the production office.

The fate of the film is still hanging by a thread.

At sunset I go down to the sea-front with Mad Mike and drop infor coffee and cigarettes at the only homely house inSwakopmünd, a beach cabin surrounded by whale bonesrented by Ina and Amelia Roux, the production buyer anddresser, known affectionately by the art department as theʻVixen Sisters'. Tonight Ina, the practical one of the pair, gets inthe beers while Amelia, who affects a cape, and smokes toomuch, goes wandering off down the moon-drenched tideline inwhat approaches an altered state of consciousness, a jointsmouldering in her hand.

As Woody Allen said, ʻThe truck arrives with fresh compromisesevery morning.' This morning is cold and misty as usual, and Ispend the first part of the day scouting locations around town.At three p.m. I return to the production office to learn that thecompetition bond guarantor is demanding that I lose ten pagesfrom the script before he signs off on the bond.

I stagger back to my bunker to discover that hundreds ofpelicans have taken over the bungalow complex, sittingeverywhere on lamp-posts and every available inch of roofspace. I draw the curtains and lock the door, going into a huddlewith Mad Mike to do the necessary rewrite.

Tonight there is no time to sleep and the dreams will have towait.

Saturday 10 AugustI emerge red-eyed from an unbroken, twenty-seven hour rewritethat has stretched to over one hundred handwritten pagesconsuming three full A4 pads. Overnight I have simplifiedChelseaʼs character, cutting the memory of her rape as a childand the paranoid core of her relationship with her husbandMark. Also gone is the character of Aaron the ticket-collector,who witnesses the killer passing on the station platform. I feelsad at letting go of them, but right now Iʼm too tired for it to hurt.Mad Mike, who has hardly slept himself, takes the mound ofscrawled pages in to the production office to type up and I try toget some sleep.

Sunday 11 AugustI hear that my old associate, the inimitable Immo Horn, hasblown into town in a battered pick-up truck and I go to meet himat the local pizza-joint. Standing nearly seven feet tall in hishabitual black coat, sporting a profile reminiscent of the MervynPeake character Steerpike, Mr Horn (who has worked with meon a number of past ventures) is a talented underground film-maker in his own right whose work I first encountered in Berlinalmost ten years ago. In 1989 we shot a documentary togetherin Afghanistan covering the events leading up to, andimmediately following, the Soviet withdrawal.


Mr Horn was severely wounded by shrapnel, losing the use ofboth legs in the battle for Jalalabad, the capital of Ningraharprovince, and in the weeks that followed it had been down tome to save his life and get him to a Red Crescent hospital in afrontier province and thence back to Europe for surgery.

Mr Horn has always felt he owed me a favour for this, and nowIʼm calling it in. Iʼm putting him in charge of the second unit, andsupply him with copies of the storyboard and shootingschedule. If we are to have any chance at all, then the secondunit must be able to function autonomously and often at a greatdistance from the main unit. Mr Horn is my insurance policythat, in my absence, the unitʼs work will meet a desirablestandard. For a second unit operator I have brought on MrHornʼs old schoolfriend Greg Copeland, a London-basedlighting cameraman who shot all my music videos and came toNamibia with me before on the original Dust Devil I6mm shootin 1984. I have to trust that their close working relationship andcommitment to the material will help bring their rushes to life.

Robert Burke, our lead actor, a veteran of Hal Hartleyʼs quirkyoeuvre and the lead in the as yet unseen Robocop 3, hasarrived in town and I go to see him at the Cafe Anton, where wesit in an enclosed back garden surrounded by a menagerie oftame animals. Robert has travelled well and is in good form. Wetalk long and hard about his character, whom we now perceiveas a purely mythological figure, a synthesis of Leoneʼs Man withNo Name, the bushman ʻNagtloperʼ and the devil himself,portrayed in the script as an incubus, a demon lover from the idwho exists only to lead Ben and Wendy to their deaths. It will bea hard ride for Robert, for, in opening himself to this role, he willbecome a receptacle for the demon that stalks us, the dark manof my nightmares. In exorcising myself, he will becomepossessed.

As we talk, the mist clears long enough for the Southern Crossto be visible overhead, and a tame ground-squirrel climbs on toRobertʼs shoulder.


Tuesday 13 AugustWe drive out on reconnaissance for the cave scene to wherethe granite ramparts of Spitzkop oppose the sky, their cliffsrising sheer from the flat plain, brooding silently beneath thedead weight of the afternoon heat. I scale Spitzkopʼs bonyflanks,: accompanied by Robert, Greg Copeland and Mad Mike,coming at last to the lip of the hidden plateau that has served asa sacred place for the Khoisan people since time immemorial.

The plateau is ringed by overhangs and huge mushroom-likerock formations, their stone surfaces alive everywhere withancient life. The faded, ithyphallic figures of the first men pursuezebra, ostrich and eland through the morning twilight ofprimeval time, their shapes all but hidden beneath the quietdust of that still, hot plateau where the only movement is theimperceptible dance of the shadows around the prehistoricquiver trees, moving to the ceaseless music of the sun andmoon. We linger here and, as the sun sets, Robert sits atop ahuge volcanic boulder and plays the flute, while a swallowcomes out of the brazen sky and circles him quite deliberately.

Wednesday 14 AugustIn my dreams I am back at Spitzkop. The dark man is there.The man who has no face or name. He takes me to a highplace and shows me the world spread out before my boots.

Robert has begun to have the dreams as well now. We spendthe morning in the school hall reading through the script withChelsea and when we break for lunch he tells me he dreamedhe saw me at Spitzkop. I stood on the edge of the cliff and,motioning for him to follow, I smiled and stepped out into the air.

Later, I go over to the props department to approve the facelessoneʼs knife. Dirk, the props master, has engraved its blade withthe design of the Midgard serpent. Amelia Roux flirts with me asshe shows me the old photographs and their frames that shehas amassed for the night-stand of the dark manʼs first victim,the lonely schoolteacher Saartjie Haarhoff.

I have grown very fond of the vixen sisters and am glad of theircompany now.

Thursday 15 AugustJo-Anne summons me urgently to the production office firstthing in the morning. She presents me with an amendment tomy contract that has been faxed over from Palaceʼs legaldepartment, claiming that unless I put my mark on it at once thecompletion bond guarantor will refuse to sign off and productionwill be closed down on the movie. The amendment waives mylegal right to injunct the filmʼs release or remove my name fromthe project. I find this very ominous, and refuse to sign unless Ican first consult my agent or an entertainment lawyer. Jo-Annetakes this as a personal betrayal and is furious at me, telling methat Palace have already spent three hundred thousand poundsof uninsured production money on the project and that sheʼll callthe whole thing off today unless I sign at once. Furthermore,Daniel refuses to let me use the production telephones unless Ipay for my calls out of my own pocket.

At lunch-time I go on a reconnaissance of the mortuary set andcall my agent from a payphone out back. It is very hard to getthrough to her, and when I do she is maddeningly vague,merely recommending that I sign everything Iʼm told to. When Iget back to the production office I tell Jo-Anne I am willing tosign the contract only if I can sign it in blood as a symbol ofprotest, and to this effect I cut my hand with a razor.

Friday 16 AugustThe first day of 35mm shooting.

We start with a photo shoot of the schoolteacher and the youngboy who will play Zakes Mokaeʼs lost wife and child in the film.

Second unit officially expose the first frames of 35mm stock.Slate zero. Take one.


Sunday 18 AugustA hideous first day of full main-unit shooting.

We are shooting on the freeway in a freezing fog that refuses tolift. Everyone is cold and miserable, including Robert andChelsea. We wheel on the turbines and put a brave face on itby filming the scenes where Wendyʼs car is forced into theBethany turn-off by a sandstorm.

