Kobus Loots: Cutting Loots

After a brief career in law, Kobus Loots moved into editing aged 30, and has since worked with South Africa’s most respected and prolific directors. He talks to Ryan Watson about his taste for controversy, securing permission to use Nelson Mandela for a bank commercial and baboons trashing his kitchen.

Kobus Loots hasn’t had much peace lately, and for a man living up in a village called Misty Cliffs, an hour outside Cape Town, it comes as a surprise. The other Sunday, the South African editor was sitting at a restaurant about to tuck into a steak when he received a call from a neighbour telling him to get home quickly. Once back there, he found himself faced with 15 baboons that had gone ape on the contents of his kitchen cupboards. It’s a regular occurrence for Loots, and he usually resorts to bellowing at the top of his lungs and pointing his Zulu spear to rid the beasts from his property.

Growing up “slap, bang in the middle of the countryside”, Loots recalls being isolated. Back then, in the 70s, there was no TV in South Africa, you couldn’t take art at school and, instead, it was considered natural to play rugby as a hobby. With a traditional upbringing, he ended up practising law for five years, but says “the whole time there was this need to be creative”, and his eventual move into the arts was beyond doubt.

But Loots’ evolution into editing was more inspired by his childhood than you might think, and Saturday-night trips to the drive-in may have ultimately influenced his work on commercials for clients including Standard Bank, First National Bank (FNB), Cadbury and KFC, to name a few.

“My dad was a minister in the church,” Loots says, “so the next day (after going to the drive in), I soon figured out that if you go through the whole movie you saw the night before in your head, by the time you’ve carefully got to the end, church is over. And that’s how movies became important in my life; I’d put the organ music to the pictures I saw the night before.”

Loots began his creative career in Johannesburg where he’d been practicing law, but eventually moved to Cape Town. “My dad didn’t speak to me for six months because I was giving up a career to go and do something that, even by the time he died, he didn’t really understand,” the editor says.

He didn’t begin as an assistant until he was 30 years old. “I had to start pouring tea for people at Sabrina O’Sullivan Post Production,” Loots explains, “After that, I started Cutaways with Peter Mostert, Sue Everson and Cal Kingwill.”

“The woman who owned the company Marcel Feldt emigrated to the US, so we bought it. We were the strongest post house for years, but it got too much and I took a two-year sabbatical. Then, I thought work was going to fall out of the sky and it didn’t, so I got pulled back into film and here I am.”

But it isn’t like Loots is just treading water on the editorial scene these days. He continues to work with some of South Africa’s most respected and prolific directors including Keith Rose, Erik Van Wyk and his long-time friend and collaborator Kim Geldenhuys of Egg Films.

“He’s shooting in Morocco at the moment,” Loots says. “I had a text from him at 12.15am last night asking me for advice on what more they can do to this new bank commercial to make it interesting. So with some of the directors, specifically Kim, I have that kind of involvement.”

Loots also held the reins at his own company, Elevator, before his sabbatical and now mainly works out of Upstairs Post when he isn’t on the mountain at Misty Cliffs, where he also has his own home suite. “I’m pretty much a free agent at the moment. Upstairs belongs to my partner and it was just easier to come and work here rather than start up on my own again,” he explains.

Loots’ passion for creativity is evident in his work and his campaigns have also recently been stirring up a bit of controversy, which is only positive, according to the editor. Getting permission to use images of Nelson Mandela in the recent Standard Bank commercial Moving Forward, through TBWAHunt Lascaris Johannesburg, was tough, but they eventually gave it, and on Monks for Cadbury he says Ogilvy got flack for being disrespectful to monasteries and religion. “[South Africans] don’t have a great sense of humour,” Loots says. “I can’t really see the point of making an ad if you’re not going to grab people’s attention. If you’re not going to stir up controversy you might as well not bother. And there’s a lot of that shit around, where the client may as well have put their logo on for 30 seconds.”

He may be busy with causing commotion on the ad scene, but the next time we’re in Cape Town we’ll definitely be calling Loots for his steak recommendations. And if the baboons aren’t busy creating chaos in his kitchen, with a bit of luck he’ll be able to join us.