Oscar villain Elinor Burkett in the Hot Seat

SW Radio Africa Transcript

HOT SEAT: Oscar winner Burkett explains why she hijacked co-winner’s speech

BROADCAST: 12 March 2010 

VIOLET GONDA: ‘Music by Prudence’, an inspiring documentary about a group of handicapped Zimbabwean musicians, won an Oscar for Best Short Documentary at the 2010 Academy Awards held in Los Angeles, recently. My guest on the Programme Hot Seat is the film’s producer Elinor Burkett who collaborated on the film with director Roger Ross Williams. She is here to tell us about the film and also explain why she stormed the stage on Oscar night and interrupted Williams’ acceptance speech. Welcome on the programme Elinor and congratulations.

ELINOR BURKETT: Thank you Violet.

GONDA: How does it feel to win this prestigious award

BURKETT: You know, I live in Bulawayo, and we live in Bulawayo and suddenly getting on airplanes, flying to Los Angeles to like, all this, you know this fancy event and getting an Oscar is pretty surreal. I think I’m still kind of in shock, there’s not much sense of reality to it. 

GONDA: What is the documentary about first of all?

BURKETT: Bulawayo is home to an extraordinary school called King George VI School and Centre for the Disabled and they have a band called Liyana, ‘It’s Raining’, made up of eight young musicians, all with different physical disabilities. It’s a kind of Afro-fusion marimba band and the movie is about the band and the individual members of the band and the struggles they’ve had with their families, their culture and the reality of Zimbabwe as disabled young people and as musicians.

GONDA: Right, and it is unusual to focus on the physically impaired. Why did you choose to focus on this group?

BURKETT: I had known Liyana, because you hear them out and about in Bulawayo quite a bit, for about two and a half years before I decided to do this film and there’s something very compelling about these young people in a world in which people are so convinced that if you have any kind of disability, and I don’t just mean physical disability or mental disability, but I mean that you were born poor, or that your mother wasn’t nice to you or any problem in your background that you can’t move forward. These young people seem to be ignoring all of that and just keeping their eye on the ball to move straight ahead and concentrate on what they could do, not what they can’t do and I think that is extremely inspiring, not only in the western world but in Zimbabwe and that people really need to hear the message that they’re sending.

GONDA: And how did you get involved with this film?

BURKETT: I guess about four years ago, Roger Williams who was the director and is my neighbour – I spend six months a year in Zimbabwe and six months in New York, and Roger lives in New York and he said to me one year that he wanted to stop doing television and he wanted to make documentaries and why didn’t I find an idea for a documentary we could work on together. So that year it just so happened that the day that I got back to Bulawayo, Liyana was playing a concert in the evening at the National Gallery and I went to the concert and when I saw them at the concert, it just flipped in my head that they would be a perfect movie.

The problem was to figure out whether it was doable because as your listeners know and you know, this is not an easy thing to do in Zimbabwe right now. Some of it is logistically and some of it is that people are, especially people in positions of authority are very wary if anybody is walking around with a camera and this isn’t a political film but, so I roped in a colleague of mine, I was teaching at the University of Science and Technology, and I pulled in my colleague Gibbs Dube     and we spent a couple of months trying to figure out if it was doable, and once it was, then I called Mr Williams and said, do you want to do this with me and about six months later he came to Zimbabwe and we began filming.

GONDA: We do hear of course as you said, tales of how difficult it is to film in Zimbabwe, so did you get support from the Zimbabwean government and also did you have any problems filming?

BURKETT: We began by filming under the auspices of NUST, because I was pulling in a lot of NUST people and in that case that kind of gave us a certain sense of legitimacy, and then, shortly thereafter the co-director of King George VI School. We were dealing lightly with the authorities, they knew we were there, we were not trying to hide because I think if you try to hide, that’s when you really get into trouble and so we didn’t ask for their cooperation but we didn’t have any significant problems. Every once in a while, somebody would stop by to see what we were doing, ask some questions but we were so open about the fact we were concentrating on the musicians. The more difficult problem I think was just ordinary people so there was one day that we went to Renkini – to the bus terminal in Bulawayo because we were trying to show what happens when disabled people try to get on busses and the environment was pretty hostile because people are worried that they’ll get in trouble if they’re seen on international TV. But there was never any problem problem. I think five years in Zimbabwe I’ve kind of learned how to deal with things and for the most part people gave us tremendous cooperation.

