Celebrity Life

Award-winning filmmaker and director Apichatpong Weerasethakul on his latest film Memoria, working with Tilda Swinton, his art and more.

During Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul's busy summer, he found time to talk to us about his latest film Memoria, which won the Jury Prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival, as well as his current art installation at Bangkok's 100 Tonson Foundation.

In conversation with Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul

When his film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives received the Palme d’​Or at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul became the first Southeast Asian director ever to win this top award. Of course, he'd already shown several times at Cannes, beginning in 2002 with Blissfully Yours (which won the Un Certain Regard prize), but his 2010 victory catapulted the soft-spoken director to new heights of stardom on the international art-house cinema circuit.

For Oscar-winning actress and noted cinephile Tilda Swinton, a long-time admirer of Weerasethakul’s work, Uncle Boonmee ranks as one of her all-time favourite films. On the British Film Institute (BFI) website she describes it as, “Slow cinema at its most immersive, lateral and resonant. It’s possible to believe you dreamed Apichatpong’s films after you see them… they certainly take you somewhere you’ve never been before on this Earth.”

Now, more than a decade since the release of that landmark film, the acclaimed British-born film star has the lead role in the enigmatic director’s latest movie, titled Memoria, which had its world premiere on July 15 at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (coincidentally the eve of director Weerasethakul’s 51st birthday). 

In the film, Swinton plays Jessica Holland, a Scottish orchid farmer in Columbia who finds herself unable to sleep after being startled at daybreak by a loud and inexplicable bang only she can hear (this idea stems from an experience the director had during his own first visit to Columbia). She later befriends an archaeologist studying some newly unearthed human remains, and becomes fixated on a 6,000-year-old skull with a hole drilled into it – in order to “release bad spirits”, the archaeologist tells her. Together, the pair visit the excavation site, and then in a small town nearby Jessica encounters a man by the river with whom she begins to share memories. 

In retrospect, it seems almost cosmically inevitable that Swinton and Weerasethakul would one day collaborate on a film. When I spoke to the director, shortly before the Cannes festival, he discussed how he and Swinton have become friends over the years, and how they’d long been searching for the right project to work on. In fact, he wrote the script for Memoria specifically with her in mind.

“It’s not a typical work for her,” Weerasethakul said. “That’s why it took time for us to find the right moment, so that she could be totally committed, for a long stretch of time. It’s quite unusual.” Also unusual is the fact that this is the director’s first film not set in his native Thailand, or with Thai dialogue (it's a mix of English and Spanish). It seems like quite a daring artistic leap to take all at once.

“I know,” he chuckled, “but that’s the beauty. I think that I should have done this a long time ago. I've been working with my own team in Thailand for almost 20 years. So to suddenly shift and go somewhere else with a new team is a bit scary, but it definitely opened up the senses.”

So does this combination of star power and a primarily English script hint that Memoria might be a step in a more commercial direction?

“I have no idea!” he said gleefully. “That’s why I’m excited about Cannes, to find out, because I can never judge my movies, really. But I wouldn't say it’s commercial. That’s why we need so many partners, to contribute little by little,” he adds, listing the countries of production as Colombia, Thailand, UK, Mexico, France, Germany and Qatar, while the movie itself is a Kick the Machine Films and Burning production, in association with Illuminations Films (Past Lives). As for critical reception, the film went on to win a Jury Prize at Cannes – one of the festival’s top honours.

“The film is about the vibration of memories that connect us,” the director said during his acceptance speech, in which he also thanked Swinton for her grace, humour, and heart. “We talked many times about this dream,” he told her from the stage, “and here we are. Our ship has landed.”

In addition to Memoria, Weerasethakul was also part of another Cannes 2021 premiere, having contributed a segment to the anthology film The Year of the Everlasting Storm, alongside such renowned international directors as Jafar Panahi, Anthony Chen, Laura Poitras, and Malik Vitthal.

“I contributed a short film to this omnibus project. All the films reflect the situation we’re in… the pandemic. It was made last year actually, when the situation was quite intense. In my case, I just shot [it in] my bedroom.”

After Cannes wrapped up, Weerasethakul returned to Bangkok, where he put the finishing touches to his art installation, A Minor History, at the 100 Tonson Foundation art space, which runs until January 2022. To some, it seems curious that with all his success in cinema he’s still interested in smaller-scale art exhibitions, but he doesn’t see the two disciplines as mutually exclusive.

“They feed on each other,” he explained. “But, of course, making a movie involves a lot of people and financing, so art installations allow me more freedom to experiment.” Coming from someone whose feature films are most often described as bewildering, inscrutable and hallucinatory, with a marked preference for unconventional narrative structures, this seems an interesting and even amusing statement.

For his exhibit at 100 Tonson, which combines photography and three video channels, Weerasethakul relates how he returned to Thailand’s rural Isaan region, the setting for many of his previous films, for inspiration.

