Q & A of Headshot with Director Pen-ek Ratanaruang, Producer Pawas Sawatchaiyamet, Producer Raymond Phathanavirangoon (unfortunately he had to leave the venue during the Q&A), Actor Nopachai Jayanama and Actress Celine Horwang took place at TOHO Cinemas Screen 6 on Oct. 25 (Tue) with Competition Programming Director Yoshi Yatabe as the MC.
The film is about a cop who becomes a hit man whose conscience is turned upside down because of the bullet which he took in the head.
*The audience sent him the deepest sympathy for the victims of the flood disaster that recently happened in Thailand and Director Pen-ek Ratanaruang thanked for the sympathy during the Q & A Session.
Q: I would like to ask Director Pen-ek Ratanaruang. Your leading role gets shot in the head and his vision turns upside down after that. Is this idea based on some sort of the case that took place in the past or was it an idea that flashed in your head?
Director Pen-ek Ratanaruang: It’s not my idea because the film is based on a novel but when we were doing a research for a script development, we heard that there was a person in Thailand, 63 of age, who reads and writes upside down but he doesn’t see things upside down.
Q: This must be my misunderstanding so allow me to confirm. There’s lot of violence and some one shooting another in the film but it seems that it was not shown directly. Sometimes the violence was hidden behind something or was not directly shown in the picture. Was that intended?
Director: Yes. It is intentional. Our intention was to make a violence look like you were watching the real thing. When you are looking at the people shooting each other, sometimes you don’t see many things. Usually things happen very fast and finishes very fast. In this film, when someone is being killed or is killing, it happens in 3 seconds.
We talked to people that do this kind of thing for a living and learned that most films are overly dramatized. Especially when you are a hit man who is assigned to kill some one, the target is usually not prepared. So it is impossible to have John Woo kind of scene in reality where the shooting takes 5 minutes and everything is in slow motion. Because the target is a normal guy and he is not even a fighter.
Q: Where did you get an idea of making this book into a movie and what specifically did you do make it into a film?
Director: The writer of the novel is a friend of us. He’s been writing many novels and every time he wrote a new one, he signs it and sends it to me. I don’t have much time to read them but I like this novel because of its title. In our language, the title of the film is Rain Falling Up To Sky. I thought that the title was interesting, so I read it and the few pages caught my interest and I knew it was good for a movie. So I wrote a treatment from the book and made it into the film. Even though the writer was our friend we had to pay. I thought we could just buy him a beer instead but he didn’t drink so we had to give him cash instead.
Q: Has the film been released in the theaters in Thailand?
Director: Originally, we were going to release the film next week after winning some prize here but because of the flood disaster, the Cinemas are asking us to move the release forward because no body would come out from their houses.
Q: I understand your film is hardboiled but I felt that it had a different mood compared to French noir films or works of Katsuhiko Ishii from Japan. I thought that the leading character had a wonderful perception of good and the bad and I really was impressed but who killed Tul in the end, was it Rin?
Director: I was going to say in the beginning of the Q & A that if any body said who killed the monk in the end, the person would be escorted out of the cinema. I don’t know who killed Tul.
Q: Mr. Nopachai, the final scene was very impressive. We don’t know who killed Tul but what kind of direction did the director give you and did he give you any instructions for that last scene?
Actor Nopachai Jayanama: By the time when we got to shoot that scene, the director was no longer directing anymore. Half way through the film, I knew how this character was feeling. So all director had to tell me at the end was to hold my breath and stop moving. My performance was a result of reading the script together with the director and doing the rehearsals.
Q: The film is shot in digital and the scenes of nature and the expressions of actors and the actresses are very nicely expressed and like referred symbolically in the title of the novel, Rain Falling Up To Sky, were your intentions for choosing digital was to capture every drop of that rain?
Director: Well, we shot in digital because it was cheaper than film. Hopefully we would like to continue shooting film in future and we realized that we can’t escape from not using the digital. In fact we started shooting with the Red from our previous movie. We made a lot of mistakes in the previous film, but this time we made fewer mistakes. And the interesting thing is that most of night scenes, in the forest or in the factory where he was tortured, were shot during the daytime around one pm. By using the digital we could achieve broader results by manipulating it in the post production.
Q: Ms. Celine, as the director says that this film was homage to film noir and as femme fatale of this film, playing the role must have been a very complex one, how did you feel acting the role?
Actress Celine Horwang: Actually when we were working in the workshop, the director told me not to think that I was manipulating Tul. Don’t act twice, don’t know it before you act and just say the lines making it very emotionless. So when I was playing the part, I tried not to think that I was his sister.