After a grim lunch, we move further inland to find the sun andstart work on the crucial sequence where Wendy first picks upthe hitch-hiker. It becomes rapidly apparent that our car mountsand process trailer are woefully inadequate, and theVolkswagen quickly disappears beneath a tangle of scaffoldingand G-clamps that seems to keep shaking itself apart as soonas we try to get it on to the road, strewing clanging debrisacross the asphalt and slowing shooting down to a painfulcrawl. By the evening I have already lost a set-up and gone fourpages behind schedule.

I return to my bunker a gibbering, frozen wreck and am cheeredonly by Lisa and Amanda, the make-up girls, who surprise mewith a hot meal before I crawl into bed.

Monday 19 AugustAt sunset we burn the Haarhoff house.

The scene calls for Robert to walk away from the blazingbuilding, climb into the car and drive off, circling the sundial inthe middle of the driveway before heading out into the opendesert. Like all scenes of this nature, it can be staged only onceand while I intend to cover the action from the dolly in anelaborate tracking shot, I hedge my bets by using two othercameras. A second emplacement in the bottom of a shallow pitbehind the sundial will provide us with a static master, whileGreg Copeland mans the roving second-unit camera to pick uptelephoto detail shots as the action happens.

Jo-Anne, Daniel and poor Steve Earnhardt (Miramaxʼsexecutive in charge of production) watch from the flanks of thehill, tension mounting as the afternoon slips by. We rehearsethe scene again and again until everything is running likeclockwork, waiting until the shadow of the sundial signals theonset of the magic hour and the mountains behind the house

glow like ruddy gold. The set falls silent and everyone takestheir positions. I signal my first assistant and he calls action onthe bull-horn, setting the mechanics of the shot into action. Rick,our stunt co-ordinator, presses the detonator but nothinghappens. Something has gone wrong with the wiring of theirpyrotechnics. Robert stands, looking puzzled, at the head of thesteps, the cameras rolling. I call ʻCutʼ and our other stunt co-ordinator Roly goes running over to the house to trace the fault.The shadow of the sundial lengthens.

There is a sudden crack inside the house and black smokebegins to pour from the window frames.

I canʼt see Roly, and no one seems sure whether heʼs clear ofthe blaze or not. Jo-Anne is running towards me, cursing andshouting for us to roll cameras. There is still no sign of Roly.There is a flicker of orange fire inside the downstairs windows.I call for turn-over and the cameras are already rolling by thetime the first assistant relays the command on the bull-horn.I cue Robert and he starts down the steps without looking back,flames climbing higher in the windows behind him.

Then the glass explodes outwards and the fire begins to takehold of the veranda.

Robert reaches the car and climbs inside, but now seems to behaving trouble getting it started. He takes off the brake and for aheart-stopping instant the car begins to roll backwards, beforethe engine grumbles into life and he heads away down thedriveway, circling the sundial as the house disappears into acolumn of flame and greasy black smoke behind him. In themidst of the conflagration a flock of geese fly slowly out of theeast, forming a huge V-formation as they soar directly over theburning house. This additional, unplanned detail is capturedonly by Mad Mike on his Super-8 camera. It will not appear inthe film, but at least I can prove it really happened and isnʼt justsome weird, stress-induced hallucination.

When I finally call for the cameras to cut and a phalanx of stuntassistants descend on the inferno with fire extinguishers, I learnthat Roly has managed to escape out of the back of the houseand a tragedy has been averted.


Thursday 22 AugustToday is our first day of interior shooting in a roadhouse-cum-service station outside Swakopmünd that has been restoredfrom a gutted shell by Joseph and his art sluts with such lovingcare that several motorists pull off the freeway during thecourse of the day to try and tank up there.

During the shoot I bump into a gaunt, raven-haired girl who ishanging about the set watching the proceedings. I introducemyself, and she seems surprised that I am the director. Sherather sweetly tells me that I look more like some kind of acidcasualty or burned-out bag-person, and for the first time I noticethat my military fatigues are covered in a thick layer of grimeand glistening mica. Her name is Deborah Deats and she is tobe Chelseaʼs stunt double. Wasting no time, I turn her over toLisa and Amanda, who dye her hair red and start to transformher into Chelseaʼs doppelgänger. I note with interest that herfirst appearance on set coincides with the passing of Roll 13,Slate 66, Take 6, which of course is a complete screw-up.

It is full moon tonight, a time traditionally associated with themixing of the pigments used in the elaborate rock paintingscentral to Khoisan magic, and Mad Mike and I plan to head outto Spitzkop and spend the night under the stars at the ancientceremonial site. We have arranged to rendezvous at theplateau with Greg and Mr Horn, who have been out at Spitzkoptoday doing time-lapse work. The gore boys, Chris Halls andLittle John, who are responsible for the shootʼs quota of latex,gelatine and karo syrup, tag along, riding in the back seat onthe long journey across the moonlit plains, as we thread theback roads out to Spitzkop with Mad Mike at the wheel and aselection of Golden Oldies on the stereo. At one point, a greatwhite owl looms up in the headlights, narrowly missing thewindscreen as it swoops over us. At another, a strange hoppinganimal like a rabbit bouncing on its hind legs crosses the trackin front of us, its eyes glowing like embers.

We plunge deeper into the heart of the wasteland - Spitzkopʼscrags coming into view on the horizon, a deeper patch ofdarkness against the night passing every now and then solitaryfigures wandering on the verge of the road, dressed in suits orwhat seem to be shrouds, looking like theyʼre on their way to acasting call for a George Romero movie.

Just before we hit Spitzkop itself, another set of headlightscomes up hard behind us, bearing down on our tail and thenswerving around us to cut us off. Our car skids to a halt, dustrising in the headlights. The doors of the battered, maroon-

coloured touring car blocking our way burst open, disgorging aposse of unlikely-looking individuals, so many of them that itʼshard to imagine how they all fitted into a single vehicle. At firstMad Mike thinks they must be connected with the shoot androlls down his window, but as they come shambling into thecircle of our headlights he realizes that this is not the case.Their dark faces are unfamiliar, even though they are grinningat us to a man, their movements strange and erratic, their limbstrembling as if they are either very drunk or in the last stages ofsome degenerative nerve disease.

There is something oddly animalistic about them, and as oneslaps his hand against our bonnet I see his eyes glint in theheadlights like a dogʼs. He leans forward, his face twitchingspastically, his lips parting in a horrid mockery of a smile, hiseyes wide and moon-crazy, brimming over with monstrous mirthand a stupid, bestial rage. He reaches for the handle of my doorand I bring my fist down on the lock, my other hand going to thehilt of my knife.

Then ʻSuzie Qʼ comes on the stereo and Mad Mike floors theaccelerator, skidding around the touring car and leaving ourassailants behind us in a cloud of dust. I watch in the rear-viewmirror as they pile back into their car and gun its engine into life,following hot on our heels. The dirt track comes to a dead endat the base of Spitzkopʼs granite cliffs and Mad Mike has toeffect a three-point turn, narrowly avoiding a head-on collisionwith the touring car that is now determined to try and run us offthe road. Mad Mike is pushing the car to its limits, the vehicleslaloming from side to side, its wheels barely holding theswitchback surface of the track, its suspension jarring as itleaps depressions and wash-outs.

As we come back up fast from Spitzkop, the touring car still onour tail, a pair of figures suddenly appear in our headlights.

A woman seems to be lying in the middle of the road with a manstanding over her who appears, in that insane split-second thatwe see them for, to be beating her. Mad Mike swerves to avoidthem, narrowly missing mowing them down, the car tremblingas it skids across the sandy verge, threatening to go into a rollat any time. By the time he regains control of the car, the figuresare lost from view behind us and we can only guess at what wehave seen.

