Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Tilda Swinton on Memoria | NYFF59

[Music] hi everyone i'm dennis lim the director of programming of the festival uh and very pleased today to be joined by one of our great directors and one of our great actors uh we is [Applause] [Music] thank you so much uh both of you for being here um i know it's been we were just saying backstage has been it's been many years since you've come and and tilda of course this is the third film that you have in the festival so it's great that you're finally able to be with us so thank you um i'm going to start with a question um for um which is that you've talked for several years about wanting to make a film outside thailand and you've talked for several years about wanting to make a film with tilda who you've known for many years can you talk about how these two impulses came together in the character of jessica the country of colombia and memorial well thank you um first of all it's really pleasure to be here after almost 10 years now i'll be here so it feels really nice thanks er this this is a long dream of us to to work together but uh we didn't know what was this dream and in 2017 i had a chance to be in colombia as part of the fixi and and i have to repeat this because i they were they were doing a tribute for me and and the night they show these clips from my past films it's very well made and i feel very emotional i feel like oh it's like a funeral you know and i'm like oh i'm old and but but it feel good it feel like that the end of something the end of the chapter and it's quite symbolic like i want to to make something new you know of thailand and then i you know after kathyanna i had a chance to travel around the country in many cities and during that time i had this exploding head syndrome that that was it's called the symptom of bang is that is it similar to always to jessica's condition in the film a not as extreme you know because it's it's more it's like a slingshot it's something like a idea of sound okay it's not jumpy is it something that's experienced when you're asleep or no when when i was waking up okay early in the morning and i didn't know what it was until much even after writing this film then i i found online that this is what it's called yeah and and and with personal issues there i started to to really connect with people talking went to many hospitals because i love hospitals i grew up my parents were doctors so that that feel familiar but somehow i started to hear stories traumas and hope and yeah and memories started yeah um maybe you can both talk a little bit about um creating the character of jessica i know that your process is always intensely collaborative and that you really bring the actors into the creation of their characters you often draw on their own lives or their own memories and and i'm wondering how jessica took shape for for both of you well for me i because because in thailand i i had my memory i have my roots and so all my actors close to me you know so it's about bringing that out but for here i'm just absorbing and and my my reference was jessica from i walk with a zombie by jacques turner you know the same name jessica holland she's comatose and she's just she's sleepwalking she's sleepwalking through the sound of the voodoo drum and and so we went there and yeah i should let you answer that process yeah well we never we never talked about character at all um i i don't think of jessica as a character i i think of her as a predicament and our first impulse when we started talking about making a feature film together because we have made other gestures together we've co-curated a film festival in thailand and we've made some short pieces but but from the very beginning of our correspondence about this film we knew that we had to tackle the issue of where we would be i mean we knew we wanted to work together and we knew we wanted to work together in a sort of atmosphere a sort of dreamscape um which is which is a you know as usual with with joe but particularly for me to be to enter into this dreamscape with him and we quite quickly uh i voiced concern about entering a dreamscape in thailand i didn't know how i could possibly uh fit in uh and so and so very soon we went okay let's let's place it in a somewhere where we are both strangers that was very significant and then we looked for the place but in thinking about uh the predicament of jessica you know it was something like 17 years this conversation and so every year there was another element another layer or another leaf that fell off the tree and became the mulch of the film and there was joe's experience with his exploding head syndrome and his insomnia um and there was my personal experience of grief bereavement and we just sort of mixed it all in this sense of uh of jessica dislocated so it was more it wasn't to do with building a character it was to do with um finding an environment in which she could be as dislocated and as and as connected not disconnected dislocated and connected uh and and all of these personal experiences added to that this feeling of being slightly outside of of society outside of the of the running of the world meaning that she was completely connected with nature joe i want to hear you talk about this of this what tilde was just talking about the idea of being being outside i mean you've all your your future films at least have all been um shot in thailand i think you might have made one or two short films outside uh installation installation work right in dilbar right yeah but um this time you know just being in unfamiliar environment unfamiliar environment for you um can you talk about that as a a plus or a minus or or both yeah that turned out to be the best thing for us not knowing and don't understand uh so i again i didn't know and then the first day of shooting was it's like adjusting and absorbing just like tilda said just to be you know and and personally with my past film too i was not that much interested in the background of the characters you know we didn't know how long the husband has passed or you know how long have she been in colombia so it was just about that moment and how um how she or how i like feel at that uh in the weather the light