“After the lockdown [last summer] I travelled to the northeast, where I grew up, to see and be inspired by the landscape and the people there. It started from just having no direction at all. I spent a month and a half on the road, mainly along the edge of the Mekong River, passing through my hometown of Khon Kaen, as well as Nong Khai, Nakhon Phanom and Ubon Ratchathani,” he says, adding that the stories he unearthed in the region were mostly about situations that were quite oppressive. 

“In Kalasin, I discovered the ruins of an old cinema that reminded me of those big cinemas I grew up with, so I kind of juxtaposed these ruins – like the skeleton of a dead animal – with the current situation around there, most importantly the disappearance of people,” he says solemnly, alluding to the incident in January 2019 when the bodies of two high-profile Thai political activists, who had fled to Laos seeking sanctuary, were discovered in the Mekong River; very much the victims of foul play. 

In its entirety, A Minor History comprises two halves, which change midway through the scheduled six-month run. Helping with the show’s evolving concept is Manuporn “Air” Luengaram, a well-known Thai curator with whom the director has worked closely in the past.

“The first part is mainly a kind of reminiscing,” Weerasethakul remarks. “A fictionalised story about a person strolling along the Mekong and talking about the floating corpse, and how the Naga [the mythical river serpent] accidentally swallows the corpse and then has to throw up.”

Such pointed political jabs seem destined to stir up controversy, but the director is well-known for ruffling feathers in his homeland. For the Thailand release of his internationally acclaimed 2006 feature film Syndromes and a Century, which had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival that year, the Thai Censorship Board demanded the removal of four scenes (a request the director denied, although he later agreed to a limited release where the cut scenes were replaced by a black screen). As for his award-winning 2015 film Cemetery of Splendour, he never gave it a theatrical release in Thailand for fear that it would also be censored, though it has been screened privately at special film events. 

As for the future, the director reveals a small glimpse of what he’s working on. “It’s another strange project, combining film and performance, but I cannot tell you much about it yet,” he said. However, he did indicate it's influenced by the ongoing pandemic and also touches on his continuing interest in exploring the theme of sleep. 

“At the same time I’m developing local works where I really want to focus on the political situation in Thailand,” he continues. “We are living in a very ‘crossroads’ moment. The new generation has a totally different attitude from my generation. There’s been such a shift in the past 10 to 20 years in this country.”

And while he’s probably too humble to say it outright, outspoken artists such as Weerasethakul have played a major role in keeping the spirit and momentum of that shift alive.

(Image credits: All stills used from the film Memoria are courtesy of ©Kick the Machine Films, Burning, Anna Sanders Films, Match Factory Productions, ZDF/arte and Piano, 2021)

This story was first published in the August 2021 issue of Prestige Thailand and online on Prestige Thailand here.

The post Conquering Cannes: In Conversation with Apichatpong Weerasethakul appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.

We chart the global ascent of Asian cinema, from blockbusters to independent arthouse.

At this exact moment in time, the world is in the thrall of Squid Game, the violence-soaked South Korean series that’s set records for Netflix (at 111 million viewers and counting) by becoming the platform’s most popular show ever.

Before that, Chloe Zhao’s history-making first Academy Awards as an Asian woman justifiably seized the spotlight at this year’s ceremony. But there’s also been the remarkable achievement of Hong Kong director Derek Tsang, which somehow missed the degree of attention it surely would have attracted in previous years.

So let’s start with a little reminder.

The Rise of Asian Cinema

This past year, Tsang became the first-ever Hong Kong-born director to have a feature film nominated for an Academy Award when his China-set bullying-and-crime themed drama Better Days was in the running for the Best International Feature Film award.

Better Days is only the second feature film the 41-year-old Tsang has directed on his own, and that its edgy, fringe-of-mainstream subject matter – and style – won over the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was a surprise, not least to the man himself, who admits, “We never really thought it was going to be that well-received, critically or commercially. We just thought we’d put a whole lot of heart into making this film – and hopefully, that would make the audience appreciate the effort and the story.”

But the world has woken up to what’s going on in Asia, and the nod to Tsang’s work was a further reflection of the growing influence and grip the region’s cinema – and its content creators – have on the global audience, both mainstream and art house. That notion was confirmed on the same Oscars night in April, when the China-born Zhao became the first Asian woman to win Best Director and Best Picture with Nomadland, her atmospheric and mesmerising portrait of age – and of an ageing America.

There’s increased interest, too, in the way Asian filmmakers tell their stories, and a welcome change in perception, given the traditional dominance of a viewpoint very much that of filmmakers who are predominately white, middle class and male.

Never one to miss the tide of public opinion, Hollywood has rapidly added depth to its talent pool, turning to Zhao to take the reins of the Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero actioner Eternals, set for release this month and the first time an Asian woman has added her vision to the franchise. Meanwhile, the first Asian-led superhero flick, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings has so far taken more than US$400 million from the global box office – with over $214 million of that in the US, making it 2021’s biggest blockbuster in America.