We screech to a halt when we hit the dirt track to Hentieʼs Bay,flagging down a passing car that turns out to be a local farmer

on his way home. The touring car has turned off its lights anddisappeared from sight behind us as if it never existed. Thefarmer, a doughty, middle-aged German, readily believes ourstory and casually explains that he is carrying several guns inhis pick-up truck, including a couple of lightweight pump-actionshotguns designed for riot control. He coolly suggests that if theoccupants of the touring car show up we should simply shoot itout with them, confident that his fire-power is vastly superior toanything our assailants might be packing.

As we wait in ambush, the farmer explains that one has toexpect this kind of thing when one visits Spitzkop, and comeprepared. The local psychos are apparently a well-knownhazard of the area. Apparently Spitzkop has attracted aconsiderable squatter population who scratch a living scouringthe mountainʼs flanks for rock crystals that they sell to thosetourists foolhardy enough to venture this far from the beatentrack. The lazy ones spend their time grinding down the bottomsof Coca-cola bottles that they try to pass off to the tourists asthe real thing.

The crystal gleaners have come to form a tribe in themselves,defined by the physical stigmata of inbreeding, their behaviourfurther deformed by the malignant influence of the local well-water. The former describes the water as bra, salt or poisoned,claiming that it drives anyone who drinks from it homicidallyinsane. The districtʼs history reeks of overt viciousness and half-hidden murders. Even the farmer seems unsure of exactly whatis the matter with Spitzkop, referring obliquely to ʻsomething todo with magnetic fields', loud crackings and rumblings that areheard frequently from within the rocks, and the old legends ofconclaves of bushmen who once called shadowy shapes out ofthe hills and celebrated blood-drenched rites here to the gods ofpre-Christian Africa.

By now the moon is past its zenith and a further confrontationwith our pursuers is starting to seem increasingly unlikely.Finally, wishing us luck and warning us to stay away fromSpitzkop in future during the full moon, the farmer clambersback into his pick-up truck and goes on his way, leaving usalone with the sibilant African night. Mad Mike, whose nervesare worked to shreds, refuses to drive any further and LittleJohn volunteers to take the wheel.

We head slowly and cautiously back down the dirt track,determined to reach our destination while the moon is still in thesky, driving with our headlights and stereo turned off now.


This time around we make it to the foot of the mountain and,gathering our gear, we begin our ascent of its eastern ridge,coming at last past the mushroom rock formation and into thesacred valley, while the moon blazes down and the stars gleamabove us like innumerable campfires or, as the Khoisan liked tobelieve, tiny burn-holes in the blanket of the night.

We lower our packs and sit in silence on the topmost ridge.Then, without a word, but as if by some prearranged signal, weslip one by one into a deep sleep.

Saturday 24 AugustThe rising sun wakes me, the rock growing warm against myface. My mind is awash with fragmentary yet vivid dreamimages. A dark man, his naked body covered in mud, sitting inthe middle of a dry salt-pan beating a drum. Myself runningnaked through the desert at night, my body bristling with ananimalʼs fur, the knife-blade glinting in my hand, graven with thedesign of the Midgard serpent. I open my eyes and see Gregand Mr Horn, a tripod over one shoulder, hiking up the slopetowards us, the rising sun at their backs. I turn over, pressingmy face against the rock and close my eyes once more.

When I wake again, it is full day.

Mad Mike, Little John and Chris Halls are standing some wayoff down the ridge smoking a joint. I amble over and ask aboutthe whereabouts of Greg and Mr Horn, but no one besidesmyself has seen them. We wait at the plateau until the earlypart of the afternoon, during which time I sit and meditate for awhile in the cave of the rock-paintings, but still there is no signof the second unit. Finally, we go back down the rock and turnthe car towards Swakopmünd, Mad Mike at the wheel oncemore. Driving away from Spitzkop, we pass a man standingwatching the road. I am convinced he is one of the individualswho attacked our car last night, but no one feels like stopping toask him any questions.

On the freeway back into town we overtake a governmentdelegation travelling in convoy, flanked by police cars, headingfor the local sports centre where another bizarre ceremony isunder way. The production is holding a reception in the stripedcatering tent. Daniel, our beloved production manager, gives a

short speech and Robert Burke, in the guise of the dark man,presents a hefty cheque made out by Palace Devil Limited tothe visiting party members as a ʻgoodwill donationʼ to the SouthWest African Peopleʼs Organization. Nobody asks me to sayanything, nor do I volunteer to.

Afterwards, the crew play a rather one-sided match with thelocal team. Needless to say, the locals win.

The latest batch of rushes are in and I return to the productionoffice, where once again I am thoroughly entertained, thefootage proving to be of a consistently satisfying quality. DerekTrigg, the editor, has set up a Steenbeck in the suite next doorand is attempting to move towards an assembly of the scenesalready shot, but is having trouble getting his edge-numberingmachine to work. The machine has jammed on 666, stubbornlyrefusing to print any other numbers. Derekʼs team are feeling alittle spooked by this. They have only been here forty-eighthours and already theyʼre getting the creeps,

Later, while I am at the office, the vixen sisters turn up toannounce that the props department has been broken into andthat a key prop, the dark manʼs knife carved with the design ofthe Midgard serpent, has disappeared. Now I start to get thecreeps as well.

for her performance in Percy Adlonʼs Baghdad Café) whom Ihave not seen since a film festival in Sitges, Spain, the yearbefore. Marianne is a big fan of Hardware and having told methat it was her ambition to cameo in a horror film one day, Imade a point of offering her a part when it came to casting DustDevil. She has brought a gift that she now presents to me, acarved wand startlingly similar to the kierie that the witchdoctor,Joe Niemand, gives to Zakesʼ character in the film.

In Khoisan mythology, the vampire Nagtlöper (literally ʻnightwalker') can only be trapped by being tricked into stepping overthe magic kierie traditionally laid across the threshold of the hutto guard against nocturnal visitations. There is an obviousparallel here with the stake hammered through the heart toexterminate the undead in the European vampire myth, andalthough the kierie used as a prop in our film is a genuinemagical artefact carved for these very purposes, it in fact hailsfrom Borneo, where there is a parallel tradition.

Marianneʼs kierie is of local origin, carved with the figure of anaked fertility goddess and decorated with lucky beans,designed to ward off evil and ensure a good harvest. I thank herfor the gift, and promise to carry it with me on the shoot fromnow on as a way of symbolically protecting the crew.

Monday 26 AugustGuy Travis, my first assistant, tells me that Iʼve been riding thecrew too hard lately. He urges me to use a more hands-offapproach and to stand back after giving my brief, to allow theart department and lighting crew to get along with setting up theshot at their own pace.

I try out an experiment and give Steve Chivers and CarrieFisher, our operator, their heads for the first set-up, waiting on abench on the station platform and reading from AndreiTarkovskyʼs Sculpting in Time until Guy comes to tell me thatthe crew is ready. As a result of this new policy, we go somethree hours behind schedule and I have to tell Guy that,regrettably, a return to my old ways is in order until he provesthat he can make the crew hold their pace without me.

After wrap I have dinner with Marianne Sägebrecht (best known


Tuesday 27 AugustWe are in Josephʼs vast, sepulchral mortuary set today,shooting the scene where Zakesʼ character goes to consult thelocal pathologist, played by Marianne, who points out theconnection between the murders and ritual magic. We spend allmorning lighting and rehearsing the scene, but when we cometo the first master take, things go hellishly awry.

In the scene, Zakes and Marianne are standing in thefluorescent glow of a slide bench, poring over transparencies ofthe mysterious blood mural from the scene of the first murder,when a morgue attendant bursts into the room to announce thatthere is an urgent telephone call from Bethany police station.The room is lined with two rows of motionless extras, made upby Chris Halls and Little John as partially dissected corpses,their faces and stomachs pinned back by surgical clamps. Themorgue attendant is played by a weird-looking local who in reallife pedals around the town on a rickety bicycle selling Bibles,and who is now waiting excitedly in the wings to storm in andsay his one line.

