i evo nekoliko stvari koje je virasetakul rekao, cisto da se vidi koliko je pametan:
My works in film and video are personal, and have very few links with what’s going on. The current filmmaking atmosphere tends to get very complicated for me. I like to do simple sketches. I shot how I felt each day, some as short clips, some long, building the emotional structure along the way. On Blissfully Yours I was more focused. Tropical Malady, to me, was more temperamental. Since I made Tropical Malady during my “dark” period—I was at pain with some losses—the film is like my sorrow box. Some of the scenes, including the style and the structure, contain personal references. It may appear scattered to some, but it was the way I saw my memories at that particular time. The experience of making this film is very naïve and direct. When we shot in the jungle, I was more aware of how the movie was going. Somehow I felt like I was back in the past making a silent film where there was no man on earth.
Even though I grew up in a small town where the land is flat, there were strange animal sounds in a quiet night not unlike those up on the hills. The tales and the landscapes were imprinted in my mind. I always imagine a parallel world with these elements, one where I did not physically live. It situates in a remote jungle with hidden spirits. When I had a chance to make films, which in itself is to create another world, I always resort to this jungle.
I wanted a real old-fashioned mood of a horror film. But Tourneur never used a real monster; he would just use a shadow and a sound, and I wanted more monster. In the end, we agreed that Tourneur was right - never show the monster!
In this story, I have chosen not to dwell on the political issues of the Thai-Burmese border, but to focus on mundane and futile activities, which in themselves carry an underlying political message.
Even though the town in this film seems peaceful on the surface, the boredom, hidden emotional conflicts, and communication differences, produce psychological tensions between the protagonists of the story. The main character is a Burmese refugee whose fate has linked him to the lives of two Thai women in this border town. The film details their mundane activities on a typical lazy afternoon. The characters do not have a meaningful goal in life. Under two flawed political systems, they choose to remain ignorantly blissful.
Yes, now it's very common for everyone to make films. Yeah, and video for the young people. Before it was quite limited in terms of equipment and now so many kids are making video. Before, five or six years ago, there was a lot of work dealing directly with social issues quite outside of the personal style. Now we see a lot more people who are just talking about themselves, which I think is a better way because it reflects the society they're living in. In a personal way, that's more interesting, so you see more of this work, and the studios in Thailand are tapping into this area as well in hiring fresh graduates to direct a video and then go to film or direct a film cheaply. I think that the mood of making my kind of films is getting stronger here.
I tried to understand the pacing, the way this soldier moves through different landscapes.
I was asked many times about the darkness in this film. Technically, it was hard to capture darkness when there is a moon as the only light source in my mind. We tried some ways, but they all looked fake to me. So we ended up using little light, which scared the producer very much. My original idea was to have many parts of the second half in total black—that’s not possible commercially. So the producer was OK at least to see something. So we went on to light the night to be very heavy. I am not sure how to explain—to have the weight of the black on the actor. Some scenes were actually too dark to use. The result was like the theater was in the middle of the jungle. The audience shares the weight.
In Tropical Malady, like in my previous film Blissfully Yours, I set the jungle as one of the main characters. But this time the jungle is active, reacting more to the character’s mind. This character is a man in love. He is attached to another man who may or may not be real. The film is about the internal conflict of a man in nature. The landscape acts as a mirror, always reflecting double images, two worlds: human and animal, darkness and light, past and present.
Many films I see nowadays are like reading a book or something. I believe film has to be expressed in a medium that is not theater, a book, a narrative. Just the image. And it should be open, so for me it’s successful when people look at this image and interpret it in different ways according to their experience. For example I like watching things out of the windows, and when another person watches the same thing from a different angle, so much is expressed but not expressed. So it’s a different angle, a different point of view. It’s great that they can’t express all that they’ve seen in the same way. This comes back to the point that there’s no reality, because each person’s reality is different, and each person experiences time differently. Like, maybe after I hang up with you, you can tell other people it was a very long interview, and I can tell other people it was very short interview. It’s relative, it’s different.
_________________ and there is something decent in the universe
if i can feel all this, dicto millesimo
at the age of whatever
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