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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Singer/actress Josie Ho and Ferrari’s new Roma don’t seem like the most obvious match. Granted she could easily stroll into the local Ferrari showroom and snap up its entire stock outright, straight off the floor.

But for a performer who, in a more than 25-year career in the music and movie industries, has developed a reputation as a rule-breaking iconoclast with a persona that’s more cyber- or steampunk than traditional showbiz glitz and which belies her privileged background, isn’t the elegant new coupé – so new, in fact, that at the time of shooting we have to keep the car shielded from public view -- just a little too svelte? Heck, does she even drive?

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It turns out that not only does Ho have more than a little experience at the wheel of a motor car, having learned as a youngster how to drift a humble Honda Civic through the corkscrew turns of Hong Kong’s south side in the early ’90s, but she can also claim a brief (if from her own account somewhat hair-raising) career on the race track, competing in celebrity women’s events at the Macau Grand Prix and even getting to grips with open-wheel formula cars on the circuit at Zhuhai. On her first Macau outing she crashed out – “I didn’t know a thing about racing and apexes,” she says, “and I was obviously going too fast when I came to a big right-hand turn and crashed the car head-on into a wall” – but her second attempt was more successful.

“I had [former racing driver] Michael Lui as my coach and he’s seriously nuts,” she tells us mischievously, as she painstakingly applies her own make-up for our photo shoot, a process that seems to take forever. “We had some training and he’s, like, ‘You don’t have to worry, you have to find the apex and get the right angle to ease out of the turn, find your straight line as soon as possible and slow down before the 100-metre sign, brake heavily, stay on the left and then go round to the right.’ So, I was doing that … and suddenly a car hit us on the side. It was a Miss Hong Kong. So, I’m like, “All right, Miss Hong Kong. Let’s kill her!” She’s my friend but she did it on purpose.

“So, we chased her down the road and my coach put his leg over mine and put his foot on the pedals, so I was steering, and he was accelerating and braking. Finally, there was a big, big turn, and she was catching up to me and you know what we did? I was on the left and she was coming up, trying to squeeze me up against the wall. She tried to kill me twice! So, my coach opened the door and kicked them, so they went off and I came in second that year.”

This was roughly the time when Ho was taking her first steps towards fulfilling an ambition to become a singer, after she’d returned to Asia from school in Canada. Although her parents were initially reluctant, she was gradually able to win them over, not least because of the support she received from big sister Pansy.

“I signed my first contract at the age of 18 in the chairman’s office in Shun Tak Centre with my father, [sisters] Pansy, Daisy and Maisy, [brother] Lawrence and my cousins all there,” Ho recalls. “It was like a huge celebration – like, ‘Oh my God, she’s sold!’ Jackie Chan and [the late Malaysian-born film producer] Willie Chan and Jonathan Lee from Rock Records also came – like, ‘You’re gonna take care of my daughter, please.’ And they really took good care of me. My dad thought it was a very terrible idea, so Pansy was, like, the guarantor. All my brothers and sisters supported me, but she got the say. She strongly convinced my father to let me do this, because she knows all these big stars and that there’s nothing dirty about this industry unless your daughter wants to take it.

“I’d just come out of high school and I had culture shock coming back to Hong Kong. I wasn’t wearing a bra! And people were staring at me like, ‘Oh my God, who is she?’ I came back from Canada in the early ’90s and it was a time when mini tees, tight mini tees, was a trend and it was like, no bra please, you’re young enough to pull it off. People dressed very modestly back then. I didn’t know I [looked like a] street walker, I thought I was cool with my jean shorts and Dr Martens.”

Her career as a songbird, which officially kicked off in 1994 with an album called Rebel (and which in reality was anything but rebellious), never really gained the kind of traction she wanted until around 10 years later, by which time she’d reinvented herself as the indie rocker she is now. She took voice lessons, and at one point was even fired by her record company.

“It took a while for me,” says Ho, “but I really did crack it because I had good mentors. I signed to a pop company in the ’90s and they said, ‘Josie, try to be as minimal as you can be.’ They wanted a clean palette and they didn’t want me to be wild – they’re releasing [music by] five clean palettes and they want to see which is popular. If you’re popular, they’ll spend money on you and make you bigger. So it’s a real competitive life I’ve been living.