GONDA: And the documentary of course is about, the main focus is about the lead singer Prudence Mabhena and the marimba group, Liyana, as you said and I understand it offers messages of hope through their music despite being neglected by family members and discrimination. Can you tell us a bit more about this issue of how they were discriminated against?

BURKETT: I think you have two levels; in Zimbabwe the law is actually good about disabilities, there’s constitutional protection and if I understand correctly in terms of the new constitution there’s a lot of discussion about extending those protections. But the discrimination – all but one of the members of the band is from a deeply rural area and in many of their traditions, their families, especially their extended families saw their birth as a sign of a curse or a sign of witchcraft and so many of them have pretty awful stories. For instance, Prudence is the most obvious, Prudence was born in Victoria Falls, the paternal grandmother told her mother not to breast feed her or give her food and let her die and then when the mother refused they were kind of rejected by the family and they moved back to her mother’s family.

Most of the boys in the band, because everyone else is male, most of the boys have had problems with extended family, and of course the mother is always blamed, that’s kind of the key thing, that the mother must have done something wrong. I think there’s a very clear sign, of like a lack of education about what causes the disability. Ultimately however, of the boys in the band, every one of them is close to his family, the families found a way to struggle through it, to understand what was going on here and are supportive of their kids, they all went to school, they all went to secondary school and three of them now are in “A” levels. But when you walk down the street with them and when you just go around town with somebody in a wheelchair with a lot of disabilities, very overt disability, people look strange at them, people don’t want their children touching them, there’s still a lot of what we would call fear that a disabled person somehow will bring bad luck or will carry a taint onto them and to their families.

GONDA: So how do you think this documentary is going to bring to light the plight of the physically challenged?

BURKETT: Well, when you’re a journalist, it’s the same thing – I do visually what you’re doing on the radio right? What you hope is that by putting it out there, by showing people, not only the plight but the spirit, because one of the things I think is extraordinary about this band is they’re extremely funny. They are, their way of coping with the situation is to make jokes and then to get back to work so I think helping people to see not only prejudice but to see who the person in the wheelchair really is as a person is an extraordinarily inspiring thing. I guess the other thing that I think really helps is for people to watch other Zimbabweans accepting them. There was a wonderful moment – last year, last January they were on tour in the United States and just before they left, one of the textile companies in Bulawayo, Archer Clothing, gave them a bunch of clothes, because they needed clothes to wear while they were on tour and to thank them the band went to Archer Clothing, on to the floor of the factory to sing for them – and you have 2000 workers cheering and dancing and shouting and for people to see how they inspire other Zimbabweans to forget that they’re disabled I think helps people get over their own prejudices.

GONDA: And of course the film is called “Music by Prudence”, why is it called that, how did you come up with the title?

BURKETT: I didn’t come up with that title. HBO which is the channel here in the United States that is airing it came up with that title and so I claim no responsibility for it whatsoever, I’m not overly fond of it.

GONDA: Why?

BURKETT: Because not all of the music is by Prudence. The music is first of all obviously by the entire band, but there are many songs in it like Thulasizwe or Gumbo that are not by Prudence, nor would she ever, ever claim they were by her and I think it’s kind of the American way to try to boil everything down to one person because that’s what our audiences feel most comfortable with, but in turn, in the Zimbabwean context I think that it is an unfortunate title.

GONDA: Right and I guess this brings us to the topic of what happened on Oscar night, why did you take the microphone from your co-winner?