Zakes and Marianne have just crossed to the slide bench onthe first take when something inexplicable happens. Although itis still early in the day, the atmosphere in the railway shedwhere the set has been constructed is hot and airless, and asthe flickering fluorescent tubes come on inside the slide bench Istart to feel strangely giddy. It is almost as if the walls of theroom, of reality itself, have suddenly become very thin, warpingin and out of focus and seething like hot Silly Putty. I stagger,putting one hand against the door-frame to steady myself, myother hand clutching Marianneʼs kierie.

Then the morgue attendant begins to scream and comesrunning into the shot uncued, his arms pinwheeling. Zakes andMarianne are plainly confused, vainly trying to continue theirdialogue as I struggle to call the shot to a halt, only to find thecommand sticking in my throat. The morgue attendant is doingsome kind of weird dance now in the aisle between the slabs,stamping his feet and chanting something almost unintelligible.For a moment it is as if he is speaking in tongues, but then Imanage to make out some of his words.

ʻHallelujah! Hallelujah! He is come! The Lord is come!'

His words disintegrate into an agonized gurgle, his eyes rollingup into their sockets so that only their whites remain visible. Hislegs fold under him and he drops to the floor, his bodyconvulsing in a full-blown epileptic seizure, his lips flecked with

foam, his teeth gnashing, Zakes and Marianne breaking off theirdialogue and turning in shock.

For a split second everyone seems paralysed.

Then Daniel and Guy come running into the shot and start tryingto force a metal ruler into the morgue attendantʼs mouth to stophim from swallowing his tongue, and I find my voice at last,calling for the cameras to cut, the kierie waving in my hand. Evenafter the cameras have stopped rolling, the corpses refuse to risefrom their slabs, the extras having apparently fallen into such adeep sleep that they remain blissfully unaware of Daniel and Guystruggling to hold down the screaming morgue attendant in theaisle, his legs thrashing against the concrete floor.

ʻHallelujah! Hallelujah! He is come!'

I turn away, gasping for fresh air, as Zakes and Marianne fleethe set, joining me in the doorway. Zakes complains that he canfeel a weird pressure at the base of his brain, and Mariannetells me bluntly that ʻthere are too many psychics in the room.'We clear the set and break for lunch without a single usabletake in the can.

It is Marianneʼs birthday today, and we have laid on a seafoodlunch with a platter of Lüderitz oysters shipped in specially forher. I try to make light of the morningʼs events, rationalizing themorgue attendantʼs behaviour as an epileptic seizure broughton by the flickering of the fluorescent tubes.

By mid-afternoon we have resumed shooting, with a new extracast as the morgue attendant. On the first take of the afternoon,when Marianne and Zakes reach the slide bench once moreand the same line of dialogue that triggered the first morgueattendantʼs seizure, there is an electrical malfunction and thefluorescent tubes begin to flicker maddeningly, sputtering onand off for no apparent rhyme or reason. We try to continue withthe take, but eventually have to call another halt to repair thefuses and restore everyoneʼs calm.

Marianne insists that there is a presence in the room.Something unborn trying to break through into our reality. I nolonger try to deny that something weird is going on, but insteadtry to assume a quasi-shamanic role, insisting that we can onlyexorcise the demon by pressing on with our work. This strategyproves to be an effective one, and we are able to complete thesequence without further interference from the ether, although

we have to rush the scene and simplify the coverageconsiderably to make up for lost time. Just when our spirits arestarting to lift, an urgent fax arrives for Marianne. Her motherhas had a serious stroke that afternoon and she is asked toreturn at once to Munich.

Later, sitting outside Marianneʼs trailer, my head in my hands, Iam approached by Dirk and the vixen sisters from the artdepartment. They tell me there has been a street fight in thelocal township, Mondessa, and that a vigilante group hired bythe production has succeeded in recovering the stolen knifeafter a pitched battle with one of the neighbourhood gangs.

Ina puts the knife in my hand and I hold it up in the glare of thefloodlights. Its gleaming edge is notched and the etched designof the Midgard serpent is clotted with blood and bits of hair.

Later still, after a series of frantic telephone calls from theproduction office, we learn that Marianneʼs mother is out ofdanger, and Marianne volunteers to stay another three days tocomplete her scenes before returning to Germany.

Friday 30 AugustToday we begin work on Marianneʼs final scene in the mortuaryset, which has now been re-dressed with glowing murals and litby hundreds of church candles, the floor dampened down toreflect their glow. The set is intensely humid and Marianne ismore than a little nervous.

During the morning there has been another odd incident. Whilethe second unit were shooting pick-up shots with Marianne, theslide bench malfunctioned again on the same line of dialogueas before, the fluorescents beginning to flicker once more as ifon cue. I try to reassure Marianne that our work today will be akind of exorcism, laying the demons raised by the previousshoot, and have cause to reflect on how the film-maker seemsto have taken on the same cultural role in this century as theshaman in times of old. The West has displaced its unconsciousmind into the media and now we are called upon to act asdream doctors for the masses.

Kierie in hand, I glide through the afternoon, the shootpresenting few problems.


Saturday 31 AugustToday is the first official rest day I have allowed myself for alltoo long. I take the chance to drive up the coast into theuninhabited wasteland beyond Hentieʼs Bay to visit the sealcolony at Cape Cross. With a thousand miles of tracklessvolcanic desert on one side and the fathomless depths of theSouth Atlantic on the other, Cape Cross feels like the very edgeof manʼs universe. Beyond where I stand, there is nothing savewind and water sweeping away to the ends of the earth and thebarren shores of Antarctica and the Falklands. The air here isthick with the stench of excrement and decaying flesh, andraucous with the roaring and bellowing of the huge sea lionswhose writhing bodies undulate across the jagged rocks,fighting, fucking and foraging for food, as vast glacial wavesburst over the top of them.

Everywhere around me there are creatures being born anddying, the living copulating on the bodies of the dead, the younggoing in constant threat of either being crushed by the adults oreaten by the jackals who boldly weave in and out of even thethickest parts of the press, their eyes glistening with a constant,seemingly insatiable hunger. I am reminded somewhat uncom-fortably of Gustav Doréʼs engravings for Danteʼs DivineComedy, the souls of the damned languishing on the jaggedreefs of the sunless seas of hell.

On the beach at the worldʼs end lies scattered the decay of thecenturies. Mussel shell, seagullʼs feather, tigerʼs eye, theshattered spars of man lie entangled with the bones of deadleviathans, for all that is lost must one day fetch up on that flatexpanse. The beach-comber of this desolate shore walks alonewith his wicker basket and, waiting and watching with infinitecare, he plucks one by one unto himself the derelict dreams ofEarth.


Sunday 1 SeptemberToday is one of the single most expensive days of our shoot.On a windswept railway siding at Usakos, Joseph hasreconstructed Bethany railway station and a steam train hasbeen brought in from Windhoek in order for us to film the darkmanʼs arrival in the town.

In the afternoon and evening we board the train to shoot adialogue scene in one of the cattle-trucks between Robert andtwo South African soldiers, played by Phillip Hen and LukeCornell, the animal handler; in real life, both are veterans of theAngolan bush war. Before the light goes, we have to complete ahelicopter shot of the steam train approaching Bethany, ourrushed schedule requiring the scene to be shot simultaneouslywith our work in the trainʼs interior. Daniel sees this as being thesequenceʼs ʻmoney shotʼ and insists on personally takingcharge of the helicopter rather than leaving it up to : the secondunit. Once he is airborne, he discovers that in order for the shotto cut with the rest of the sequence he has to use the samefilter as the main unit camera; however, his own budget cutshave allowed for the provision of only one filter pack, which isalready on the train.