“I’ve never been one to listen, so I’d crawl out and they’re like, ‘Oh my God. Oh my God …’ I was told off about my singing as well. I wasn’t that good back then because I didn’t have a good teacher. I wasn’t using my real voice, and I was doing falsetto all the time and it didn’t go into the microphone well.”

In parallel with her road to musical self-discovery was an embryonic career as an actress. Realising that she’d be unlikely to get a second chance if she messed it up, she went out and bought “a lot of books about how to be an actor – Stanislavski, Chekhov etc. At the time I was doing a stage play with a serious art-installation group and during rehearsals I learned about the basics of drama, and I’d bring those tricks to my films.”

After taking a succession of small parts in local ’90s movies (her first cinematic outing was in the 1994 comedy, Victory), Ho’s breakout role came while playing alongside Daniel Wu in the 1999 Teddy Chan-directed Purple Storm, for which she received best supporting actress nominations in the Golden Horse and Hong Kong Film Awards. “[It was] a heavy action film and back then I was really fit,” she says, “so I’d do all my stunts and fight with my stuntman. I’d go after him, check out what he’s doing and I’d be like, ‘I can do it too.’ A good artist has to have the passion and joy to love what they’re doing and that will automatically bring them to be a more serious player.”

By the early 2000s it was as if Ho had found herself both as a singer and an actress. As a singer, she talks about the inspiration she gained from Madonna, as well as from her actor/rapper/producer husband Conroy Chan, whom she married in 2003.
“The company I was signed to before told me not to move at all, so I was confused – like Madonna moves, everybody moves, even Talking Heads move,” she says, incredulously. “Madonna was one of my first inspirations because of her work ethic – how she could go to New York with 10 bucks in her pocket and she was eating garbage and she made it.

“I read a lot of books about her, so I knew her attitude. I knew if I wanted something I had to work very hard, I just didn’t know how to work out the big corporates, the politics, but then I became independent after taking advice from my husband – because he’s a heavy-metal head – and LMF, this heavy-metal, hip-hop rap group. They were like, ‘Hey Josie, why are you playing video games up at our studio? Why are you acting? Aren’t you a singer? We thought you were pretty cool for a singer. We’re recording a song and we need a chorus, we’ll tell you if you can sing, come on, come in,’ and they gave me a chance and they were like, ‘Yeah you can sing, we’re going to talk to so and so.’

“I told them that no record companies wanted me, and they were like, ‘Oh yeah? We’ll try, we’ll talk to a record company tomorrow,’ and after they heard about what they wanted to do with me, as well as Davy, the producer of LMF, they were like, yes! Before that, I never understood what I really liked – before I thought I liked acid jazz and soul funk. My Taiwanese company let me sing some of that, but I always thought it was missing something, that it wasn’t heavy enough. I started listening to Metallica, Linkin Park etc., and I felt like I’d found my niche.”

Likewise, Ho’s cinematic career exhibited a new-found confidence, with leading roles in Takashi Mike’s Dead or Alive: Final (2002), set in a futuristic Yokohama, Dante Lam and Donnie Yen’s 2003 vampire fantasy The Twins Effect and the well-received Hong Kong drama Butterfly (2004), which opened the Venice Film Festival and brought her a Golden Bauhinia best actress nomination.

In 2007, she and husband Chan founded their production company 852 Films. “Our whole motto is to bring East and West together,” says Ho. “We don’t care who we work with, we just want to introduce our Eastern culture and rituals to the West and we want to introduce the Western side to Asia, so we understand each other better. But due to the current situation in Hong Kong, I think it’s better to venture into Hollywood for now. We’re still trying to do some Hong Kong films, but we still don’t really understand the laws just yet, like how much they’re going to control our freedom of speech and inspiration and all that, so we’re kind of taking a step back and playing it very safe.”

Among 852’s recent projects is the soon-to-be-released Rajah, a Hollywood biopic of Sir James Brooke, the 19th-century British adventurer who became the first White Rajah on the Southeast Asian island of Borneo, in which Ho stars alongside Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Dominic Monaghan. She recounts an issue she had during the filming of a scene in which her character, who plays Brooke’s former lover, finds a half-dead Myers crawling into the compound and speaks to him in Chinese-accented English, which she thought at the time was inappropriate.

“He’s like, ‘Can you not speak so loudly? You have a mic on your body.’ And I said, ‘But there’s a difference in distance,’ and he said, ‘This is the new way in Hollywood, we don’t scream.’ And I said, ‘I wasn’t screaming, I was just talking loud.’ So they tried to cut off my lines and I was furious. It was like 5am after the night I arrived, and we’d had to wake up and shoot the ending. I’d never met the actors before and suddenly here we were finishing the film at the beginning.”