BURKETT: Well you know, the Oscars this year for the first time ever had a very clear policy – that only one person could speak and Mr Williams won’t speak to me so there was no agreement as to who was going to give the speech on behalf of the movie. We had equal right to give the speech since we both were getting our Oscars and he raced ahead and started speaking without my even being on the stage. And what I heard him saying was about him and not about the band and it feels to me that, you know this is a short documentary film, this is not Avatar or one of the huge movies, the focus needed to be on the band, on the subject of the documentary, not on him and not on me and it seemed to me that this was really inappropriate and I needed to make sure that the members of the band – the young people who worked so hard to help us make this film needed to be thanked.

GONDA: Just looking at some of the reports that have been published about this issue, they quote Roger Ross Williams saying that you actually ambushed him and had nothing to do with the film.

BURKETT: I mean it was funny because if I’d nothing to do with the film, why did I get an Academy Award? It was just kind of silly. I mean he’s told a lot of different stories about my role in the film – it is public record that we had a very bad fight, there was a lawsuit that has been settled and I thought settled amicably between the two of us. But when you have two people, I mean Roger and I both had to sign the form entering the film in this competition, it could not be entered without my signature or his, I am listed on the film as the producer. The Producers’ Guild of the United States had to certify me as the producer so I had as much right to be giving that speech as he did so I guess I could say that he ambushed me.

GONDA: He is reported as saying that you were pushed off the project and that you don’t really have much claim to the production. What is the lawsuit about? Were you pushed off the project?

BURKETT: No. The law suit was, he and I had creative differences that were very significant and I filed suit against him and pulled myself off the project when I filed suit. But that didn’t happen until the project was over, that happened about three weeks before the editing was done and we’d been working on that movie at that point for about a year and a half. So I was not involved in the selection of the title or the very final edit but everything until then, I certainly with our Associate Producer Gibbs Dube     and all of our Zimbabwean crew did all the set up, all the production work, all the organisation, all the fixing and I, out of my own personal funds, paid for the entire, entire production except for $6000 that Roger put in at the beginning, up until the point where HBO came in and started giving us money.

GONDA: So I know you said you were not happy about the title but were you happy with the final product?

BURKETT: I have very mixed feelings Violet. What happened was when we very first started to film which was in January of 2008, when we met with the band, the boys in the band said, well they asked us very clearly; is this movie only about Prudence or is it about all of us? Because it was going to be a lot of work for everybody and we promised them that the focus would be on the entire band and it was with that understanding that they signed their releases, their permission for us to film and then did an enormous amount of work and that was the intention from the beginning on the entire band. And when Mr Williams and HBO moved the film to a tight focus on Prudence I was very unhappy because I live in Zimbabwe – these are people I know, these are people I deal with every day and America is a very individualist society where it’s totally appropriate to focus on one person but that’s less true in Zimbabwe and it felt to me a violation of Zimbabwean tradition and culture.

So I think it’s a very nice movie, it’s a wonderful, terrific tribute to a fantastic young woman who also is an amazing singer but it’s not the movie that I wanted made. And the settlement of the lawsuit gave me the right, Roger and I co-own all the footage we shot, and so in the settlement, he had the right to finish that movie and I was given the right to use the footage to make another movie for Europe and Africa – the movie we had planned to make and that movie is now cut, it’s called Ithemba and I’m in the process of trying to sell it for distribution in Europe and Africa.

GONDA: And what is that about?

BURKETT: It’s about the entire band. It’s the movie that we had originally promised the boys, the whole band, that we were going to make. And the other thing about “Music by Prudence” is there’s not much Zimbabwe in it and maybe because I live in Zimbabwe and because I’m a journalist it was important to me to really root the band members in their own context, in their world, so the movie is much more inclusive of both the full band and of Zimbabwe.

GONDA: And so the main reason you pulled off from the post production aspect of the project was because they were focussing too much on one person and not the entire group?

BURKETT: Yes. Absolutely.

GONDA: OK. So how did the rest of the band feel about this? Did it cause any tensions or disharmony in the group?