This leads to the insane scenario of Daniel chasing the train inthe helicopter, yelling over the two-way radio for us to pass himthe filter pack. We have to complete the rather leisurely on-board dialogue scene while Daniel hovers impatiently overhead,cursing at us through the static. When I finally call cut on thelast take, he brings the helicopter alongside the cattle-truck sofast that we are still busy checking the gate. The crew has torush to reseal the camera before the cloud of dust kicked up bythe rotors clogs the works and ruins the afternoonʼs footage.

Passing the filter to the helicopter is a crazy business thatseems far more dangerous than anything on-screen, and I endup on the roof of the moving train, jumping from carriage tocarriage as the desert flatlands stream past us, bathed in thegolden glow of the magic hour. I am so preoccupied withstaying on the train that I narrowly miss being struck on theback of the head by a power-line that goes flashing past. I duckunder it with only a split second to spare, and afterwards exudea false confidence in order to mask my own awareness that Ihave come within a hairʼs breadth of a very nasty death. I wouldalmost certainly have been decapitated or swept beneath thetrainʼs wheels, had I not glanced around in the nick of time, andthis serves as a sobering warning to me.

As in my memories of combat, being under shell-fire, saturation

bombing or in a particularly bad car accident, reality has a habitof flattening out and slowing down, becoming dreamy anddistant at times like this, so that the fact of oneʼs own deathseems suddenly of frighteningly little consequence. I amdetermined not to let this film put me in my grave prematurelyand resolve to take more care from now on, knowing as I dothat the shoot will collapse if anything happens to me. Danielcompletes the helicopter shot and I call a wrap, riding back tocamp on the roof of the train, the sky turning from beatenbronze to a sullen red behind us.

That night there is an inexplicable orange glow in the northernsky that I first notice just after midnight. Several of the crew,including Mad Mike, Little John and Michelle Clapton, thecostume designer, see the glow as well and we standdumbstruck outside our bunkers watching the light for morethan an hour. The eerie nimbus comes from the direction of thedeep desert, where all of us know there is no human habitationor artificial light source, although the intensity of the glow seemsalmost to betoken the presence of a large city such as the glareof Los Angelesʼ lights reflected against the smog as seen fromthe back of Topanga canyon.

We stand for a long while, gaping like yokels who behold amarvel beyond their comprehension, filled with a sort of half-mystic wonder and dreamy curiosity. The light is no aurora orhuman beacon, and whether it comes from just beyond thecraggy, volcanic horizon or a billion miles away in intergalacticspace, none of us can say. Just after one in the morning itgrows dim and starts to fade, leaving my sense of wonderacutely sharpened. My knowledge of natural science, althoughfar from extensive, can afford no plausible clue to the lightʼsorigin and I feel with a wild, half-fearful, half-exultant thrillingthat the thing we witnessed is not to be found in the annals ofhuman observers. The phenomenon leaves me in a state ofprofound excitement and sleep, when it comes, is intermittent.

Tomorrow marks our biggest company move, over a thousandmiles to the south to Bethany district proper, to shoot theclimactic ghost-town scenes and the canyon sequence that canbe shot in no other part of the world but those regions wherethe original events took place back in 1984.

The winds are already picking up down south and if we leave itany longer it will make shooting impossible, although acompany move now is a logistical nightmare that will cost us atleast two days of precious shooting time. Jo-Anne and Daniel

try to insist on me taking a charter flight south with the cast andheads of department on Sunday, but as I have a morbid fear offlying ever since a narrow escape in Zambia many years ago, Istubbornly refuse, insisting instead that I travel overland, drivingdown tomorrow with the rest of the crew.

Jo-Anne is frightened that for some reason I might go AWOL,but I swear to her that I will reach the airstrip in Lüderitz beforeher. Despite my willingness to take a substantial wager on thematter, Jo-Anne for some reason remains curiously sceptical,as if already convinced in her heart that I am plotting toabandon her and disappear back into the desert. Her lack offaith saddens me and encourages me to go hell for leather toprove her wrong.


Saturday 7 SeptemberI set off on the road south just before dawn, travelling in a hiredcar with the taciturn Mr Horn, Deborah Deats (Chelseaʼs stand-in) and Mad Mike, who as usual takes the first spell at thewheel. We call a halt for the evening at the point where the tarroad gives out, on the banks of the Fish River, which windsthrough the second-largest natural canyon on Earth, a placethat the Khoisan people knew as the home of the great snake-father Kouteign Kouroo. Back in the first times, in the time of thered light, Kouteign Kouroo, the great serpent and father of therainbow, made this place from the lashing of his coils.

We climb down the side of the canyon, the river glisteningbelow us in the darkness, and pitch camp beneath the stars ona dry sandbank, the sound of the running water whispering tous in our sleep, our fire sending up its sparks to greet thebackbone of the night that I arches above us. In some strangeway I feel, as I slip into deeper slumber, that I am coming home,returning at last to the source of my dreams.

We arrive at the airstrip on the outskirts of Lüderitz just as thecharter flight from Swakopmünd is getting in, winning our wager bya hairʼs breadth. I amble out on to the runway to greet Jo-Anneand the principal cast members as they disembark, welcomingthem to the town and assuming a relaxed air as if Iʼve been waitinghere for days already. After freshening up in the seaside cabin thathas been allocated to me, I head back into town to rendezvouswith Jo-Anne and organize a scout of tomorrowʼs location.

When I reach the steps of the production office I hear thesounds of screams and breaking glass coming from within andSheila Frazer Milne, the starchy production secretary who onceworked with the sainted Andrei Tarkovsky on the production ofThe Sacrifice, comes running out of the building. She bumpsinto me on the steps and seeing me, starts to scream: ʻDonʼt goin there! Donʼt go in there!' , I try to get some sense out of her,and she explains that Joseph has found out that Jo-Anne ishaving an affair with Daniel and has stormed into the productionoffice and tried to attack them, beating them with his fishing rod.Glancing over her shoulder, I see at once that Daniel has gotthe better of Joseph and is busy slamming him around theroom, while Jo-Anne stands in one corner screaming abuse andDeborah Deats, who was apparently trying to make a long-distance call to her boyfriend, cowers under the table, stillclutching the receiver. Sheila cuts and runs, telling me to guardthe steps and make sure that no one comes or goes.

A moment later Robert appears, also in a blind rage, and insistson trying to push past me to see Jo-Anne. He claims that hishotel room has no running water and threatens to walk off theshoot unless it is seen to immediately. I try to make lightconversation with him, leaning from side to side to block hisview of the commotion in the office, while he cranes his neck totry and see past me. Insanely, neither of us comments on theviolent tableau unfolding behind us, and eventually, seeing thatit is an inopportune moment, Robert goes on his way, promisingto return later with a vengeance.

A split second after Robert has gone around the corner, Danielthrows Joseph out of the office, both of them swearing loudlythat theyʼll kill each other. Joseph is a mess, his face streamingwith blood, his fishing rod still clutched in one hand, his whitesuit streaked with gore. I walk him as far as the local bar and tryto comfort him a little, hoping at least to convince him not to doanything rash. Over the grim, Bavarian-style bar countershamelessly hangs a cherished portrait of Adolf Hitler, who isobviously still a hero to the unrehabilitated locals.

Sunday 8 SeptemberI sit naked on a flat rock beside the river, breathing in thebreathless tranquility of the prehistoric landscape thatsurrounds me, allowing the sunʼs first rays to warm me just asthey warm the rock, feeling my strength returning to me as if Itoo am made of stone. Then rising, I dive into the sluggishorange waters of the Fish River that runs wide and tumid acrossthe sandbanks, holding my breath and swimming along thebottom until I reach the far shore.

When I break surface once more, I feel cleansed and somehowrejuvenated by the riverʼs embrace, as if the dust of all that hasgone before has been washed away from me. Later, refreshedand revitalized, we climb back up from the river and turn the caron to the dirt track to Lüderitz, Mad Mike at the wheel once more.

