SPIEGEL ONLINE: Congratulations on winning this year's Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Was it a surprise?

Hood: We'd been nominated for a Golden Globe and we'd been nominated for a BAFTA, and we didn't win either. You never know with these things. At a certain point you get lucky and we were very fortunate that the world responded in the way it did with the Oscar. SPIEGEL ONLINE: This prize is the first Oscar South Africa has won. It must be quite a boost for the national industry.

Hood: South Africa is really doing well right now. We are making more and more films, and they are getting better recognition all the time. Darrell Roodt's film "Yesterday" was nominated for the Oscar (for Best Foreign Language Film) in 2005. And "U-Carmen eKhayalitsha" won the Golden Bear at Berlin last year. So it's very exciting to be part of a new growing voice of South Africa. And I just hope that more and more South African stories will be told that reflect the full range of the country's experience.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What was your own motivation behind making "Tsotsi?"

Hood: What appealed to me most were two things really: On the one hand it was a story which can be told in Johannesburg, a city which is incredibly vibrant and exciting, but not often seen on screen. We were able to use great visuals and tremendous Kwaito music. These are all  exciting specific elements which make the film very original. On the other hand, it is a timeless and universal coming-of-age story, which has been told in many different ways and many cultures.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The film does give you the feeling of what it must be like in a South African shanty town. How difficult was it to film?

Hood: It was surprisingly easy. Obviously we didn't rush in with a massive film crew. We prepared and planned and negotiated, and involved the local community. All the people you see in the shots of the shanty town are people who lived there. People on the street were employed as extras in the film, the people dancing in the illegal drinking house are folks from there, just having their Friday night party. It was actually a very humbling experience seeing how joyful people, who have very little, can be.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: But how representative is this story? In parts, the film seems quite clichéd in its portrayal of how a bad guy turns good at the sight of this cute baby.

Hood: I think if you read the story as bad guy turns good guy, then clearly it is a cliché. But my experience, when I spent three years working with young people in the townships on issues principally around HIV/AIDS, is that people are usually neither entirely good or bad. They are usually variations of both. Just because someone is a carjacker doesn't mean they are a ruthless cold-blooded murderer. This implies there are degrees of criminality. But in fact there are. So is "Tsotsi" the story of a bad guy turns good? No. I think it's the story of a vulnerable and very traumatized young person who has not had the benefit of parental support or social support. We just had the story yesterday in the paper about a young man who carjacked a woman at gun-point, drove away with her seven week old baby. She happened to have also left her handbag in the car. The police phoned and he answered the cellphone, they begged him to please bring the baby back. And he did. So it sounds like fiction, but it has strong parallels in fact.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: In this real life Tsotsi incident, the police chief said, when he was asked about it, that the criminal who returned the baby was obviously inspired by your film. Do you take some credit for this baby being returned?

Hood: I would love to meet this criminal and ask him if he saw the film, felt bad, and took the baby back. Wouldn't that be a lovely moment where, instead of filmmakers being accused of having inspired crime, we were actually told we helped resolve the crime? That would be nice.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: How important was the work you yourself have done in the townships in making this film?

Hood: I think my early work in the townships obviously gave me an insight into young people such as the characters you find in the film. It gave me a certain empathy, not sympathy but empathy. It also made me acutely aware of how fortunate I was. Hopefully that makes you less judgemental and more able to find the universal humanity in people. I really believe that we focus so much on differences and not enough on similarities. Most people, on a very basic level, have surprisingly similar needs. The need for companionship, dignity, love. And when these basic needs are not met, you find individuals developing a very distorted sense of the world.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: But is there a difficulty in you, as a white person from a relatively affluent background, going in and making a film about black poverty? Or is that an unfair criticism?

Hood: No, it's a comment I hear all the time. And I have never found a perfect answer to it. Other than to try to say, at the risk of being controversial, "Tsotsi" isn't a black film. And I think it's kind of patronizing to constantly talk about black people, as if they are somehow so different from white people, that white people cannot understand them. This is a story about a traumatized young person. He happens to be black. But frankly he might have been Chinese in Shanghai, white in Moscow or African-American in South Central LA. I really believe that trauma is trauma. What gives the film its flavor, is its cultural specificity, but it's not what gives the film its soul. I am a story-teller working with a craft. My job is to use my craft -- which is a different thing to my race -- and tell a story well. Take someone like Ang Lee: I admire his artistry in films like "Sense and Sensibility", which is quintessentially English, or a film like "the Ice Storm", which is very American. Or a film like "Brokeback Mountain" which is about gay love, by a director, who as far as I know is heterosexual, using two actors who are heterosexual. The point is they are artists able to empathize and use their craft to tell a story, that perhaps lesser artists of whatever race or sexual orientation may not have told as well. You have to separate artistic ability from ethnic origin. Not only am I not black, I am also not a woman, therefore how can I direct women? I am also only 42, therefore how can I direct someone who's 60? So you see where the argument ends up? If you take it to its logical conclusion, I would have to walk around and point a video camera at myself. And who the hell is interested in that?