--- name: "Gavin Hood" canonical: "https://film.one/person/gavin-hood" roles: ["Producer","Director"] born: "12 May 1963" reviewed_on_fi1m: 1 average_as: "producer" average_over: 0 updated: "2026-09-18T08:55:49.548733+00:00" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Gavin Hood Producer and director. Born 12 May 1963 in Johannesburg, South Africa. ## Details - **Work:** Producer, Director - **Born:** 12 May 1963, Johannesburg, South Africa - **Elsewhere:** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Hood, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q443106, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0004303/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/13079 ## Streaming the US now - **AMC+:** [*Official Secrets*](https://film.one/film/official-secrets.md) (65) For United States; add `?region=XX` for another country. ## Fi1m on Gavin Hood > Gavin Hood makes films about one person deciding whether to do the right thing while more powerful people argue elsewhere. Kept to one room, as in *Eye in the Sky*, he is a fine director. Let out of it, he loses sight of the person. A woman at a grey desk under strip light reads an email she was not meant to act on, prints it and takes it home. Gavin Hood holds on her face while she decides, and Keira Knightley lets almost nothing cross it. That is the Hood shot: no music, no movement, a person alone with a choice that will cost them. He has said he prefers close-ups and quiet performance to anything showier, and *Official Secrets* (2019) bears him out. He began in South Africa with *A Reasonable Man* (1999) and the Polish-language *In Desert and Wilderness* (2001), and was noticed abroad for *Tsotsi* (2005), a Johannesburg crime drama he also wrote. Hollywood followed: *Rendition* (2007), on post-9/11 interrogation; *X-Men Origins: Wolverine* (2009); *Ender's Game* (2013), which he adapted himself, about children trained for a pre-emptive war. Then smaller pictures again with *Eye in the Sky* (2015) and *Official Secrets*. The scale moves about a great deal. The subject barely moves at all: someone inside a machine built for violence is asked whether they will take responsibility for what it does. He trained as a lawyer before he trained as a director, and his films are built like cases, with witnesses. The best of them keep the case in one room. *Eye in the Sky* put its whole argument about modern war into one room and one decision, and was the better for it. *Official Secrets* has three rooms and a dozen decisions, and Katharine Gun is in only one of them; for long stretches she is at home waiting for the telephone while men in offices decide what her act meant. The script, by Gregory Bernstein, Sara Bernstein and Hood, admires her enormously and keeps forgetting to look at her. Florian Hoffmeister shoots GCHQ as a low-ceilinged building society and the Observer as brown clutter lit by desk lamps, and the picture wakes up whenever it goes back to the newspaper, which tells you where the drama has drifted. He can be blunt. He cuts the real television footage of Blair, Bush and Colin Powell into *Official Secrets*, which is a cheap way of getting anger into a room, and it worked on us: we were angry, and a little annoyed at how easily we had been made so, because Hood had got the feeling from archive rather than from his own scenes. Paul Hepker and Mark Kilian's score is a low, worried pulse that keeps out of the way until the courthouse, where it decides to help. His most constant collaborator is the editor Megan Gill, who has cut three of his films. He said of *Official Secrets* that he was "walking a fine line between atmosphere and style over substance and the ordinariness of this extraordinary story". He nearly always comes down on the side of ordinariness, which is honourable and is also why his films are respected rather than loved. We would take one more from him with a single door and nobody allowed to leave. ## Biography Gavin Hood is a South African filmmaker, screenwriter, director and actor. He was born on 12 May 1963 in Johannesburg and graduated with a law degree from the University of the Witwatersrand before studying screenwriting and directing in California. Hood began his career directing short educational films and his feature debut *A Reasonable Man* (1999). He directed the Polish-language film *In Desert and Wilderness* (2001) after replacing the original director. His breakthrough came with *Tsotsi* (2005), which he wrote and directed; the film won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. Subsequent credits include directing and co-writing *Official Secrets* (2019), as well as directing *Rendition* (2007), *X-Men Origins: Wolverine* (2009), *Ender's Game* (2013) and *Eye in the Sky* (2015). *Sources: en.wikipedia.org, imdb.com.* ## On Fi1m (1) - *Official Secrets* (2019), Fi1m 65, Screenplay, Director, Executive Producer — [page](https://film.one/film/official-secrets.md) ## Complete filmography (20) Every credit, newest first. Titles without a page can be requested for review on the HTML page. - *Official Secrets* (2019), Executive Producer, Director, Screenplay — Fi1m 65, [page](https://film.one/film/official-secrets.md) - *Eye in the Sky* (2015), Lieutenant Colonel Ed Walsh, Director - *Ender's Game* (2013), Giant, Screenplay, Director - *X-Men Origins: Wolverine* (2009), Director - *Rendition* (2007), Director - *Tsotsi* (2005), Director, Writer - *King Solomon's Mines* (2004), series, as Bruce McNabb - *In Enemy Hands* (2004), as Achilles Captain - *In Desert and Wilderness* (2001), Director, Screenplay - *Traitor's Heart* (1999), as Roberts - *A Reasonable Man* (1999), Sean Raine, Director, Writer - *Operation Delta Force 3: Clear Target* (1998), as Sparks - *Operation Delta Force 2: Mayday* (1998), as Sparks - *The Storekeeper* (1998), Producer, Writer, Director - *Stargate SG-1* (1997), series, as Colonel Alexi Vaselov - *Live Wire: Human Timebomb* (1996), as Mike - *Project Shadowchaser II* (1994), as Tieg - *American Kickboxer* (1991), as Ken Holligan - *Curse III: Blood Sacrifice* (1991), as Robert - *The Test*, Director, Screenplay ## Gallery - ![Director Gavin Hood at the premiere of Eye in the Sky, 2015 Toronto Film Festival](https://film.one/media/person/1013401/gallery-47bb2c7554ff.jpg) Director Gavin Hood at the premiere of Eye in the Sky, 2015 Toronto Film Festival — GabboT, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/09/Eye_in_the_Sky_05_%2820748485204%29.jpg/1280px-Eye_in_the_Sky_05_%2820748485204%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail) - ![Gavin Hood](https://film.one/media/person/1013401/gallery-b05c4fdbf3d7.jpg) Gavin Hood — GabboT, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/01/Gavin_Hood_2015.jpg/1280px-Gavin_Hood_2015.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail) ## Awards ### Other awards — 0 won, 1 nominated - European Film Award for Best Non-European Film 2005: European Film Award for Best Non-European Film (nominated), for *Tsotsi* *From Wikidata, which records wins more completely than nominations.* --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/gavin-hood