and and the fact that we always shoot a shot in long take yeah you know 35 millimeter is one big row 14 minutes so it's on like right so so she and other actors has to to be really acute feelings and and along the way we shot chronologically as much as we could and so it's about adjusting day by day and and so young our dop he he's very you know how you say prefer minimal intrusion you know of light and things so it's it's like 360 almost of space right yeah so unlike in thailand i i knew you know how to get this chair and how people dress and stuff but in colombia i no idea so i just kind of release and relax and release the sense of control and i just trust the team and as we have so many beautiful crew members yeah and and the beautiful thing is that we had a show in in bogota and other cities in colombia just before here and then and it seemed like incredible that people could connect it and with the film and few many people told us it's is a very relevant portrait for them especially this kind of yeah yeah weather yeah color weather is very pronounced in the film um tilda do you want to talk about this this process of just um negotiating this unfamiliar environment together yeah i mean i i thought it was um i always thought of it as a huge blessing this feeling of of us being lost it was sort of what we wanted wasn't it we wanted to go and not know what we were doing and um and and we really drove into the curve of that joe and i as aliens in colombia you know held by our beautiful colombian team family um but we we really made a virtue of that feeling of of divesting ourselves of of of of knowing too much about what we wanted and to to keep that atmosphere of um stillness of of of unplanned in jessica in particular and uh yeah it i mean if you're going to do that colombia is a very good place to do it because there's you know so much to just be quiet and listen to and watch um but i think it when i think of what joe said that you know when you work in your own backyard you're constantly making choices because you know it all so you're going not this not that yes not that not that but but all we were in colombia were these kind of incomers traveling and and and really trying to make a virtue of being lost you're kind of describing ourselves as just you know sponges or antenna like just sort of you know taking in uh stimuli in some way but i'm wondering if there was an active research process as well i'm i'm thinking about the title which i think refers not just to personal history but political history and much as in your thai films i think politics is always on the edge of the frame just as i think colombian recent colombian history is is present here too so i'm wondering if that was something that you know you you you both felt you had to negotiate well that's what we were looking for when we because we knew that we wanted uh we spoke before about the first sort of uh on the back of a of an envelope uh series of the menu that we knew we wanted to touch in the film that we were going to make in 17 years time we knew we wanted this lostness and this sense of of of connectedness but we also wanted very much to continue uh the work uh that joe you know has made so often about the reverberation of trauma in the land and the reverberation in thailand and for myself as a scot the reverberation of of trauma in scotland but to find a third place that that gave that to us that was a task and that was a task for several years finding that place and when joe first went to carthage and i went soon after and he wrote to me and said it's colombia that's the third pill that's what we need it was that reverberation in the culture and in the land and in the people of trauma that we really that we really were looking for and of course ironically history being what it is in 2019 we thought we were making a film very much about the past and then 2021 it seems uh we're making we've made a film about present um we thought the film was going to come out last year but the fact that it's coming out now has i mean we just came from bogota yesterday morning and uh having had these screenings and having taken the film back to the village where we shot it and the resonance of the film for colombians seems to be really quite immense yes i you know as i travel around you know 2017-18 and listen to many people and there's some shared you know stories um or feelings through to style sound you know for example uh people would you know 10 years ago or 15 years ago you're just driving and then this bang you know you're frozen in the car you just didn't know it's a gunshot or explosion of fireworks you know so all this anticipation and you know decoding is is really shared stories of people there and the film for me in some instances as they are collage there are collage of my memories there you know for example the the men who just jumped down with the sound of the bus tire explosion yeah that's what i saw in bukota yeah and and many other stories yeah can you say a bit about responding to bogota i actually you know people often associate your films with rural environments or the jungle but i love seeing cities in your films actually um and uh i know you have a background in architecture and i think you shoot built in the built environment in a really interesting way and you've obviously found some very interesting spaces in in in bogota that we see especially in the first half of the film yes my original plan was the amazon the amazonia but but then i i'm hooked and i was hooking bogota because of this huge massive mountain and architecture and you know the brick colors you know this and it's really shifting all the time it's almost like you are in communication or negotiation with nature you know you have to leave the house with umbrellas or anything because it could be sunny raining and big wind at the same day so so i love this communication and trying to express this in the future i'm just going to ask maybe a couple more sorry i have so many questions but uh and then i will take some from from uh from the audience um we have to talk about sound sound has always been such an important part of your work but you've really made it central here um wondering if you can talk about that it sounds like it's connected