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With Grain: A Q&A with Apichatpong Weerasethakul

The acclaimed Thai filmmaker sits down with novelist Katie Kitamura for a conversation about narrative vs. storytelling, black magic, and migrant populations.

By Katie Kitamura

KK: Have you been working in digital?

AW: Yeah, a lot. Mostly on short videos, videos for installations.

KK: So the feature films are still all shot on film.

AW: Yes.

KK: Would you shoot a feature on digital?

AW: That’s a very good question. I just talked to a friend and he said, “Next year you will have to shoot on digital.” I will be the last person, I think, at least in Thailand, to stick to film. But these things you can’t help because it will depend on Kodak, Fuji, the labs. Now the labs are closing all over the world.

KK: Do you think there’s a way to emphasize the quality of digital, to use it as a positive thing? I’m thinking of Inland Empire, when Lynch really used the quality, the flatness of digital film to tell a certain story.

AW: Well, yes. I think that as with film, there will a generation that has a romantic attachment to the medium, as it’s developing. And maybe it will be more than with film, because the medium is developing really quickly. So you have many kinds of HDVD, and therefore all these grains. The look of digital is always transforming. So I can understand people like Lynch, having an attachment to video grain.

KK: Even very recent pieces of technology have already become obsolete. Like I don’t know if you remember the Flip Camera, that’s—

AW: Is that out?

KK: It’s out of business, now. The turnover is accelerating.

AW: We have to get used to it being very transient, with these changes. I remember when the digital camera was introduced in Thailand, we went to see the demonstration, and they said, you have to get used to this grainless cinema. “Ah, this is strange”—cinema without grain. It’s a really interesting period.

Apichatpong with actress Kathleen Turner and
New York Times critic Janet Maslin.

KK: Speaking of films making reference to other films, your film The Adventure of Iron Pussy was a homage to Thai Seventies films. I heard you were developing a movie about sci-fi movies.

AW: Oh, that’s a long time ago. It’s shelved, because it’s very expensive. I tried to raise funds, but in the end it wasn’t worth it. But yes—genre is very interesting. I love science fiction. How can I put it—it’s in the same universe as those ghost stories that I grew up with as well.

KK: Are all your influences in your childhood?

AW: Yes. I think most people—writers, filmmakers—childhood is a very important part that you’re stuck with.

KK: There seems to be a theme of illness in the films. Sometimes it’s a terminal illness as in Uncle Boonmee, sometimes it’s more like a fever as in Tropical Malady. Or there’s the hospital in Syndromes and a Century. What is interesting to you about illness?

AW: The first thing is about my growing up. Because my parents are doctors, we lived in the hospital area until I was fifteen. So that’s my playground, in a way – the hospital, and the sickness around it. But for me it’s not really something sad. It’s just part of the environment. Like when I go there, or I go to my parents’ clinic, it’s always about how you treat a problem. So it becomes really normal—you see that it’s part of us. If you go to a doctor, or you meet a doctor, and you say, Hey, I am so normal, I don’t have any sickness or something—well, I think that’s a problem, because people are supposed to get sick.

KK: It’s interesting, a friend of mine wrote a play about a world in which illness had been eradicated. So there was no more sickness. The twist is that without sickness, people don’t know how to care each other any more. So he imagined a museum of nursing.

AW: Wow, that’s fascinating.

KK: It’s a museum where you can see people recreating what it was like to care for someone who’s ill.

AW: Is this a play, or a screenplay?

KK: It was a play by Adam Rapp. It opened in New York last year.

AW: Wow, that’s fascinating.

KK: His mother was a nurse, in fact. It was really interesting. The set included a glass wall between the stage and the audience. In the action of the play, they would inject a patient with an illness from the past. And then the nurse would care for the patient.

AW: This would make a good movie!

KK: I feel like I see this in your films as well, this idea that illness has to do with care.

AW: Yes—and to make you realize as well, the mortal fragility—

KK: Of the body—

AW: Yes, of the body, of the mind, of the things that you forget, you start to forget.

KK: This falling away.

AW: Yes.

KK: I wondered if you could talk a bit about the political aspect of your work. I know that politically there’s this strong tension between the city and the rural parts of Thailand, which appears in your work. You grew up in the Northeast region, which historically witnessed the clash between army forces and communist sympathizes. Has your work become more overtly political? Do you think of your work as political?

AW: In a way I feel like I need to express more politically because it seemed like I’ve been avoiding, or trying to avoid, these issues in the past. I was in my own bubble, of childhood and these ghosts—but at the same time there’s another ghost that I ignored, which is the ghost of politics. It’s also about growing up. In the education system in Thailand—it’s quite a closed system, to the point of propaganda. When you study history, for example, you have no knowledge. It’s all about how great Thailand is, and was. And we know nothing much about our neighbors, except that they’ve been enemies in the past. But with this political tension that has been heating up for the past ten years in Thailand, and the availability of information on the internet—I’m in the period of reeducating myself, like many other Thai people. About our history, our political history. So then it just hit me that I should also talk about them, or try to understand them, through movies.