Bad ideas
Bad Influencer creator Kudi Maradzika and director Keitumetse Qhali talk about their partnership on this South African crime drama, tapping into influencer culture and the importance of language and music in the series.
Kudi Maradzika is a writer, director, producer and actor. She was also once an influencer, though by her own admission, she wasn’t a very good one. Yet it was her experiences working in social media that led her to create her first series for Netflix.
“I was a fitness influencer, and what happens is you get a lot of PR packages from brands and they ask you to put on their clothes and do content around it,” she tells DQ. “Because I was also working as a TV producer, and I was doing influencing work on the side, I just didn’t have time, so all these packages would accumulate. I said to my friend one time, ‘Oh, I’m such a bad influencer.’ She was like, ‘Oh, you should make that a TV show.’”
That comment spurred Maradzika to create Bad Influencer, a South African series that landed in the streamer’s Global Top 10 list for English-language shows when it debuted worldwide at the end of October. It also made the top 10 in 45 countries around the world – and reached number one in nine of them.
“Our standards, from writing all the way to production and post-production, were very much international in intention,” she says. “So even though the show will resonate very much with a local audience, and with an African audience per se, the themes are strong enough to travel across borders, which they obviously have. That’s obviously a culmination of the storytelling, the directing, all of the components that came together in the final product. But in writing it, I don’t think I was writing specifically for a local audience. I was definitely writing for a global audience.”
However, Maradzika says the story is “very South African” in its reflection of the country’s influencer culture, as well as its use of music. “I would say definitely it’s as South African as it can get. But the themes are pretty universal,” she notes.
Produced by Gambit Films (Blood & Water), Bad Influencer centres on small-time con artist and single mum BK (Jo-Anne Reyneke), who must provide for her son with special needs. To do so, she teams up with wannabe luxury influencer Pinky (Cindy Mahlangu) to sell fake luxury handbags online. But their scheme draws the attention of Bra Alex (Vincent Mahlape), a notorious criminal in a counterfeiting syndicate, as well as the police. Caught between criminals and cops, the unlikely duo must outfox both to stay out of jail, survive and thrive.
The project emerged from an episodic writers lab hosted by Netflix and the Realness Institute, which seeks to support writers in the development of African content. Six writers from Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa took part in the 2021 scheme, with Maradzika among them. Her series was then taken forward and a full development process began in partnership with Gambit Films and directors Keitumetse Qhali and Ari Kruger, involving 18 months of writing and rewriting.
“For me, dialogue and writing dialogue is such an important thing to get right,” Maradzika says. “What I don’t like is heavy-handed dialogue, because it doesn’t necessarily feel natural. So one of the things I insisted on was having short, quick and quippy dialogue that sounded like real people, that sounded like someone who you’d meet in a coffee shop or something you’d overhear.
“That naturally lent to the dynamism of the show in terms of the tone and the pace, because everything became a lot quicker. If you think of Gilmore Girls or Succession and how they used to speak, that was in the back of my mind.”
Writing a series for a streaming platform and conscious of the “buffet of television” available to viewers, Maradzika was keen to ensure the story was engaging while also “making sure that, at the end of everything, we’re giving something new to the audience, like a twist, a surprise angle, something in the story that was completely unexpected,” she says. “We just made sure we added something special and unique and different at the end of each episode to keep people engaged.”
Qhali was drawn to the series by its “very grounded” story of single mum BK trying to make it in the world. “That’s very much a universal theme,” she says. She developed the show’s visual style with Kruger and Gambit executive producer Nosipho Dumisa, with their intention to make its setting, Johannesburg, a key character and not just the background.
“I’m not even from Jo’burg. I’m South African, but I’m from the coast and I came to Jo’burg to work. So there’s a part of me living in Jo’burg that also sees it as an outsider,” she says. “It has a lot of grit – Jo’burg has its own personality – so that came down to the locations we chose. It even affected a lot of the tone of the colour palette, the direction of the grade.
“Then when it came to music, that was a really big discussion. How do we make the music feel as authentically South African as possible? Right now, globally, amapiano is very popular in terms of music that comes from South Africa, but we wanted to go a little bit deeper. We used a little bit of kwaito, music from the early 90s in South Africa, and we use gqom, underground amapiano music. Where gqom lives is very much in a gritty underground party space.”
Blending that music with the show’s dramatic sequences means the series “has an edge to it,” the director says. “It felt like the most natural thing to combine these things. So for a global audience watching it, they’re going to have this very visceral experience of what Johannesburg sounds like, what it feels like, what it looks like.”