to this exploding head um syndrome that you experience um but i also wanted to hear you both talk about the extraordinary climax of the film which is basically just like a whole movie like in you know like a whole audio play essentially that that we experience at the end of the movie uh in the scene with jessica and hernan so um if you can talk a bit about sound and also that specifically that uh scene i'm very curious to hear until the experience of playing a scene like that too yeah yes for me with the best of this bang no with my head i try to you know connect and and i remember just lying there every morning just listening you know and then you you realize that you're listening to the birds you're listening to the car and i found that oh you know this this is a very cinematic experience just just be you know and so in bogota i just i'm you know unconsciously just be in certain you know this place that is almost like jessica you know collecting sound and image like a cinema and and i feel like um it's almost a meditative practice um and it's only available in this kind of setting you know in in the in the theater and collective but at the same time individual you know because even the same sound you approach it differently according to your own experience your own memories and i found it um you know i've been doing that in other fields but also this film in particular is the focus you know of this being aware yeah yeah and and it also relate to being aware of your internal vibration internal grief or happiness and and the key is is to accept that and to embrace that and you liberate it that's what i believe yeah yeah i think that's really what your frame does joe because the the combination of the the order of your frame the rigor of your frame and the width of it and and then also these very long takes because to step into the frame to speak as a as somebody inside that frame it's like sort of you know those massive bubbles that you see in the parks it's like the surface tension which is spread over this very wide piece of street or side of a hill or you know the bank of a river um and to feel the the as i say the rigor of that but then also the freedom within it so um those long takes mean that the rhythm uh not just the sound but actually the pulse of the film is in in the hands of of all the people in the frame including all the birds you know i mean when i see the film and i and i notice those little birds that suddenly appear you almost feel that joe arranged them um and he kind of did of course but they are you know they also contribute to the pulse and when you're in the frame as a human um uh bird you you're relating to all of that so when we came to that final scene because the film is in many ways a mystery story you know it starts with this question mark what is this sound and and we've talked a lot about about jessica being um simply a predicament but that's that's it that's her that's her brief what is this sound that's it i'm not gonna give up anything more about myself i'm just gonna you know walk around trying to find out what this sound is and and we knew that at the end we would find out um but of course in terms of the making of it we didn't have that sound it was entirely imaginary um and it was it was an extraordinary piece of work for all of us to set up the frame and to set up the atmosphere to kind of to know that eventually months later in a in a sound uh studio in uh in bangkok or that what we were proposing was going to be it was a strange piece of of sort of tightrope time travel and trust to know that what we were responding to would be in the future and so there it is and i we were right to trust but it was a sort of leap to imagine what would satisfy this question what what's what what are the answers that are actually going to put this thing to rest and so that's what we did we just played with with that joe can you talk about that designing that that soundscape so was that already clear in your mind as you were shooting no okay really it's about like she said building up you know and trying uh working with the sound designer i mean not only the bang but also other things that contribute to the the image that's we many times we have to change or extend the length right is short for because of the sound it is happen for all films of course but for this film it's particular you know we spend a lot of time trying you know the right and and then he continued to now because this morning i was still talking with neon about you know have you calibrated the sound here for this because this afternoon also i'm going to calibrate for for the premiere the the public premiere so so it's it's all about that because if we set a certain level it it's like this and then this is better for example because some birds appear and so so this dealing with sound is it's really interesting for me this film yeah um yeah and and it just feel like um i would say personal sure yeah yeah so tilde acting with this imagined sounds in your head like did you did you talk a lot about what these sounds would be or were you did you both have your ideas we did i mean we were always talking um and but no acting purely responding and responding to conversations that we had and suggestions that that joe made but at the same time each take and we did even the that last very long scene we did do i think three takes um which is quite a chunk of change you know um and i s and each one of course was a little bit different and responsive to that particular moment for example there's rain very for me very beautifully rain on the landscape that there is no rain visibly in but there were there was a take where there was a lot of wind and that meant something different because that could have translated as rain right but when there was no wind and the leaves were still then there was a sort of clear thoroughfare of understanding to the fact that there was rain which means there was this disconnect which means there was this kind of strange collision right um so it was quite i mean i suppose i'd never thought of this before but it was making that was a little bit like being in the sound uh studio and calibrating the sound we were kind of calibrating the shapes of ourselves um elkin and i a