Just before Aus we pass the Bethany turn-off and, leavingbehind the canyon and mesa country, emerge on to aseemingly limitless primordial plain, dotted with ant hills, thatsweeps away to meet the steely sky at a point infinitely remotefrom us. On the westernmost rim of the horizon we can see thehuge igneous rocks that surround the blighted hamlet of Ausand which once served as back-projection plates for part of theopening sequence of Stanley Kubrickʼs 2001: A SpaceOdyssey.

Thursday 12 SeptemberToday we begin work on the climactic showdown in the ghosttownʼs main street. The sequence is deliberately designed toevoke echoes of a classic Western shoot-out, although in DustDevil it is a shoot-out in which the man with no nameʼs pocketwatch turns backwards, none of the guns are loaded and theantagonists are a white man, a black man and a woman. I drewmy initial inspiration from the climax of The Good, the Bad andthe Ugly, which I analysed for long hours as a teenager, butonly now do I begin to realize the full extent-of Leoneʼs genius.

In The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the three gunslingers, LeeVan Cleef, Eli Wallach and Clint Eastwood, fan out around acircular arena in the centre of an enormous graveyard. Thestrength of the scene derives in part from the extraordinaryrhythm of Leoneʼs editing, building up a complex montage ofimages and angles that plainly demand a vast number of set-ups to achieve.

I realize my cardinal error before we are even half-way throughthe day. By locating my shoot-out in the horizontal perspectiveof the main street, I have inadvertently locked us into a rigidcontinuity of light and shadow, with too many identifyinglandmarks for us to be able to cheat. Leoneʼs sequence is set atthe hub of a vast wheel, with the characters surrounded by auniform background of anonymous graves, thus allowing him tocheat the action to follow the sun, rotating the actors as if on avast sundial and enabling himself to continue shootingthroughout the day.

In a single, almighty error of judgement, I have trapped us intoshooting this sequence only in the morning, before the angle ofthe light begins to differ too dramatically from the master take.With the sand-storms closing in on us, I have pinned the mainunit and principal cast down in this one exterior location forwhat may turn out to be weeks. I have no choice but to chalk itup to experience and put a damage-limitation scheme intoaction, splitting our days between the showdown sequence andthe interior scenes.

At least tomorrow will be a rest day, and I resolve to travel backout to canyon country to help collect my thoughts and get afresh perspective on all this.


Sunday 14 SeptemberI have to delay my departure for a scheduling meeting at theproduction office, and decide to ride out to canyon country withDeborah Deats, who is also making for the river. We finally getunder way around noon with Deborah at the wheel, driving alittle too fast, perhaps to make up for lost time. We have just hitthe dirt road beyond Aus, roughly at the same point where wehad the blow-out last Sunday when, predictably, we haveanother blow-out.

The front left tyre goes soft and the car begins to waver,skidding from side to side on the dry, dirt surface as Deborahstruggles to bring it back under control. I brace my bootsagainst the dashboard, seeing the road running out beneathus. Then with a thud and a rush of gravel we hit the softshoulder and begin to roll. The horizon spins around us, theground coming up to slap the side of the car, the doorcrumpling beside me and the windows imploding in a luminousspray.

I close my eyes too late, feeling the flying glass rake my face ina cloud of stinging, insect pain, the car rolling and rolling,threatening to tear itself apart, the roof caving in above me.Then, its momentum spent, the mangled chassis comes to reston its wheels once more, rocking and shivering, the sounds oftwisted metal ticking and cooling all round us, Verdiʼs Requiemstill playing on the stereo.

My face is wet with blood and I try to open my eyes, only to feela jab of pain and something like broken glass grating againstthe inside of my closed lid. I manage to get the buckled dooropen and pull myself from the wreck, my wet shirt chafingagainst raw nerve endings as I paw at my face, trying to wipeaway the splinters still embedded there.

I turn my eyes towards the sun, feeling its heat on my upturnedface and sensing the silent immensity of the landscape thatsurrounds me, yet I see nothing. I stagger a few paces downthe road and then sit down in the dust, Verdiʼs music lendingthe scene a farcically operatic quality. I dab at my eyes withpart of my shirt, feeling pain once more. Then I feel Deborahbeside me and I ask her if sheʼs all right. She reminds me thatshe crashes cars for a living and then tries to apologize,obviously spooked at the idea of being held responsible forputting me out of action. She brushes some of the glass off myface and tells me to try not to move or open my eyes. I sitwaiting in darkness on the soft shoulder while she fetcheswater from the wreck, a giddy sense of calm enveloping me.

I keep seeing the same thing over and over. The last split second before it all went dark. The glowing halo of flying glass fanning out in the air before meso slowly that I can see every individual fragment in sharpfocus as they rush up to meet my face. My thoughts turn towards the shoot and the still uncompletedfilm. I begin to feel afraid.

Then I feel water on my face and Deborahʼs touch once more. Itry to tell her that itʼs all right but she tells me to be quiet andrelax as she tries to re move a particularly dangerous splinterfrom the corner of my left eyeball. As I blink, there comes aspark of light. The spark irises up and the world comesmercifully back into focus.

The first thing I see is Deborahʼs face as she leans over me,the sky behind her over-exposed, burned out to a white glare,an almost comical expression of concern on her face. I find thisabsurdly touching, a massive sense of relief flooding throughme as I realize that I havenʼt lost an eye after all. My headhurts and friction burns have flayed the skin from part of my leftarm and shoulder, but otherwise I have been afforded aremarkable escape.

Deborah has come off even better than me, and after taking abreather we clamber back into the wreck and manage to restartthe engine. To our mutual surprise, the car still runs despite itsbattered shape. We get the clattering wreck turned around andlimp back towards the nearest town, Aus, where we stop for adrink to steady our nerves at the local hotel.

Sitting on the hotel veranda, I realize that my temporaryblindness could not have been down to the glass splinteralone, and finding a raised lump on the back of my skull,deduce that I must have struck my head against the roof andam probably suffering from a mild form of concussion. Theageing German matron who runs the hotel joins us on theveranda and we strike up a conversation with her. Aus, whosename literally means ʻoutʼ or ʻexitʼ in German, was originally aconcentration camp, one of the earliest, set up by the SouthAfricans for German prisoners in World War One. The SouthAfricans got the idea from the British, who came up with theprototypes of the modern death-camps during the Boer War.The unsettling idea that Aus might have in turn inspired theGermans comes over me.

The matron who runs the hotel in what was formerly the hub of

the camp tells me that three years ago Aus froze over, in anunprecedented bout of freak weather that produced an isolatedblizzard in the middle of the Namib desert, the only one inrecorded history. She disappears back into the hotel to dig outsome photographs of Aus under snow, and while she is gonean elderly bushman clutching a guitar comes wandering up onto the veranda and sits down beside us. He is the first and onlybushman I have come across on the shoot and I try to speak tohim, although his English is non-existent and my Afrikaans andGerman are equally poor.

The bushman tells us that we look very beautiful together,apparently failing to notice that we are covered in blood. Hebegins to serenade us on his guitar, singing an inane romanticballad. The German matron returns and without warning orprovocation starts to yell at the bushman, driving him off theveranda and making as if to strike him.

Then she cheerfully sits down beside us once more andcontinues the conversation. I remark on how few bushmen areleft and she tells me how back then before World War One, theGerman settlers massacred most of the locals, burying them inmass graves beneath what is now the local golf course.

Every time she turns her back the bushman creeps back on tothe veranda, grinning mischievously and attempts to continuehis song, prompting further outbursts of abuse from thehotelier.

All this talk of death-camps seems to make Deborahuncomfortable, and eventually she urges me to move on,driving back to Lüderitz as the day shelves off into night, thecarʼs shattered headlights casting amusingly psychedelicpatterns on the road ahead. Even when I reach my cabin backat the beach-front, Deborah seems loath to leave me, stillapprehensive at my condition and perhaps wanting somereassurance herself. She waits while I take a shower, washingmy hair to make sure all the fine debris has been removed frommy scalp. The hot water stings against the raw flesh of my backand I close my eyes once more, turning my face towards thecleansing spray.

