Sean Mongie is a distinguished screenwriter, visual artist, and educator, holding Master’s degrees with distinction in Screenwriting and Honours in English Literature. His creative work spans feature screenplays, television pilots and award-shortlisted sci-fi shorts, alongside directing music videos and live music content. The writer-director’s latest short film The House That Never Sleeps is screening at this year’s DIFF and explores an author’s life and rigours of the creative journey.
When did you start writing the script and how close is the final product to your original vision?
The House that Never Sleeps has been a passion project in incubation for many years – I think the earliest versions of it were written in 2019. I received development funding from the NFVF and worked on it during Covid, which suddenly gave the project this resonance for trapped artists that was quite universal.
It began as a toxic idea of what I wished I could do to myself to be more productive, and became more horrifying once I thought about it – and a metaphor for the act of creation. I think filmmaking is such an iterative process and films are never what was on the page during a first draft, but I’m immensely proud of the worldbuilding we were able to achieve. For a story about a literary practice like bookbinding that as a craft and profession in Africa has been dying, and master craftsman are trying to keep alive, I don’t think there’s anything like this world that I’ve seen, and I hope audiences feel transported to Ayanda’s claustrophobic world of writing and binding books.
Do you have a specific formula or routine when it comes to getting ready to write?
A lot of the film is about what used to be my own writing practice, something quite draconian and self-flagellating. Unlike Ayanda, the protagonist, I still love writing and try my best to separate the initial joy and flow state of first inspiration from the editing process that is much more painstaking.
I love the research process that I usually begin with – it’s a kind of procrastination that leads to interesting discoveries and ideas that don’t fit neatly into the plot but can surprise you. The bookbinding came quite late into the development and working with Alan Jeffrey to understand the craft brought new dimensions and visuals to the film. It’s an amazing joy to be able to daydream for a living and when it’s hard I like to remind myself that it’s not that deep and to begin you just have to entertain yourself.
How did you integrate the physical setting into Ayanda’s internal state and the broader thematic message of the film?
The building that the story is set in is a character all its own. I think in all the things I write, I’m obsessed with space and how it affects us. The House is not really a house at all – it’s a workspace that Ayanda lives in, a space that he’s shut himself in to unavoidably be immersed in his own artistry. I think audiences will decide what it means for themselves, but from production design to location scouting and filming, we wanted the audience to feel like they were drowning in books, much like Ayanda himself.
The “mythical device” is a central driver of the mystery… how did you balance its enigmatic nature without giving away its true meaning too early?
Sbu Dludlu, the young podcaster who visits his idol’s workshop is central to establishing the mystery of the Box, and like him the audience wants to know what it is. For me part of keeping that mystery alive was keeping it in the background and offscreen space – I was obsessed with how Andrei Tarkovsky did this in Stalker – The Zone is all the more terrifying and enigmatic precisely because we don’t get to see inside. Initial versions of my script were more literal about what’s going on inside, but I think some of the magic is in what the audience gets to imagine for themselves.
The contrast between Ayanda and Sbu is key to the precarious balance between old and new. How did you craft their individual voices and perspectives in the dialogue to highlight this generational divide in the arts?
I’ve been very fortunate to have mentors and funders who have kindly and supportively held my hand through the creative process. But there are also many who have been brutal in their own jaded way about cautioning me against becoming an artist. Having seen beyond the veil, well-intentioned honesty from would-be mentors about the harsh realities of South African creative spaces can often deflate and disillusion young artists before they get to dream.
This story isn’t about finger-pointing or really suggesting a right way to live a creative life, but in writing it I wanted to project a vision of myself as an older artist that I didn’t want to become. I think in South Africa particularly, life as an artist can be quite devastating and soul-destroying, and I wanted to explore some of the burden seasoned artists feel when they themselves are burnt out and they have to still shoulder the additional weight of ushering in the next generation.
I like to think writing is like a journeyman craft akin to the bookbinding on screen in this film, and without the experienced hands of a master teaching an apprentice, many young South African artists are crushed too soon and supported too little.
Sbu and Ayanda’s journeys are about taking inspiration from each other – Ayanda needs to rediscover the inner child who fell in love with magical worlds, and Sbu needs to take on the mantle of the sacrifice and craft required to become an artist himself.
How did you approach the screenplay’s language, references, and character interactions to achieve a sense of timelessness?
It was a delicate balance – Ayanda’s world is almost out of time and space, a self-imposed exile from the world, while Sbu with his new-fangled podcast is very much an artist of the present moment. So much of the timelessness is indebted to the incredible Marshalltown location, Victory House, where we filmed and brought Ayanda’s studio to life. Nothing like Ayanda’s workshop exists so we had to build it with thousands of books carried up the staircase. It’s challenging to create the sense someone has lived in a space for a long time, but I’m very proud of what we were about to achieve.
Jonathan Kovel brought a sensibility to the cinematic language that enhances this – it is a quiet and rigid framing of Ayanda’s world that I think eschews the whirling dervish movement modern films often have – but that would have been out of place in this story. In many ways our own collaboration was like that of the characters – two generations seeking to create something together. In terms of references, I was more inspired by literature and art than films per say, the most overt of these are called out directly by the characters themselves, and the shots composed like paintings.
While I studied screenwriting as a postgraduate student, my education was really in literature, history and art and I think that has informed my approach to storytelling. Franz Kafka’s ‘A Hunger Artist’ was something I returned to more than anything else while
writing. The Count of Monte Cristo, and the writings of Steve Biko and Frantz Fanon are called out directly in the film too, for obvious reasons.
While there is a magical realism to the story, crafting understated and grounded performances with Sechaba Ramphele and Mothusi Magano helps settle the film into a realism that questions the magic lurking in The House’s unseen corners.
What specific social commentary were you intending to make about the legacy of artists?
I think to survive as an African artist you have to wear so many hats – producer, publicist, writer, performer, the list goes on. On a little and metaphoric level this film explores the cost of having to split yourself to survive as an artist. Is there another way? I hope the film suggests what that might be.