little bit like a sound engineer calibrates you know right yeah it was it was quite uh yeah it wasn't forensic which we loved yeah i remember like i whisper to you you know some words along the way and you grabs or not some and then take it in your own way and yeah because it's again like a whole take sure from the beginning to you know so this is um it's so amazing to to witness to the you know this transformation and for us to crew member somewhere crying after the cut and yeah uh which is one more question and then we'll open it up uh i does um fireflies the publisher has put out a book about a really beautiful book about the making of memoria um so it's unusual to have this book at the same time you know as we're seeing the film in some cases people might even see the book before the film and one thing that's striking is that there's so much else going on in in in terms of that you had been thinking about that we don't see in in the film and i'm wondering if this process of it sounds like you had ideas that you actually shot and and that are not in the film and i'm wondering if this process of reduction which i know is always part of your process was it more extreme here and how do you feel about having this you know sort of this constellation of stories um i actually love it because to me it's very much part of your project this idea that like the stories the film itself is you know continues to expand outside the frame and like they're all these sort of phantom limbs these you know stories almost that uh ghost that these other stories function as son of ghosts that haunt it in a way so i'm wondering how you feel about this this this um this project and also the the process of um reduction that seems like it was a big part of find arriving at the final film yes um this film is quite extreme that in that regards of reduction and so that means i have another kind of film in my head in my memory um but at a certain point you know in the editing me and lee in thailand we were like no we just need jessica to follow her just to to be aware and then to give space for people to also fill in through her you know their own takes or whatever yeah so so so if you want another film you have to buy this book he's like yeah are you doing anything with any of that footage or it's just gone forever i did one already a it's like a satellite video of uh jessica's sleeping you know the end of the day it's in our exhibition right now exhibition in france yeah yeah until then what's it like for you watching this film that's you know a sort of distilled version of everything you shot and talked about it's usually that way in the sense that uh you know there are always bits left out uh we're dealing with montage after all but but i didn't because of um uh situations um that we all know about i wasn't able to be um around for the edit and so i very often have seen several edits before so i sort of get used to the final cut of a film but i still no i think now i'm uh i've sort of closed my book on what the film is but of course the first time you see a film that is so edited as this one is there's so many sections and so many sort of curlicues that have gone um i you know you need a couple of screenings to really go oh oh right that's not there that's not there i now know what it is but i would say that i feel the presence of those other adventures i i mean maybe this is only me because i know that they exist but they do feel like they inform that you know there's a for example an adventure involving the character of hernan the older hernan played by elkin diaz at the end of the film um involving explosions and his life which i feel informs somehow that's still there in him there's there's still that sort of underbelly of those explosions in his performance and uh that's my luxury because i know i know what's not there um but those of you who'll go and buy the book you'll also know what's not there i think that's true i mean i saw the film read the book and then saw the film again i think there's actually kind of a productive confusion in terms of you know trying to remember which which is where yeah um okay we will take a few um audience questions another question about sound i guess specifically about um location sound um which is always very important to you and also how that um affected you tilde and your performance yeah it's about being there so we record you know we try to always use life sound and it's about the presence no presence of sound and that and also of course later it's more and more you know the acuteness of jessica you know when hernan showed her how to stop you know she he just refused to continue you know in the film you know because we go this and suddenly hey i'm stopped so jessica is confronted with okay what i'm gonna do i'm gonna carry the movie and so she just listened and that we of course add more and sound from thailand from the birds so it's mixture my my sound library and the memory yeah and in the end you know with revelation at the table you know we mix with post-production of your memory aching and also the sound from the first record sound music of human history you know from france you know that singing voice there yeah among others yeah did you want to address this sorry um no it was it was all welcome i mean it was it was it was invited to the table it was that in many ways the sound of everything else was uh was the sound we needed because jessica is is responding she's she doesn't say much you know she's a she's a she doesn't she doesn't offer much she certainly doesn't offer much by way of sound i mean one of the one of the things that i was so uh was such a rich experience for me is i i really love um in articulacy and particularly in in performance and in in narrative um the idea that we are all incredibly fluent and we can understand each other and we can communicate very easily is not my experience of life and i love to see the the the silence and the the tentativeness of humans particularly when we we see it in animals but i i think the animal part of us is really interesting for in the cinema particularly and so her she's out of her own language we we flag up immediately that she her spanish is really quite ropey that's very important she's not someone who's