BURKETT: You know the problem is, at least as of last week when I left Zimbabwe, the band hasn’t seen the movie. They have repeatedly asked Roger for copies of the movie and he hasn’t sent it. So I think it’s very, very hard for the boys in the band to know what to think. I think they’re very excited that a movie that deals with them in some way is getting so much attention and they should be excited because it’s a terrific accomplishment but I think they just don’t know what to think because they haven’t seen the movie.

GONDA: And of course it is a terrific accomplishment but unfortunately you didn’t come across very well in that moment when you were up on that stage and some have likened you to Kanye West when he very rudely grabbed the microphone from Taylor Swift last year. Do you regret reacting in that manner?

BURKETT: No I don’t. I understand why people felt that, I thought it was a little odd that people thought I was just some random person who didn’t have the right to be on that stage. They had just called my name, to call me up to the stage. I thought it was extremely rude that Mr Williams raced to the stage. In general the right thing to do in this situation is you go up together and I thought it was amazingly rude that he went up there and not only went up without me, but didn’t even wait for me to arrive before he began to speak and then only spoke about himself. I think the focus needed to be and needs to be on the band and I’m not unhappy that I at least, made sure that the band members were thanked because I don’t know whether overseas you’ve seen the Larry King live show, but Larry King who does CNN here gave Mr Williams the opportunity to deliver his speech the next night on another programme and the speech was still, you know the first 45 seconds which are the only 45 seconds that get aired, he didn’t thank anybody in Zimbabwe. He didn’t thank the band, the only cameraman he thanked was the white cameraman who shot three minutes of the film, not the black cameramen, there were three black cameramen, one white cameraman – he only thanked the white guy and I thought it was horrendous so I do not regret what I did because I think that what he did was unconscionable.

GONDA: It’s reported that you said you were blocked by his 87 year old mother when you tried to get up to go with him on stage. Is this true?

BURKETT: Yes. I certainly do not want to be disrespectful to a very nice woman, because his mother’s a very nice person and certainly I imagine that if I had a child who asked me to block somebody I would do it too. So this is not about her but it’s one of the things that everyone has commented on this side of the pond is why it took me such a long time to get out and I couldn’t get out, she just would not let me out to the point where the guys sitting in front of me from another show documentary said do you want to climb over the seat in front of me.

GONDA: What do you mean, you could not get out? What was she doing?

BURKETT: She was sitting next to me, kind of towards the aisle and she took her cane and blocked me. You know she’s an old woman, she has a cane and she physically blocked me, you know it’s tight to get out and I didn’t want to push her, I mean you can’t, that would have been really rude and I wouldn’t have done that and her cane was in the way and I could not move.

GONDA: And of course we all saw, those of us who saw the Oscars on television, saw Prudence was in the audience. What does she have to say about all this and the drama that was taking place?

BURKETT: You know I didn’t talk to her about the drama afterwards. I think at that point the focus just needed to be on Prudence, so the focus at that point was – she looked beautiful, because she is a very beautiful young woman and she rolled into the Governor’s Ball and people were celebrating her and I think that’s what she was focused on and what she should have been focused on.

GONDA: How come she didn’t also go on stage?

BURKETT: Because the way the Kodak Theatre where the event is, is set up, there is no wheelchair accessibility from the floor of the Theatre onto the stage. There are steps in the way and there would have been no way to do it.

GONDA: And of course you said, when you took the mike, when you grabbed the mike from Williams, you said – let the women speak. What did you mean by that?

BURKETT: Well you know there is a kind of tradition here in the United States where the men seem to think that they’re more important than the women even if they’re on the same level of things and if you look at the Oscars, the whole group that goes up, usually it’s the men who speak and I think a lot of women in this country are really fed up with it, including me, so that’s what I meant.

GONDA: And I understand that documentaries are notoriously difficult to get an Oscar so how did you get the attention of the Academy members to vote for this film?

