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.

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No one said showbiz was easy, and if you’ve met JuJu Chan Szeto, you’ll know she’s not one to give up. We sit down with the action star to talk about how embracing her martial-arts background led to her big break in Hollywood.

As a child, JuJu Chan Szeto wouldn’t sit still. Her father was an action-movie fanatic, and every time they watched something together, Chan Szeto remembers copying every move by Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Donnie Yen. “I’d jump from table to table,” she says. “I broke a lot of things at home.” Exasperated with their daughter’s boundless energy, her parents sent her off to judo school where she fell in love with martial arts. From judo, to karate, Chinese kung fu, taekwondo and Thai boxing, Chan Szeto has honed her martial-arts skills since she was 10, entering national competitions and representing Hong Kong in taekwondo.

A born performer, Chan Szeto says she’s never turned down a chance to sing, dance, or act since she was a child. She studied computer science – “something practical befitting a traditional Chinese family” – but ultimately found herself enrolling into New York’s Tisch School of the Arts and learning the ropes of the film industry. Afterwards, she came back to Hong Kong to begin her career here and she’s never looked back since. 

It wasn’t an easy start, though. From beauty pageants to reality shows, and even a brief music career, Chan Szeto tried everything to make her mark, but it wasn’t until a director told her to embrace her roots as a martial artist that she found her way. That director, with the gems of wisdom that put Chan Szeto on the map and Hollywood on her radar, is Antony Szeto, who’s now her husband. 

I talked to Chan Szeto about her love for martial arts, her favourite action scenes and her upcoming feature film on Netflix, Wu Assassins: Fistful of Vengeance. 

You’ve credited your husband for pushing you to embrace your martial-arts background as an actress. 

Yes. In Hong Kong especially, actors are expected to act, sing, and appear in campaigns. When I came back I took any opportunity that came to me, because I just wanted to perform. I got signed to a music label and I released an album in Hong Kong where I wrote my own songs. My husband, Antony Szeto, directed one of my first music videos. At that time, I was doing so much and Antony knew I wanted to become an actress. But at that time also, I didn’t tell people that I could do martial arts. My image was very different then – I had long hair and looked very girly, which was the typical look in Hong Kong at that time. I wanted to make hip-hop and rap music, but my management told me to stick with mellow love songs. But Antony told me he was having a hard time finding female actors who could act and do their own actions. There are a lot more action stars in the older generation, but not in our current generation. He could tell I could fight, and he said maybe I should focus on letting people know that and not be afraid of being different. After that, I brought my nunchucks out and showed people what I was capable of. 

Was that how you got your Hollywood start and joined the cast of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny (2016)? 

Netflix was doing this worldwide search for Asian actors and actresses who knew martial arts for the movie, and they’d heard about me as one of the action actresses based in Hong Kong who also spoke English. There really weren’t that many of us at that time. There’s Michelle Yeoh, whom I really like, especially after working with her. She didn’t start in martial arts, she was a dancer who actually got trained by the Jackie Chan team and became a female action figure. I’d say until this day that she’s the biggest female action actress in Hollywood and it was amazing to have worked with her on Sword of Destiny. She was so graceful, really loving and caring and generous. I look up to her and, yeah, I hope I can work with her again. 

Do you do a lot of your own stunts?

No matter how good you are, everyone in Hollywood has a stunt double for insurance. But I do all my fight actions myself. I have my own fighting style and the way I do my actions makes it hard for people to double me. But there are times when we shoot multiple units because of our tight schedule and the production might have to use doubles to pick up some shots of our previous fights, because we can’t be in two locations at once. I love to run through all my actions as many times as possible before I shoot them. And I also like to attend the pre-visualisation sessions with the stunt team, which is where we visualise the scene to show the director how it’s going to look on
the screen. 

Have you choreographed your own stunts too?

On Wu Assassins, we had a longer period of shooting because it’s a TV series, so I became really close to the stunts team and the action choreographer Dan Rizzuto. He knew I did a lot of high kicks, so we incorporated a lot of those into the kitchen scene. We came up with the choreography together in the stunt room and ran the whole scene with the other stunt doubles. The choreographer was like, “I’ve never had an actress do this – usually it’s the stunt double’s job.” But I like being there and being able to have some creative input. I also choreographed all of my fight scenes in an independent action film called Hollow Point, which aired on FOX Movies in Hong Kong and my action performance in that film got me a nomination for a Jackie Chan Action Film Awards in 2019 for Best Action Actress. 

Out of all the projects you’ve done so far, which would you say is your favourite fight scene?

The kitchen fight in Wu Assassins episode three is one I love a lot. It’s so quick and dynamic and we were making use of all the kitchen pans and stuff. I love including things from the environment in the fight. Another favourite one would be in Jiu Jitsu (2020) with Nicholas Cage. That was one long shot of me fighting five or six guys alone, using nunchucks, jumping and turning. When we shot it, it was a two-minute-long fight scene, but in the final edit, there’s other scenes added in because there were a few fights happening at the same time. The camera guys are also moving with us at the same time to capture the shots – we’re not really hitting the actors, so you have to catch it at a certain angle, right? It’s a whole teamwork thing. 

Do you have plans to direct your own film one day?

I did a short action-comedy in Los Angeles before Covid. I shot it already I just need to finish editing it so I can release it. I’m interested in directing action films, especially as an Asian. I don’t think there’s another female action film director who actually has an action background, and I’d like to be the first. Hopefully I could get the editing done by the end of the year so I can put it in a festival and release it next year. It’s a really fun piece. 

Do you feel that as an Asian American actor today, you’re finally receiving the recognition and getting more opportunities? 

I started auditioning while in NYU, but at that time there weren’t that many Asian-American roles in America. It’s only these past five years or so that more roles have come up. I receive auditions every week from Hollywood now. There are a lot of roles and more people competing for those roles as well. It’s a good thing. For Asian representation in Hollywood to grow, we need more Asian faces, more roles in different genres. It’s a healthy competition. 

What’s a role you’d like to play that you haven’t tried yet?

A musical! Singing, dancing and maybe some action. I want to be in a musical so badly. I recently re-watched Glee and there were so many great songs and dance, and it looked like it would have been so much fun to be one of the main cast.

So Wu Assassins: Fistful of Vengeance comes out on Netflix next year. What can we expect from it?

Four of the original cast members come back from the TV series. I still play Zan, and then Lewis Tan, Iko Uwais and Lawrence Kao also come back to reprise their roles. There are new cast members too, including Jason Tobin from Hong Kong, who’s great fun to work with. Roel Reiné is the director and he was super great to work with too. We filmed the entire movie in Bangkok in 28 days because of Covid – I think they wanted to shoot it in the shortest amount of time possible since the longer you stayed the more liability there was for the whole production in case the whole thing had to shut down. We managed so many fight scenes it’s quite amazing. The audience can expect heavy action, fast pacing and just pure fun seeing all of us going around Bangkok.  

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