This may sound melodramatic but I have never, ever worked so hard. The film will be released in a different country every week for the next six weeks. I've just come back from Germany, France and Sweden to be in LA for the nominations and to speak to the American press.

When you make a little film without stars and not in English, you [just] hope you get into international festivals, so we didn't know if we'd get accepted in competition in Edinburgh or Toronto. Each [one seemed to bring] attention to the film to audiences around the world. We [originally] just wanted it to play in London, New York and Los Angeles like most small films do.

One of the struggles and one of the exciting things for South African filmmakers is: What stories are we allowed to tell? I hope for the industry that more and more, it will tell whatever stories it likes.

I learned a lot doing 'Wolverine,' and I was also very fortunate, in the sense that I got to do a huge number of visual effects shots.

You don't want to make a big deal out of it because it sounds indulgent. But the fact of the matter is that, for all South African filmmakers, because we don't make a lot of films, you feel an unrealistic pressure that your film has to say so much and has to be about everything in South Africa.

The question I ask myself when adapting a book is how do I be true to the spirit and soul of the character? How would I describe this character in my medium? If you asked one person to do a painting of something and another to create a sculpture of it, you'll never ask, 'Why doesn't the painting look like the sculpture?'