relying on sound herself and so the sound of the world around her is everything and it's interesting because we've talked about being lost but the truth is that joe's frame as i described and also his the atmosphere that he sets up with his frame and with the team is actually quite rigorous and and organized but the reason that it's organized is so that all of that is welcome so you know there's a backfiring bus or there's a you know there's someone shouting in the street or there's birds or there's dogs or the children doesn't matter it's all welcome that's what we're that's what that rigor that's what that vessel is set up to capture and so in terms of my experience in that frame that was it that was my task was just to go and experience all of this and to respond to it with no plan you know it wasn't like oh there's a dog barking that's not what i wanted i needed to be quiet no if the dog was barking then that's what was in the scene um and that's that's grace you know for my for my money that's a really graceful environment to work in i was actually curious how is your spanish both of you oh jessica's level absolutely as fluent as my tie question is about developing the language for for jessica um as she describes her condition i think how she speaks yeah about how she speaks about it yeah that that the scene i personally love that scene in the in the uh engineering in the sound engineer for me it's kind of cinema or you know to for jessica for any for an artist in any medium to say i've got this thing in my head i don't know how to describe it to you but i'm going to try that's it that's the project and and he says okay i'm up for it okay try again you didn't mean that okay try again what word could describe you know this is what i love rather like what i was saying about inarticulate there's this agreement that it's impossible you know there's this moment when she says which is the truest sentence of all you know i'm sure it sounds different in my head well everything we think sounds different in our own head you know everything we feel sounds and feels different in our heart it's getting it out there that's that's society and art and i i think that scene is really extraordinary in that sense and i particularly love that the solution comes by looking at established industrial movie like you know off the peg whatever it is you know punch hoodie stomach whatever yeah they they exist but they're useful you know that they actually they're able to build it out of using everything i think we can take a couple more so yeah over there for both of them the question is about um your your personal connection to nature how that informs your process it it's important because it's how i grew up in this town and i work in bangkok for 10 something years and i couldn't stand it i have to move to to this place in the north of thailand and now i'm a hermit it's there and just feel i don't know if you protect it and feel you know in fact surrounded by life you know and and and for me is i don't know i'm just grateful you know so i try to translate this into the film this idea yeah yeah i i um grew up in the country i'm a rural beast um and i live again in the country and i remember when we were shooting [Music] when we left bogota to go back to the to the country it was that sense of relief having said that like any country child i i i love cities i get very over excited in cities and uh and find the experience over stimulating uh to a degree which means i can never stay in a metropolis for very long i have to kind of go out and breathe and funnily enough i i noticed when i watched the film the other day there was something that we intended which actually bears true in the film which is that jessica's ability to speak spanish actually increases as the film goes on you know she gets into the country and then she's more fluent um and and and i felt that that was something quite true of my own experience that the city of bogota which is the city i've come to love it's uh you know it's it's it's pretty full-on in every way and to to then go out as we did last week when we went back to the village back to the hills you can breathe easier you can hear easier and you can you can just kind of take your place i mean what i love about about a rural environment is just how small one becomes and cities you know you're required to be bigger than i naturally feel so taking your place in the countries is my drug of choice okay one final question yeah we'll go to the back again yeah this question is about a scene with a dog and whether that was a a pivotal moment in terms of uh the characters bravery yes because the whole action was to try to connect you know the whole film so from many sources from you know young hernan he tried to deliver the sound for her and older ernan you know also delivering his silence his stop you know stopping and the dog also continue contribute to that you know just just to um to to to observe you know and to um you say to be brave and but then it left her you know so so all these instances is to allow uh jessica and the audience just to i don't know to to be immersed in different feelings of fear of curiosity and you know but yeah so she's a medium yeah and through all this life and in circumstances yeah and my sense was that the dog provides a sort of the dog's like a messenger almost in an egyptian sense you know and looks a little bit like one of those those dogs uh from ancient scrolls that that the dog is a brings a message of company somehow at that particular point it's almost like the dog leads her to the country uh and and provides this sort of dialogue and she is nervous of the dog but then she looks after the dog and the dog leaves her um i think it's a sort of pivot about company somehow the relationship having been solitary for so long the dog is a yeah yeah is some kind of fellow i'm afraid that's all the time we have for but i want to thank both of you so much for being here this morning thank you thank you thank you all for coming [Music] you

Channel: Film at Lincoln Center

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Keywords: Film at Lincoln Center

Id: 2C07slRRSVw

Length: 41min 9sec (2469 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 08 2021