Then there is a soft draught as someone draws the curtain,and I feel Deborah suddenly beside me, her hand brushingagainst my cheek. I turn and her voice comes to me indarkness once more before her lips touch mine: ʻDonʼt befrightened. Donʼt spoil it. Itʼs just love.'


Thursday 19 SeptemberThe company relocates some three hundred kilometres inlandto resume shooting on the edge of the Fish River Canyon, for aswooning romantic interlude between Chelsea and the darkman, shot from the crane and semi-circular tracks. Thegrandeur of the landscape stuns everyone into something likereligious awe and the shoot runs like clockwork, with the crewtalking in whispers as if working in a cathedral.

After getting the big kiss in the can, I sit with Deborah and MadMike on the lip of the canyon and watch a half-mystical sunset,the clouds turning into twisting tongues of fire in the brazenfurnace of the west, the heated heavens reflecting in the coilsof the river far below us, where the first patches of night arealready lurking, climbing up every gully and cleft as the desertsky slowly lapses into night and the Southern Cross appearswith an almost hallucinatory vividness overhead.

Driving back from the canyon we strike and kill a rabbit, which Itake as a bad omen and my mood remains sombre for the restof the evening, which I spend with Deborah beside a campfireat the riverʼs edge, watching as an endless armada of nightcreatures fling themselves hissing and spluttering into theflames. A huge moth sears its wings and goes fluttering aroundmy feet in a frenzied death rictus that only ends when a huntingspider scurries quickly out of the shadows and latches on to it,prompting the dying moth to get itself airborne once more anddisappear back into the night, the spider still clingingtenaciously to its underbelly. Even here, then, there is nopeace. Only the silent slaughter-house of the desert night.The quiet holocaust of nature.

Sunday 29 SeptemberI join the crew on the set of the Star of Bethany Drive-InTheatre that Joseph has constructed in the shadow ofSpitkopʼs crags. The drive-in is a re-creation of a real theatre inthe Keetmanshoop area, its purpose in the film being in part toillustrate the contamination of the witch-doctorʼs cosmology bywestern B-movie imagery. By putting an equal weight onmythology and pop culture, I hope to draw attention to thecomplex iconographic roots of the man-with-no-name figureand the magical possibilities of film itself. The witch-doctorʼsrole as drive-in projectionist helps illustrate the complicatedidea behind the dark manʼs murders, the gnostic belief that lifeonly exists as a result of a war between light and dark,between spirit and matter. The dark man, like us, is trapped inmaterial incarnation and yearns to escape the linear continuityof time like a character in a film who plots to escape from thescene itself.

As night comes on and we move into Spitzkopʼs caves anddeeper into the cosmology of Dust Devil, a posse of confusedBritish journalists arrive with the filmʼs publicist to watch asJohn Matshikiza, the witch-doctor, squats on a rock beside afake campfire and expounds on how the black magician knowsthat there is a spark of light trapped within all of us, a splinter ofthe true God.

Through the ritual of murder the magician can control therelease of the spark and ride the light-beam beyond time,beyond matter, into infinity. Our world has no more substanceto him than a projected image caught for an instant on the palmof an upraised hand.

Friday 11 OctoberWe spend all night on the eerie, sand-filled set of theabandoned Empire Cinema, the dead heart of the ghost townwhere Zakesʼ character confronts the dark man and the ghostlypresence of his wife and child. The sanded-in cinema issomehow an astonishingly apt place to end the last day of ourofficial main unit shoot, and for the first time in weeks thequality of tonightʼs sequence matches the visionary power of itsdescription in the script.

Today is Day Forty-Six of our forty-six day shoot.

From now on we will be working on borrowed time, ourcontinued presence here sustained only by Jo-Anneʼssuccessful insurance claim on the damaged mortuary footage.


Thursday 17 OctoberWe spend the morning shooting insert work before relocating tothe local shooting-range to complete a sequence torn from thescript a fortnight ago. The shooting-range sequence involvesme taking charge of a class of local schoolchildren armed with.22 rifles and live ammunition and working with a vestigial crewwithout assistant directors, production support or insurance.

The personal and ambiguous nature of the scene has alwayscalled it into doubt from the point of view of the filmʼs backers,who are ceaselessly engaged in trying to pare my work back tothe bare, exploitative bone and I realize that, even if I manageto get it into the can on the sly, it will probably still be cut fromthe final release prints.

Coming at the end of the dark manʼs walk through Bethany, thescene depicts a group of children dressed in cadet uniformsreminiscent of the Hitler Youth being tutored in the finer pointsof marksmanship by a Marist monk.

The scene is intended as another omen of the comingholocaust and an evocation of Christianityʼs moral and spiritualbankruptcy, as well as serving as one of the filmʼs only hints atthe dark manʼs past, a moment of strange recognition flickeringbetween him and one of the pupils.

The scene is a direct re-creation of a precise moment from avanished hour of a vanished day from my own childhood.Incarcerated in a Catholic military academy for two years, Ilearned swiftly that if I could shoot straight I would be exemptfrom the tiresome and degrading ritual of square-bashing andformation-marching. Lying on my belly in the dust, squintingdown the barrel of my rifle, I felt strangely superior to the otherboys, who were forced to march in endless circles in the middaysun. If my aim was good, the monks smiled on me and I wastreated to time off and away trips for competitive shootingcompetitions.

I really believed then, even at that early age, that all the differencebetween our squad and the rest of the boys lay in our possessingthe will and the specialized skills necessary for killing. We werean elite amongst the other cadets, privileged to spend our timegoofing off, lying on our bellies like lizards in the African sun,concentrating on our targets until the only thing we could still feelwere the tips of our fingers against the triggers. In this way I firstlearned, in the very bosom of the church, the art and privilege ofkilling, a lesson that for my sins I have never forgotten, even afterI tore off my uniform and broke with the programme.

It was on a bright day like this that I first glimpsed the dark manstrolling past our school fence, his face strangely shadowedbeneath the brim of his hat, the air around him seething likequicksilver. I remember feeling afraid but fascinated at the sametime. His coat, old even then and thick with dust, seemedredolent of adventure and intrigue. Even then I felt a strangeallure, a lethal glamour that told me that one day I would be justlike him. I have felt him just behind me at every turn since then,threatening and cajoling me, my dark half, my murderous alterego, my very shadow, the man that poor Deborah has mistakenme for.

In Afghanistan when my marksmanship and talent for killingbecame central to my survival, once again the line between usbecame all but invisible. Now at last, here in Namibia where it

all began, I pray I have finally drained that residue of darknessfrom my soul, dragged the dark man kicking from my woundedpsyche and trapped him safely on film, caught forever behindthe rolling frame bars of a cinematic prison speciallyconstructed for him.

Maybe now at last I will be free from his shadow. Only time will tell.

I spend the evening burning cowsʼ skulls and dressing up incoat, hat and dog mask to take over briefly from Robert andbecome the dark man for an insert shot of his partiallytransformed figure caught in the headlights of an incoming car.After the shoot when I discard the costume, I really feel that Iam discarding that part of my life for ever and when sleep findsme, it is deep and dreamless.


Saturday 19 OctoberJo-Anne and Daniel slip out of town today, heading for homewithout saying goodbye and I am left to fight on alone until thebitter end. I still have the helicopter for another forty-eight hoursand there is just about enough stock left to keep us busy,although we are desperately short on fuel

I quit my bunker just before dawn and report to the airstrip,where I solemnly say farewell to Mad Mike and strap myself intothe chopper for the ride south. All day we fly across a lifelessworld of red dust, naked lava ridges and broken quartz, theceaseless thrum and flicker of the rotor blades lulling all of us inthe cockpit into something close to a trance. Gliding like asolitary vulture on the high thermals, we cross a land that nolonger seems to be part of manʼs universe, an untenanted,unfinished world, the terrain of Gods and Spirits.

