A young man searches the jungle for his old lover, who may or may not have become a tiger. A man on his deathbed converses with the ghosts of his wife and son. A caretaker for soldiers who lie in an inexplicable coma befriends a pair of goddesses. A woman is tormented by a sound that only she can hear. In the films of the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the fantastic seems completely natural. His characters live comfortably in dreamlike states where no line exists between reality and unreality, and so the everyday can seem oddly miraculous. His oeuvre includes feature films as well as a voluminous catalog of short films, installations, performance pieces and, more recently, even virtual reality pieces.
Film at Lincoln Center organized a comprehensive retrospective of the filmmaker’s career, from his first feature film Mysterious object at noon For Cemetery of Splendor to recent Memory (The No. 1 film for hyperallergics of 2021), as well as most of his shorts. The world of Apichatpong Weerasethakul also includes a program of films that have influenced Apichatpong, including works by Nagisa Ōshima, Chantal Akerman and Abbas Kiarostami. Of particular note is Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1993 masterpiece The puppeteerwhich is extraordinarily difficult to see and should not be missed.
Prior to the series, Hyperallergic sat down with the filmmaker on Google Meet to chat about his work, period cinema, virtual reality and video games, and more. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Hyperallergic: You create a unique atmosphere in your films. It is very soothing and peaceful.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul: I think it’s very open, how you can approach them. And some people maybe have the opposite effect of [experiencing] nervousness or anxiety, even confusion, and give up.
H: Do you think people might have different reactions to long shot conventions? Do you think some people feel uncomfortable?
AW: Some people, yes. I think it depends. How do you synchronize with another person the way you look at the world? What is the definition of cinema? I think when you’re faced with something out of convention, it shows your character, if you’re willing to join in on that.
H: Your cinema requires a lot more commitment just by letting things run for a long time and demanding people’s attention.
AW: I think it’s a matter of freedom, right? When you see this open frame, you have the freedom to not only look at the characters, but also the trees and the actions. You realize the dynamics of things around life, and for me [the shots are] not so long. It’s about being present and accompanying the film without having so much noise or voices in your head. When you watch movies in general, you think ahead about what the story is going to be and you really empathize with the characters. But for me, it’s not only about the characters, but also about empathy with all of humanity, with animals, with trees, with everything.
H: When planning your films, how much of the story do you shape at the scripting stage versus at the time of shooting?
AW: Most of the time the script is based on real events that I have observed or heard about. And because we always have a small budget, the shooting is quite strict in respecting this order. So during the rehearsal with the actors, with the cameraman, with everything, it’s time to change the scenario. It really depends on the actors. In Memorythere’s a lot of times where there’s no dialogue, so when I wrote it I had one thing in mind, but when Tilda [Swinton] tried things, it always changed in different takes. And I also cut many scenes from the script.
H: Many of your movies (Memory, Cemetery of Splendor, Uncle Boonmee) are about people with illnesses or include characters who visit doctors at some point. What underlies this preoccupation with sickness, disease, and healing or non-healing?
AW: It’s a pretext for history, but it’s more about suffering, the suffering that we all share, but also the joy of living. There are no good guys or bad guys; there are only conditions. I think people strive to find happiness, simple as that. For me, my films are not complex at all. It’s just that people try to achieve that. And in the end, maybe it’s just left hanging. It’s just an observation of this cycle, of a goal that is never achieved – which I think when you are aware of this cycle is really liberating.
H: In Memory, it turns out that the condition of the main character is part of a connection to the past via a supernatural phenomenon. Do you think suffering can be a way for people to connect to something beyond the normal world?
AW: Not beyond, but inside We. It’s something we sometimes overlook, this connection. I have always treated cinema as an illusion. It’s not true. It’s fiction. Tilda’s character is not real. I draw attention to the cinema itself, to the fact that it is only a tool. It’s just a two-dimensional thing. Sometimes you’re immersed in sound and everything, but sometimes when you’re faced with duration you realize you’re sitting in a theater waiting for something to happen. It’s that push and pull of reality, sometimes being part of it and sometimes not, that’s a key challenge for me, to see if film can deliver that idea.
H: You‘I have also worked in other media. Do you approach art, virtual reality, installations or short films in the same way?
AW: Yes, I think so. Many of them are also moving images, but the interaction with the audience is different. When you create something knowing that the audience can walk in or walk in at any time, that’s different. It’s more abstract and requires much more active participation from the audience. When I started working with virtual reality, I thought it would take cinema elsewhere, that it would propel the future of cinema. But in fact, it is another language. It really showed me how in cinema you create something linear and controlled. We have close-ups, pans, all kinds of camera movements to guide the audience’s emotions. But in VR, you are very open, there is no framework. In my work, the public can walk anywhere without wires. I think it’s more theatrical, more like a performance, where you design the environment. All these media are therefore very different. But I always play or experiment with time, and with this awareness of your body in space.
H: I see virtual reality as the intersection between cinema, theater and video games. Have you ever played games?
AW: I used them a lot until the days of the Nintendo DS. But suddenly I started getting motion sickness. So I can’t play anymore. That’s a shame. It gives me a headache now that I’m playing something on an iPad, for example. But before that, I played a lot of matches.
H: When you played games, which were your favorites? You said you play Nintendo. Have you played Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda and all that?
AW: Not really. What was this game that talks about the original life and evolution…
H: Spore?
AW: Yes! And before that, what did I play? … I was playing from the Atari. Even though people hate it, I love it AND, the game.
H: Really?
AW: It’s a terrible game for most people, but for me, I was fascinated by it. Wandering around the neighborhood doing nothing. He digs, tries to find something…
H: Coins for a phone, so he can call home.
AW: Yeah yeah. Not bad.
H: Many of these early video games were inspired by the creators’ love of exploration. I know you talked about a fascination with the jungle when you were a kid, in the stories you read. Do you think it’s a similar interest?
AW: Yeah. I was totally into space travel, science fiction, Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, the classic generation. With ghost stories, it’s a different kind of exploration. I think all of these books reflect our fear of the unknown. And they ask these questions about what is God? Or what is it to be human?
H: FLC does this full retrospective. Has looking back at your career caused you any new revelations, or reflections on what you’ve worked on so far, or clarified what you want to do in the future?
AW: Yes. With the feature films and the short films put together, I feel like I’ve done a lot already. I think if I die today or tomorrow, I’m fine. It’s that sense of… I don’t know the word in English. Resignation? Resignation. And at the same time, it really pushes me to work more outside my comfort zone, so to travel and [to think] of the process of cinema as alive. It’s not about the product; it’s about meeting people and finding big problems and solutions.
The world of Apichatpong Weerasethakul runs at Film at Lincoln Center (144 and 165 West 65th Street, Upper West Side, Manhattan) May 4-14.