Directing the first four episodes, Qhali found the Bad Influencer scripts to be “loud,” with a lot of personality already on the page. “That was a really exciting place to start from,” she says. Yet she always wanted to balance dynamism with the shared ambition to tell a grounded story. “[Grounded] was a word we had to really embody, from how we directed performance to how we chose our camera language, letting the performances breathe, letting the characters be the ones who guide you into the world and you sit with them,” she says.
Meanwhile, the fact the show was being made for Netflix meant binge-viewing also had to be considered. “So every episode had its own character. Having that in mind and still making sure the identity of the show sat across the seven episodes took a lot of collaboration and took a lot of planning,” Qhali says, noting how scenes from several episodes were often shot in a single day. “You’re balancing character performance and making sure that stays on track, but making sure that, technically and creatively, you can still get something really exciting was top of mind.”
Maradzika outlined the series with two other writers, dividing up storylines between BK and Pinky. Then once the scripts started to take shape, she took over the dialogue to ensure the show truthfully represented the world of influencer culture. “Once you find the voice of the characters, everything else becomes a lot easier, because everything else is just plot pieces,” she says. “It took a long time, but we finally got to a point where we were like, ‘OK, you can identify a character by their voice,’ and that’s all you can ever hope for.”
Those voices came in several different languages, as Maradzika used numerous vernaculars – particularly Zulu, Tsotsitaal and Xhosa – in the series as well as English, often in single sentences, to create an authentic soundscape of modern-day Johannesburg. “That’s just a normal way of speaking. You dip in and out of things, also depending on where you are,” she says. “If you’re with your parents, you tend to speak more local language completely, as opposed to when you are in different social settings.”
“South Africa has 11 official languages, so aside from switching languages mid-conversation, there’s also a lot of code switching, and that has a lot to do with the history of the country and all these different spaces you have to move in between and out of all the time,” says Qhali. “You’ll find a lot of the time, when somebody speaks a certain language, their demeanour and their tone even changes slightly to embody the personality of that language.
“With a character like Pinky, she was such a beautiful balance of this big, flamboyant personality, but also deeply vulnerable. You see her interacting with her mum in Zulu, and there’s such a different execution and performance in how she talks and how she says her words, just because she’s speaking a different language. Then when she’s with her friends who are these glam influencer girls, you see her code-switch and her choice of language is also more English, a little bit of Jo’burg Zulu, which is not the same as KZN [KwaZulu-Natal] Zulu.”
Then there are characters who speak Xhosa, who are “very loud and opinionated.” “The minute they switch into Xhosa, it becomes more often a slightly more aggressive performance. So language was a really big thing, and it was intentional,” Qhali adds. “A lot of it was in the script. Not just because we want them to speak ‘vernac’ for the fun of it. It had to make sense for what was happening narratively at the time.”
Maradzika spent time on set during production, but once cameras are rolling, she no longer sees the filmmaking process as her “dominion,” and instead handed the baton to Qhali, Kruger and the “dedicated” crew and “empowering” them to make their own creative choices.
“Sure, there are moments when we confer and ask [about] a line of dialogue here and there, just to make sure something lands. But apart from that, it is their terrain to manage,” the writer says. “You’re there as a producer, as a writer. You’re always there if people need you, but the forefront is the director and the performers.”
A second season of Bad Influencer is now “definitely in the works,” though Maradzika – who like Qhali is represented by Casarotto-Ramsay – is willing to take her time to make sure any sequel stands up to its predecessor. “What’s important with subsequent seasons is to always ensure you give yourself a moment to breathe, because there’s always a temptation to rush to do something and then deliver,” she says. “If you take into consideration the fact that the first scripts took 18 months, obviously we won’t take that long because the world and story have been built, but what’s important is to allow that process of the story to unfold as well, because that’s when you will find the gold in the dialogue.”
She also believes it’s important for writers not to submit to the “overwhelming pressure” that comes with a hit series, “because it can be debilitating. It can stop you from wanting to do more because you’re now scared that you’re not going to do something as good as the thing you did before.”
She adds: “The only way you can circumvent that is to remember why you’re telling the story in the first place, and remember the fun and the joy you were trying to instil in the process from development and just holding on to that before you continue.”
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tagged in: Bad Influencer, Gambit Films, Keitumetse Qhali, Kudi Maradzika