Several times I have to splash water on the pilotʼs face to keephim alert, and near Keetmanshoop we have to cut across thefreeway and land at a service station to refuel. Then we areflying over the flat-topped mesas of Bethany district, mustangsrunning on the plain below us. We find the railway line and traceits gleaming tracks until they cross the curve of the Fish Riverand we follow the dark manʼs trail back along its shining coilsinto canyon country and the timeless gorge that in Khoisanmythology is home to the Great Snake Father.

There on the canyonʼs wall the last of the productionʼs redVolkswagens has been pushed into place, A pick-up truck isparked a little way off, with the shootʼs last two survivorsstanding by. Deborah and our runner, Desperate Dan Zeff (whoalways wanted to be more involved in the movie), have beendriving all night to make this rendezvous. She is dressed inChelseaʼs wardrobe and during the night she has crudelyperoxided Danʼs hair in a convenient service-station basin anddressed him to resemble Robert.

Now, as we circle them in the fading light of our final magichour, she takes Desperate Dan in her arms and standing on thevery edge of the cliff, draws him into a vast embrace, planting alingering kiss on his lips. The moment seems eternal, as ifsomehow abstracted from time, and I roll the camera until I amout of stock, the chopper lurching perilously beneath me,buffeted by the canyonʼs curious air currents, the river spinningfar below us. I cut the camera and we bring the chopper in toland on the edge of the abyss. I unstrap myself and bundleDesperate Dan into the seat in my place, shaking him by thehand before signalling all clear to the pilot to lift off. The chopper

circles us one last time before banking and heading away north,anxious to reach civilization before the light fades, the throb ofits rotors ebbing slowly like a fading pulse, leaving me andDeborah marooned in the silent, golden glory of the GreatNamib.

By nightfall we have arrived at our final port of call, the decayingspa town of Warmbad, on the bank of the Orage river, that wasin ancient times known to the Khoisan people as Too-Gah, thenavel of the universe, the ancestral point of emergence andportal to the spirit world. Deborah and I pitch camp beside thevolcanic spring, a storm brewing in the distance, a vaporouscolumn of living steam rising to the stars behind us, its writhingcontours suggesting an ethereal bestiary drawn from someforgotten mythology.

Alone now with Deborah, I finally have to confront the truthabout her identity and mine. I ask about her surname and sheadmits that it has been anglicized from Dietz, and when I probefurther, she admits that her grand-father fled from Germany atthe end of World War Two. He had been involved in a chemicalfactory that had manufactured Zyklon B for the gas chambers ofBelsen and Auschwitz. Her father, Michael Julius Dietz, hadfollowed in his footsteps by becoming an important mover inESCOM, South Africaʼs state-owned power suppliers, and is inpersonal charge of the nationʼs fledgeling nuclear powerprogramme.

Deborah herself plans to follow suit and dreams of a career inthe state-owned broadcasting network. Her dreams get out ofhand and she tells me of her vision of a new South Africa,arguing that I can never be happy living amongst the ʻwhitewormsʼ of the West, that my duty is to remain here and becomeone of the leaders of this brave new world, a midwife attendingto the birth-pains of a strange new order.

She tells me how some of the right-wingers are planning toreclaim this part of Namibia and build a huge wall out into theocean to divert the Benguela current and cause a temperatureinversion to bring rain to the wasteland and make the desertfertile so that the new, pure-white nation of Orandia can befounded. I shake my head and tell her that she is insane. I tellher that the white man will never be able to bend the desert tohis will. The sleeping giants of the wasteland will awaken andbreak their bones if they try. She tells me that I am just like herbeneath the skin, that no matter what, I will always be one ofʻthem'.

I laugh and tell her that the only thing I know for sure now is thatIʼm nothing like her. I never have been and never will be one ofʻthem'. She rages at me and threatens me with a soda-waterbottle. She calls me a traitor. I pull a knife on her and tell her todrop the bottle. Now she accuses me of the murders, of havingkilled all those people when I first hitch-hiked up here afterdeserting from the army. She claims she has heard me talking inmy sleep. I start to laugh again and sit down, sheathing my knife.Eventually she gets tired of threatening me and sits down as well.I patiently explain to her that I am not the dark man, nor am I ablack magician or a mass murderer, nor am I a worm or a traitor.

Iʼm just a filmmaker and a pretty mediocre one at that.

She curses me and I leave her the car keys. I shoulder my packand she yells after me that Iʼm damned, that I condemning myselfto a life of obscurity as a hack horror-film director, a life wasteddreams and worthless prophecies. I tell her that this is true andshe spits at me. Not wanting to hear any more, I start down theroad, heading north more, determined to try and hitch a ride.

A little while later it starts to rain.


EpilogueIn December 1991 I delivered a 120-minute cut of Dust Devil toPalace Pictures. The film was cut to 95 minutes and test-screened at Wimbledon, to a confused audience response. InApril 1992, Palace Pictures went into liquidation and post-production on Dust Devil was closed down. After Palace wentunder, Dust Devilʼs British distribution rights were taken over byPolygram, who sub-sequently shelved it. In the intervening time,Miramax produced an ungraded 86-minute cut of their own,eliminating the dream imagery and supernatural subtext,redubbing and wildly restructuring the remaining scenes into anew order that bore little resemblance either to the originalscript or a cohesive narrative.

In January 1993 I learned that one of Palaceʼs creditors hadgrabbed the 86-minute cutting copy and that another held thenegative. I persuaded them to hand over the material andtracked down the rushes and the remaining excised footage toa storage locker in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire. In the nextfew months I spent forty thousand pounds of my own moneyrecutting and redubbing the film as effectively as I could with theaid of its new editor, Paul Carlin.

Eighteen months after wrapping in Namibia, I delivered a finalcut to Polygram running at 105 minutes. The film wassubsequently given a token theatrical release, using the oneprint that I had already paid for, garnering some glowing reviewsand somehow actually managing to show a profit on its UKrelease, grossing more money than the Palme dʼOr winnerBarton Fink before being dumped unceremoniously on to video,hidden from view behind a tasteless and misleading box cover.

The only cut that has ever been seen outside Britain is thegarbled, ungraded Miramax cut that crept out on to videorelease in Europe and the United States. Channel Four plans totelevise the complete Dust Devil this autumn, and plans are inthe works to try to re-release the film theatrically in severalterritories including the United States.

My contract with Palace Pictures has never been honoured. Ihave yet to receive my final pay cheque, and will never becompensated for my subsidy of the post-production period.Partially as a result of the contract I signed in blood back inAugust 1991, I have no legal claim to the filmʼs box-officeearnings or right to screen the completed film without the priorconsent of the distributors.

I no longer have dreams of the dark man, but suffer from

nightmares of a different kind. Jo-Anne and Daniel are currentlyin Utah producing a George Sluizer film described by itspublicist as a ʻdesertbound psychological thriller'. Poor SteveEarnhardt is still working for Miramax. Deborah Dietz drove thepick-up truck down to Cape Town where she was reunited withher Argentinian boyfriend Jorge. On the way back toJohannesburg they were both injured in a serious car smashafter the windscreen of their pick-up truck was struck by a whiteowl. The vixen sisters, Ina and Amelia Roux, were lessfortunate. Coming back from another shoot a few months afterDust Devilʼs wrap, Ina fell asleep at the wheel while drivingthrough the desert night, and steered their car directly into thepath of an oncoming truck.

Ina was killed on impact and Amelia survived with seriousinjuries. It is to them that the film and this report on its makingare dedicated.

Richard Stanley (director)Malibu, Southern CaliforniaSummer 1993


All photos and artwork - Copyright Palace PicturesDesign and Layout - Pineapples101

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Dust Devil Production Diary