

By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Breaking the Invisible Waves: Pen-ek Ratanaruang's new pic with Chris Doyle
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.”