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By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Posted Friday, January 20th, 2006 - Comments Off on Breaking the Invisible Waves: Pen-ek Ratanaruang's new pic with Chris Doyle
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Breaking the Invisible Waves: Pen-ek Ratanaruang's new pic with Chris Doyle

asano in invisiblewaves.jpg At Bangkok Post, Kong Rithdee interviews director Pen-ek Ratanaruang about Invisible Waves, his latest collaboration with actor Asano Tadanobu and cinematographer Christopher Doyle. “The jet-lagged trance the director will have to endure” on his way to Berlin and back, writes Rithdee, “is is perhaps the same feeling his audience will have while watching Invisible Waves, Pen-ek’s darkest film to date. Its stark, mouldy look is a cushion to the story full of noirish twists and guilt-plagued characters… Once again, Pen-ek’s leading man is a Japanese chap lost in Southeast Asia’s subconscious terrain. Asano plays Kyoji, a Macau-based chef who flees to Hong Kong and Phuket on a mysteriously deserted cruise ship after he’s murdered his Thai boss’s mistress. On the ship he meets a half-Thai, half-Korean woman… and runs into a jolly hitman sent to whack him. Kyoji first wanders the labyrinthine bowels of the ship, then gets stuck in an old Phuket hotel before his final destiny is decided once and for all.” Says Pen-ek, “I didn’t mean it as a continuation [of Last Life in the Universe], but… I’ve had the same team… back to work with me—Asano and Chris Doyle especially —we feel like we’ve already started something together and we should go on doing it… I thought we all could improve what we did in our previous effort…. Everything I do is inevitably an experiment… I have no intention of setting myself on a course to making darker pictures. Many depressing things happened to me around the time I tried to get this movie made. I had the script ready, but the process of financing it and trying to get all the diverse elements together was so complicated. My love life, too, wasn’t exactly satisfying to say the least! I guess all these things were channelled into the tone of the movie. I didn’t mean to make a dark film, but if it turns out to be one, then that’s what it is… It’s a story of self-punishment. I was thinking a lot about guilt, maybe because I felt guilty all the time. As a director, you’re trained to be selfish person, since everybody has the job of satisfying your demands – to give you the script you need, the location you want, the image you have in your head. But at a certain point, I felt wrong about it all. And then I realised I was shouldering all this guilt. Perhaps the story in the film, about this man who feels guilty for the crime he’s forced to commit, says something about my state of mind too…. I’ve been travelling a lot and I have a lot of friends in different countries who speak different languages. When my film is shown in Thailand, there are people who like it and who don’t like it. When my film is shown in, say, Bolivia and Somalia, there are people who like it and who don’t like it. I’ve had less belief in race or nationality, in the colour of your eyes or the language you speak. So, for me it’s easier to classify humankind not according to countries but to taste, and more than ever people with the same taste in movies, music or books feel they belong to the same race.”

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon