Kevin Luther King Junior's Zanga Hill
His film making Journey began in 2003 as an undergraduate student in the theatre and film arts department, university of Jos. Upon completion, Kevin Luther quickly ran an online degree program with American Film Academy and followed this with a trip to Johannesburg, South Africa where he trained as a film maker for six months and today his years of hard work pay off as his new film Zanga Hill hits the cinemas. Kevin Luther the new film director on the block gives Keeps Magazine an exclusive interview
Keeps: Who is Kevin Luther? Kevin Luther: Kevin Luther is a Film maker and you could say Kevin Luther is an acting coach. Keeps: What is the project Zanga Hill all about? Kevin Luther: Zanga Hill is an epic action adventure movie, like people are saying, it is the first of its kind in Nigeria, we’ve been watching a lot of home videos, a lot of drama but we have not actually seen anything about the cannibal, something like Apocalypto, so Zanga Hill is a movie that looks into that cannibalism that was once a part of perhaps African Community, Zanga Hill is not just a Nigerian film, we look at Zanga Hill as an African film because the components of the story are made of different cultures, for example the language of Zangas was coded from about six languages, which include Swahili, Zulu language, Kenya language and a couple of other languages in Nigeria. Keeps: Is it like an adaptation of someone’s book or you wrote the story or you stumbled on the story or there was a movie you probably picked a thing or two from? Kevin Luther: Zanga Hill is not an adaptation from any book or any story; it is a virgin idea, why I wrote Zanga Hill? I actually can’t tell you why but like you said, I think I must have watched a scene from a movie that prompted this thought, and it took me about a year to actually finalize the story. It was a virgin idea but to be frank I can’t really say what prompted me to write Zanga Hill. It must have been a scene from a movie perhaps Apocalypto because when I watched Apocalypto I really like the fact that Mel Gibson used the native nature of that community. Keeps: For the coded language, are we going to be expecting a translation? Kevin Luther: As for the Zanga, you definitely wouldn’t expect the Zanga to speak English, on a normal day if you meet a caliber of those kinds of cannibals in the bush they won’t be speaking English they will definitely speak their native local language, we are going to have subtitle of what they are saying. Keeps: what’s their character like, are they men or they are beyond ordinary men? Kevin Luther: The Zangas portray a picture of these species of humans, they look human but by looking at them you know these people are not in their right senses and they eat flesh. So you don’t want to be in the wrong place where the Zangas will find you at any time. Keeps: That’s a very beautiful idea Kevin Luther:(Laughs) they feed on flesh and that’s just the meal they understand. They don’t know of the food that we eat, they eat flesh. Keeps: Who played the lead in this? Kevin Luther: The Zanga king and a hunter, these are the two leads in the movie, and they are more like the opposite of each other. The hunter was played by Maxwell Peters. Keeps: Is he an upcoming actor or he’s done a few movies? Kevin Luther: Yes, he’s done a few movies already. The Zanga king’s character was played by Solomon Gang, he’s also done a few underground movies Keeps: What informed your choice of these two guys? Kevin Luther: The idea of the Sona Acting for Film Academy is not to dwell on those past faces that you have seen in home videos but to actually discover a range of new actors, so the first thing that informed our choice of those two guys, was for the fact that they were new, they were fresh and they needed to be discovered, they have what fits the story. I personally did not care whether it was Majid or not Majid that was going to play the role, so long they had what we needed in the movie. Keeps: How challenging was Zanga Hill? Kevin Luther: wow! Zanga was really challenging, shooting for about forty days in the bush with sixty people as the cast and every day we had to leave the camping area to climb the rocks to go and shoot; you could imagine dealing with snakes, and telling stories about spirits been around the rock where we were shooting and a lot of things. Keeps: Any crazy experience you might want to share? Kevin Luther: There was something that actually happened that up till now most of the cast even the crew were not aware of, when we were shooting in the cave, we actually shot a ghost, the picture of the ghost appeared in some of the clips and then we saw a python somewhere in the rock but the actors were not aware of it, that was really crazy. Keeps: And you captured that? Kevin Luther: The white guy who was with the camera thought that was a character but it was when we were previewing the shots that we saw this huge human like ghost, with big eyes and just sat in the cave and went head down, head up while we were shooting , we can actually show that in the making of the film but it was one of the most crazy experiences that has ever happened to me as a film maker, I have never seen a ghost on a camera but as a director you need to have a big heart even when we saw that we kept quiet until we were done (laughs).
