Every filmmaker understands the classic adage: you tell a story three times – once in the writing, once in the shooting, and once in the editing. But for South African director Meg Rickards (Tess, Kaalgat Karel, Snake), there’s a silent, foundational text that underpins that entire evolutionary cycle: the psychological contract between the director and the cast.
In a masterclass conversation on the mechanics of the craft, Rickards unpacked how a director manages tone when navigating dark, insidious themes, why she treats the camera as an active emotional lens, and how a rigorous collaborative blueprint with longtime director of photography Bert Haitsma allows her to step away from the technical monitor and remain firmly in the trenches with her actors.
The Camera as a Conductor: Trusting the Visual Blueprint
For a screenplay to successfully translate its subtext to the screen, the relationship between director and cinematographer must be practically telepathic. Having worked with DP Bert Haitsma on all her long-form pieces since 1994: The Bloody Miracle, Rickards notes that their intense pre-production phase is what buys her freedom on set.
“A director is like a conductor – they don’t have to know how to play the violin or the drums, but they need to have the overall vision and bring it. Bert and I do a lot of prep; we will shot list everything. On the day, I really trust the visuals to him. Of course, I look through the viewfinder, and I always have an eye on the composition and lighting in each shot – but I try to have more of my focus on the acting than on technical decisions, like the lens choice or light placements, because I trust Bert completely and because we’ve pre-talked about what each shot needs to bring.”
This rigorous preparation allows Rickards to implement a blocking style that honours the actor’s instincts before forcing technical constraints:
“I love to see what they can bring first and then add to that. I’ll always let them go free-range first – do whatever you think, and then let’s work from there. It’s really collaborative. Never standing there telling them what to do.”
Designing the “Beautiful Nightmare”: POV Shooting and Dramatic Irony
When moving into the territory of psychological thrillers like Snake, a script’s suspense relies completely on how information is rationed to the audience. Rickards and Haitsma deliberately chose to ground the movie’s visual language in a heightened, child-centric perspective to create what has been described as a “beautiful nightmare.”
“On Snake, we wanted to make it heavily a point-of-view movie, telling it through the child’s perspective. We also wanted there to be a little bit of dramatic irony, so that the audience knows more than the child and fears for her. We wanted the insidiousness and the evil to be just hidden through a kind of slightly magic realist perspective that the child had. It was working in symbols – colour, movement, slightly uncomfortable framings – and trying very hard not to be too obvious about it.”
The One-Take Pact: Directing Intense and Vulnerable Material
Long before the industry-wide adoption of intimacy coordinators, Rickards was formulating her own ethical protocols for directing highly sensitive material. When shooting the brutal, pivotal sand dune sequence in Tess with actors Christia Visser and Brendon Daniels, she realised that pushing actors to their emotional limits required an absolute, unbreakable guarantee of trust.
“I made a pact with them… I said, ‘I want you to go all out, but we’ll only do it once, and I promise.’ And that’s what we did. It was a tracking shot, so it was a scary technical decision because you can easily lose focus on a tracking shot and it can go wrong. At the end, the camera team came to me and said, ‘You have to re-film. We went out of focus for a couple of seconds near the end, and it’s unusable.’
I looked at it and I said, ‘I can’t. I promised.’ By that time, Christia was crying, Brendon was crying. It was very intense. They only had one in them. If you promise something to the actors, you’ve got to stick to that. In the edit, actually, it worked fine because I worked with a brilliant editor and she made the sound design work around it. There is a moment that’s out of focus, but it almost feels deliberate – part of the texture.”
Learning to Abandon the Canvas
For screenwriters and directors alike, the final hurdle of any project is the painful process of letting go. Rickards treats filmmaking much like her weekend painting practice: you have to know when to put down the brush before you ruin the canvas.
In the post-production phase, this psychological transition typically manifests in three distinct stages of discomfort. First comes the initial rough-cut shock, where a creator must come to terms with the difference between the film they imagined and the film that actually exists.
Next is the temptation to over-tinker, which Rickards warns against: “If you keep tinkering, it sort of starts losing its essence and its originality and its flavour and its texture.”
Finally, there’s the exhaustion of confronting the work’s limitations at the very end of the line, particularly during credit rolls and technical checks. “By that point, I can’t even bear to look at my work anymore, I just hate it all,” Rickards admits. “I know every frame, all I can see is the weakness. That’s all I can see.”
Ultimately, however, she views this inherent dissatisfaction as the precise creative engine that drives a storyteller forward. “I’m always dissatisfied, and that’s why I always want to make the next one. You’re always like, ‘I can do better next time, I can do better next time.’ It drives you to go again.”
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