BURKETT: Well what happens with documentaries is you can submit your documentary for consideration for the Academy but it’s an expensive process because you have to show it in a certain number of movie theatres over a certain period of time and then it costs money to apply, so most documentarians don’t have any money to do that; fortunately for this movie, HBO, the channel that’s airing it in May, paid those expenses. Then the process is it then goes into a pool of films that the documentary division of the Academy maintains, and they choose the finalists, we were one of the five finalists and then there’s no special attention that happens, in fact it’s considered to be very bad form for people to campaign and the six thousand members of the Academy are sent all the films, documentary and non-documentary and they vote. It’s not a particularly laden process in terms of campaigning because that is considered to be unseemly here.

GONDA: So did it take you by surprise that you were nominated in the first place?

BURKETT: No. What’s funny is when Roger first arrived in Zimbabwe, Christmas 2007, the first night he was there, we sat in my living room in Bulawayo and he hadn’t met Prudence yet, he hadn’t met the band, and I said to him, this film is going to win an Oscar. And some friends were round and my husband was there and they were all laughing at us, but I think, that when you have a story this compelling and when you have characters who are this smart, this talented and this funny, you have to be a really bad film maker not to win an Academy award. So I’m not trying to be immodest, this is not my Academy award, this is their Academy award. They are amazing young people, and I knew, I just knew that they were going to go all the way with this.

GONDA: So what does the future hold for the band Liyana?

BURKETT: Well I think as with many bands, they are made up of young people, they probably don’t have a whole lot of future. You have three boys who are finishing “A” levels, who are going to go on to university. One has his sights very clearly on medical school, so I think as with most young people in bands, they’re going probably go their separate ways, maybe some of them will stay together and reform the band, you know like the Beatles and like everybody else but many of them have other interests. Marvellous Mbulo who’s the other lead singer of the band is a playwright and just wrote a play, a very funny play called “So What” that was performed in Bulawayo about disabilities and he might start doing some things with ZBC. He’s also a stand-up comedian. Farai Mapande who is one of the piano players is starting to do his own video production work. So I think there are a lot of interests there and I think that some will move on and some will stay in music.

GONDA: Are they going to get anything as a result of this award?

BURKETT: Yes, there’s a CD release scheduled and hopefully that will be a monetary reward.

GONDA: And in terms of the Oscar itself, what do you get beside just the accolade?

BURKETT: What you get is a gold statue and the accolade, that’s it. No, there’s no money involved. Certainly if they had handed me a cheque for $50 000, I would have handed it to KG VI but there’s no money involved whatsoever. Because you know a band like this couldn’t exist if there weren’t a school that had nurtured them, that had bought their instruments, that had promoted them, that had hired people, teachers and it employs, KG VI employs most of the band members because they’re all school leavers now and they are the home to and support the three boys who were in school so they continue their work. So KG VI really needs to get a lot of the accolades here, that they did something like this, that they created a band like this, that they create drama groups, that they have an amazing art programme. So a lot of the attention needs to be on KG VI as well on the band.

GONDA: Right and you are on your way back to Zimbabwe, are you going to celebrate with the group?

BURKETT: You know I hope so, I go back to Zimbabwe next week and I’m incredibly excited. The only regret I have is that I can’t carry the Oscar back so that we can put it in the centre of the table. It weighs nine pounds, so that’s about four kilos and trying to get it through airport security proved a nightmare in Los Angeles so I think I need to leave it in New York and that’s really unfortunate.

GONDA: And a final word Elinor.

BURKETT: You know the one kind of good thing that came from the unpleasantness between Roger and me is that most short documentary films, nobody ever hears of. It’s the one category that people don’t pay much attention to and this year at least, everybody’s talking about it and what I’m hoping as a result, everybody here in America will see “Music by Prudence” and that everyone in Europe and Africa will see Ithembo so they can see, not my work, that’s not what’s important, that they can see Liyana for themselves and feel like a little rain has been brought into their life as a result.

GONDA: Speaking on the programme Hot Seat that was Oscar winner Elinor Burkett, the producer of the film “Music by Prudence”. Thank you very much Elinor and congratulations again.

BURKETT: Tatenda Violet.

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