“That was the first time I broke my own rule, [because] I never yell at people on the street. I finally asked the producer to come out, because they all came into my room and they were saying, ‘Josie, when you failed those two lines you wasted half an hour of our time and blah, blah, blah, blah,’ and I was like, ‘I’m paying for it. I’m taking a big risk here’ They were like, ‘Can you trade lines with this other role, this Indonesian guy?’ and I was like, ‘I pay money and I trade?’ I wanted to speak nicely and talk reason with him, and he was being a little bit racially discriminating and I just went crazy, and I slammed my hands on the table. I told him I’d just talked to my lawyer and he’d given me the right to look at all of the contracts, so I wanted to know in which contract it was allowed to change my lines. And he was kind of shell-shocked.”

Ho had already noticed how many of the local extras and crew had to sit around in the hot sun, while the lead actors at least had a tent with a fan to retreat to. So she asked the producer, “‘Do you have any problems with Asians, because it looks like to me, you’re trying to shoot this story about Asian people and you’re not treating them right, and you’re asking me to swap my lines with somebody? What are you going to give me in return?’ And he was like, ‘Oh, nothing.’ So I was like, ‘No. No way man.’ I argued with him and then in the end I still speak English and they’ve already sacrificed my entrance scene by asking me to speak Cantonese with Jonathan, because Jonathan thought it would be more convincing that he knows another language than Sarawakian. They asked if I could speak the whole scene in Cantonese and I said, ‘That’s a joke, maybe one line,’ and then we started speaking in English again. I never act like that in Hong Kong. I was uncontrollable – I slammed my hand on the table, like that’s enough!” I was sitting in the centre of the James Brooke Trust [near Kuching] and all the actors were walking past, and they were like oh f…, something’s wrong.”

Aside from Rajah, Ho lets us in on other 852 projects in the pipeline. “There’s this rock ’n’ roll badass film called Habit,” she says. “It’s basically crazy nuns chased by this fetish couple, which is myself and [The Kills guitarist] Jamie Hince. In the movie he’s really afraid of me, pathetic and kind of gangsterish with this insect fetish, and torturing these nuns who are half-innocent girls who are trying to make a life in LA. My plans have been delayed a little bit due to the virus – the shooting’s all done, but it’s in post-production. I might also have the chance to work with Charlotte Gainsbourg and it would be a very interesting thing – a film called Jodie and we’ve been talking to Bruce Wagner and Mike Figgis.”

And then there’s her band, Josie & The Uni Boys, which is still kicking out the jams some 13 years after the five-piece got together. “In a rock gig, you’re the clown or the king,” she says. “It’s up to you how you want to be – you choose yourself. I’ve chosen a really crazy wild style. I like to yell a lot, and get on the ground and roll around, it’s my Madonna thing, crawling on the ground. I don’t care if I make a fool of myself, because I love it, I get a kick out of it because that’s real performance. It’s real art to be a little bit out of control because if you always restrict yourself then you’ll never develop another level.

“My family’s not about that, my family’s all about discipline, not looking bad in front of people. Only once in my life, when I got fired, my mom took me in my room – she seldom does this – to have a serious talk, and she said, ‘Didn’t you get accepted into FIDM [the Los Angeles Fashion Institute of Design and Marketing]? You got accepted for spatial and fashion design. Maybe you should think about going back and stay out of the media.’

“That would be a nightmare,” says Ho with a laugh, “I’d probably kill myself. But now, even 20 years since she said that to me, now at this age because of all the design work of posters, record covers, film posters and all that, I should have done it! Then I’d have total control. Who’s criticising this poster? I can draw something else!”

With that, the rebellious Ho, who flips every Hong Kong rich-girl stereotype on to its head, makes her way down to our makeshift studio in the basement of the Ferrari showroom. “I love the car,” she says on first sight of the Roma. “If you lend it to me for an hour, I can probably show you and myself how I can really run this monster.”

Photography: Kyu at Shya-La-La
Art Direction: Sepfry Ng
Styling: Genie Yam and Adrin Yeung
Hair: Angus Lee
Make-up: Vic Kwan at II Alchemy Hair & Nail
Car: Ferrari Roma
All Outfits: Josie's Own
Additional Reporting: Florence Tsai

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