MEMORIES, MYSTERIES

from an interview with Apichatpong Weerasethakul by Tony Rayns (Bangkok, July 2006)

The film's English title is rather allusive. 'Syndromes' suggests a concern with human behavior, while 'a Century' suggests a concern with time. Is that how you saw it yourself?

Yes, this is the third film in which I've used the structure to explore dualities, and I think it will be the last. The word 'Syndromes' could apply equally to Blissfully Yours or Tropical Malady : it does refer to human behavior, such as the way we fall in love. I don't intend the word to have negative connotations; if falling in love is a kind of sickness, it's one for which we all show symptoms. 'Century' for me conveys the sense of moving forward. A century is more or less the same as a lifetime. I'm interested in the ways things change over time, and in the ways they don't change. It seems to me that human affairs remain fairly constant.

Blissfully Yours was, for me, a film about cinema and the way I see it. Tropical Malady is more directly personal: it's about me. And this film is about my parents. I feel that I'm achieving some kind of closure with this film, and the word 'Century' somehow chimes with that.

Here the main duality is female/male ...

Yes, the first half is for my mother and the second for my father. The occasional repetitions reflect my belief in reincarnation: people do repeat things. I probably started out with larger dualities in mind - such as day/night, masculine/feminine - but the contrasts aren't so stark in the finished film. It's just my mother and father.

The first half has a more 'period' feel than the second, but you haven't really tried to recreate the environment in which you grew up. You didn't want period detail?

The town where I grew up is Khon Kaen (it's in the north-east of Thailand, near Laos); it's where my father died, and my mother still lives there. I went back there to look for locations, but the landscapes and hospital buildings that I remember simply don't exist any more. So even if I'd wanted to recreate the past, it would not have been possible. We shot the film in various places that evoked my childhood memories, but they're basically contemporary. The first half of the film, centered on my mother, is less contemporary than the second, but that's because places in Thailand do look more old-fashioned when you leave Bangkok.

Memory is the central impulse in your film-making?

It may well be the only impulse! Everything is stored in our memory, and it's in the nature of film to preserve things ... But I've never set out to recreate my memories exactly. The mind doesn't work like a camera. The pleasure for me is not in remembering exactly but in recapturing the feeling of the memory - and in blending that with the present. That's been especially true in this film. In Tropical Malady I was following a full script and trying to get things 'right'. But this film is not really about me, and so (thanks to the generosity of my producers, who never objected) I had the freedom to build it bit by bit, day by day. We shot the first half first, then took a break and rough-cut the footage before shooting the second half. That helped very much to shape the rhythms in the second half, some of the dialogue and so on. We changed a lot in the second half in response to places we found while scouting for locations and little things that happened during the shoot. For example, the room full of prosthetic limbs was something we came across by chance, while scouting many hospitals. And the idea that the woman doctor would hide liquor in one of the prosthetic limbs was spontaneous, too. It came into the film at most a few days before we shot it.

So how many of the incidents and details in the film are based on memories and how many on present-day accidents of discovery?

It's impossible to say exactly. Take the interview scene which opens both halves of the film. The decision to use psychological-test questions in the interview came from the actress we cast: she may work in a toll-booth, but she has a Master's degree in Psychology. The idea emerged in the workshops we did before shooting. But the question about what "DDT" stands for comes directly from something my father told me. It was a question he was asked by a teacher, and the answer in the film is the one he gave.

The behavior of the Buddhist monks reflects exactly what I remember seeing in my father's clinic. Monks are not supposed to do things like play guitar, but such things do happen. I have a childhood memory of seeing monks in my hometown, walking near their temple, and thinking that they didn't look like monks at all. And Sakda told me that when he was a monk, he behaved no differently from the way he did normally. The monk he plays in this film is of course a continuation of his role in Tropical Malady . In my original script, he changed into a tiger at night!

The idea of the singing dentist came from someone I met when I went back to Khon Kaen to receive an award from my old university. One alumnus there was a dentist and he had released an album of songs about dental health. I thought I'd put that in the film, but when the time came to shoot, the guy wasn't available. So I cast someone else as the dentist. Quite a few of the other characters and incidents in the film also came from chance encounters during the research period: finding a beautiful man or woman and deciding to put them in the film.

What were the workshops you mentioned?

For me, making a film is a welcome excuse to get out of Bangkok. In this case, we took the main actors to Hua Hin to get them comfortable with each other. We just talked together and they did some on-camera interviews on video. Nobody except Sakda had ever really acted before, and so Sakda became a kind of acting coach to the others.

What does the tree orchid mean to you?

It's a beautiful parasite, and a symbol of fertility. Its seeds are blown by the wind and it attaches itself to the host it lands on. It's random and mysterious, like the film itself. As I was growing up, my mother had a huge garden of orchids. And she shot home movies of the family, so maybe there's more than one association there for me.

And the sun imagery?

The Thai title means "Light of the Century". The first half of the film is a kind of portrait of the sun, or an account of the way we depend on the sun for our survival. The second half of the film is dominated by artificial light. But the chakra healing in the second half is also all about the sun: it's a way of channeling the sun's power into the body.

Finally, what are the bronze sculptures seen in the second half of the film?

They are important figures in the development of modern Thai medicine. Including the sculptures in the film was a way of paying respect to them. In one sense, the film is a tribute to those who passed on this century to us.