At this year’s Oscars, Korean-American Lee Isaac Chung’s family drama Minari was also in the running for Best Picture and Best Director (as well as Best Actor for Steven Yeun), and picked up the Best Supporting Actress award for the veteran Youn Yuh-jung, proving the change many hoped might follow Bong Joon-ho’s all-conquering Parasite last year has indeed been seismic.

The South Korean director had long called for the world at large to “overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles” and his stylishly dark and dystopian suburban thriller showed how easy that can be, as Bong walked away with four Oscars of his own in 2020, including those for Best Picture and Best Director.

So, yes, ignore the haters. It often really does take Oscars acknowledgement to wake up the cinema-going public, and the film industry itself. Just look where Tsang is now, at the time of writing. He didn’t win the Oscar – it went to the Danish black comedy Another Round – but he’s since been plucked from the relative obscurity of pre-Oscar life and set to work in London by the global streaming giant Netflix.

Tsang is currently directing two episodes of Netflix’s much-anticipated adaptation of Chinese author Liu Cixin’s acclaimed sci-fi epic Three-Body Problem, and he’s working under the gaze of the creative team that gave the world the Game of Thrones phenomenon.

“For sure, opportunity-wise there’s been a huge change [after the nomination],” Tsang says via Zoom, after a day on-set in London. “A lot of producers from different countries are reaching out to us and there’s a lot of talk about collaboration. “The past couple of years it’s really felt like there’s a demand for more Asian content, be it feature films or streaming content, with the success of Chloe Zhao and Crazy Rich Asians at the box office, and now Squid Game. It’s just like, all of a sudden, the momentum is really there.”

The Asian successes have continued on the international festival circuit in 2021, with Japan’s Ryusuke Hamaguchi taking away three prizes at Cannes, including Best Screenplay, for Drive My Car, following the Silver Bear he lifted from Berlin for Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy.

“Sometimes good stories have to come from a different country,” says Tsang, “and reading subtitles isn’t as big an obstacle as a lot of producers or studios once thought. So now everybody’s hungry for international content, not just Asian content, but for a good story that can travel well across different cultures and to different nations. It’s a really exciting time for Asian storytellers.”

In the art-house world, the festival circuit this year has so far been owned by the 42-year-old Hamaguchi, and a way of filmmaking that’s literary in texture, with long, slow takes of people engaged with each other, and no fear at all about his audience’s attention span. His love-soaked Happy Hour (2015) actually runs for five of them, while Drive My Car stretches for three.

Taken from a Haruki Murakami short story that traces the relationship between a widowed actor and the young woman he takes on as a driver, the latter has already been thrust forward as Japan’s hopeful for the next round of Oscars. It follows Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, which weaves its way around three coincidences and how they affect the love lives of his characters. These are films in which emotions and truth come as a slow reveal – as does the drama – and they’re steeped in a poetic style of cinema championed by Asian masters of yesteryear, such as Japan’s Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story).

“In life, your heart is always trembling,” says Hamaguchi, when we talk via Zoom during this year’s Far East Film Festival in Italy. “It’s not stable. It’s very important that these characters are trembling like this, otherwise, they’d be boring characters. It’s by having these characters tremble like this that I can portray universal feelings. In a way, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy can be seen as a kind of an experiment with the way I’m telling the stories and I want to keep doing this – experimenting with storytelling.”

At last month’s Busan International Film Festival – the largest and most influential in Asia – both Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and Drive My Car played as part of the Gala Presentation programme and Hamaguchi was joined on stage by Bong Joon-ho for a discussion of each other’s lives and times.

Ever the showman when an audience gathers, the Korean director admits to a personal obsession with Hamaguchi’s style of storytelling. “His movies help us experience the progress to the core of our inner emotions and feelings,” Bong says. “Thanks to his sophisticated and intricate portrayal, a three-hour film isn’t an obstacle.”

Another champion of slow-burn, atmospheric and emotive cinema, Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai is currently tucked away in Shanghai putting the finishing touches to his own plunge into pure mainstream, the suitably romantic-looking TV series Blossoms, set for streaming via Tencent Video. The Covid-19 lockdowns seem to have fast-tracked acceptance of and access to Asian content, globally.

“Streaming is a completely different platform from feature films, where you’re constrained by two hours, max,” says Tsang. “You can go for a couple of seasons to really develop your stories and your characters. As a filmmaker and as a storyteller, it’s just really exciting to have the option of choosing which storytelling platform or device is more suitable for your story.”

But that’s not to say that the big screen remains the dream. Thailand’s art-house darling and Cannes Palme d’Or-winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) is another Asian filmmaker who’s crossed over into the mainstream this year – or as close to it as an artist who regularly features in his films characters from the spirit worlds might possibly ever get.

This year he released his first English-language feature – the mystery Memoria, starring Tilda Swinton – as the world wakes up to his unique talent and an almost mystical style of filmmaking.

“Nationality seems to be less relevant compared to 10-20 years ago,” he says. “The streaming platforms are good opportunities, as they target local content and audiences. I think the streaming platforms have created a different kind of moving image and formula. Yet they also make us aware that the cinema experience, the communal experience, is unique and precious.”

(Hero image courtesy of Netflix)

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