SOLIDS BY THE SEASHORE

TRANSCRIPT / WRITTEN VERSION

SOME OF THE RESPONSES FROM THE INTERVIEWEE HAVE BEEN EDITED AND SHORTENED FOR CLARITY.

SOLIDS BY THE SEASHORE Q&A RECORDED ON 17/02/2024

IN CONVERSATION WITH DIRECTOR PATIPARN BOONTARIG (PB) AND TARA BRADY (TB), FILM CRITIC

TB: I’m delighted to welcome today Patiparn Boontarig, the director of SOLIDS BY THE SEASHORE on behalf of the East Asia Film Festival Ireland. Congratulations on the film! It’s really wonderful, and it’s such a lovely textured film. Every time you think you know what you’re watching, you think it’s something about the environment, you think it’s a romance, and then it goes somewhere else. So it must have been quite an adventure, even at the level of the screenplay to write. Can you take me through the screenwriting process and trying to work all those elements together?

PB: Yes. Firstly, thank you for presenting my film. I’m really glad that my film is being screened here. In terms of the screenwriting process, this film developed over seven years, starting in 2016, when I attended the film lab in Singapore and started developing the script. But the inspiration comes before that, about 12 years ago, when I made a documentary about the seawall. At the time, the seawall was not a good construction, it was destroying the environment and the mayor of the city tried to protect and fight the project. After the documentary was made, the mayor of the city got shot…because he has fought for this project. That’s the inspiration. I kept it in mind for a long time, thinking about the structure (the seawall)…as a metaphor, like the structure of the seawall is not different from our human life. Sometimes we build a wall, not a physical wall, but something in our heart, in our mind, that blocks something, to protect something, but it actually causes more erosion to ourselves. I started developing this into a script in 2016, then I got a co-writer and we worked together. His name is Kario (Kalil Pitsuwan). He is a Muslim and knows about the beliefs of Islamic culture…The area (where the film is shot) is a province in the deep south of Thailand where the majority of the population is Muslim. Thailand is known as a Buddhist country and Muslims are in the minority. When we started developing the script together, I spoke with the screenwriter about the seawall, and the seawall as a metaphor.

TB: I was going to ask you about that. I know that there is the same sex marriage bill on the table at the moment in Thailand. But I’m guessing that it’s still quite controversial to make a film with LGBTQ themes in it, particularly when one part of the romance in the film is a young Muslim woman. 

PB: Yes, it is. LGBTQ community is very welcome in Thailand, but in the deep south where the Muslim community is, people are still very conservative…and it’s prohibited in the religion. It’s forbidden by religious beliefs. So it’s a challenging and sensitive issue. We gave a lot of thoughts to it. Because the main protagonist is a real Muslim, we talked about this a lot with my co-writer and the protagonist, to try and balance things, to raise the issue without criticising, and not to make the film too safe or too comfortable. We tried to find the middle line and we tried to walk that line. That’s what we tried to do.

TB: Yes. You mentioned about the seawall being a kind of metaphor for the love story. And so much of the story is rooted in a sense of place and the seascape, and the landscape. So, tell me about your location, because it’s very beautiful, and so beautifully shot by your cinematographer as well.  

PB: The film location is a beach in Songkhla, a southern province in Thailand’s Deep South where the majority of the community is Muslim, while normally in Thailand the majority is Buddhist. This beach city in this province has many cultures because it is a city between two parts (of Thailand). Thai people who watch the film will know that there are two languages spoken in the film, one is another dialect from the south. In the group of friends, they often switch languages. People speak different languages and switch languages very naturally. So everything in the film tries to be in the middle, like the location between the south and central part of Thailand. Yes the city has beautiful beaches, but there are constructions, both seawalls and sandbags, many ‘solid structures’. The city works like a model for the whole country. After it, the government built more and more solid structures like that in other provinces. Because this place has a wide variety of ‘solid structures’, it was a good place to shoot the film. So we decided to pick this location.

TB: Yes. Tell me about your two main characters and the cast. And talk to me about the casting process. Did you do a chemistry test between them or did you cast them separately, or how did you know they were going to work so well together?

PB: First we held an audition and selected the main character, the Muslim girl, Shati (played by Ilada Pitsuwan). She’s a news reporter but she applied for the audition. When we tested her in front of the camera, everyone – me, my producer and the team – agreed that she should play the character. It was not easy to find a Muslim girl for that role because, as I explained earlier, it’s quite a sensitive subject. At first, she (Ilada Pitsuwan) was not confident to play in the film and I had to talk with her. I told her not to worry about the script, that we would develop it together in a way that she will be okay with it. After that, she agreed to be in the film, to play the main protagonist. For the casting of the artist girl, we did the audition with Ilada Pitsuwan, the Muslim girl there. We did many tests with the other main character (Fon), to test the chemistry, until we found the right person to play the character of Fon. Ilada Pitsuwan was the one who chose based on her feelings, the person she felt comfortable with, not in a romantic way but in a friendship way, who could be her friend. And they (Ilada Pitsuwan and Rawipa Srisanguan) matched right together at the audition.

TB: Tell me about the art in the movie, the art that we see and the art that we see being created. 

PB: About the artworks, my producer invited real artists from Thailand. In fact, there are six artists and a curator to make this exhibition. We invited them, and the way I worked with them, was that I let them make their own artworks. I took them to the seawalls and they met the activists who are fighting against the seawalls so they can give information to the artists about the seawalls, how those constructions work. They came and stepped on the seawalls for real. I just let them experienced this and make the artworks they wanted to make. I didn’t interfere or interrupt with the process. Once they had an idea of what the artworks would be, I included them in the script. The script wasn’t finished, that’s what I told my team right from the beginning. It’s like as if I have a big canvas of a painting. I have brushed and painted some parts of it but I haven’t painted the whole picture. I have a draft of the whole picture and I ask them to paint it, giving them the brushes. They can paint whatever they like, but in the same direction, with the same goal. They can paint in their own way. That’s how I communicated with my team. At first, they were a bit worried, like, ‘Are you sure we can do anything we want, that your film will work ok this way?’ They were worried, but they did what they felt and I put it into the film. When the film was finished and the artists came to watch it, they were really happy to see their works.

TB: That’s a really great kind of process. It sounds really exciting.

PB: I’d like to add one more thing. After shooting the exhibition scene, we actually held the exhibition in real for a month. 

TB: Wow, that’s very cool! I was actually going to ask you about the visual design of the film, in particular the way the film moves from the kind of macroscopic, these kind of big horizons and landscapes into the microscopic. Was that always kind of part of your plan? Was that always how the movie looked in your head?

PB: We had some initial ideas, we were going to talk about a small part of the world, how it relates to the universe, to something that big. Because at the beginning of the world, maybe the start of the universe was like emptiness, something like that…And we are a very small part of this universe, this world, something like that…So yes, first we had a concept then… Do you mean the zoom into the sand?

TB: Yes

PB: The visual for that scene came up during the editing process. We had the idea, but we tried to figure out how to put it in the film. I mean, the film is more about feelings and emotions. It’s not about the content. It’s something that is in the character’s head. So it needed something to explore that, to give the audience the experience to feel something like that. I also wanted to connect about a very small part of the world…if you look at the surface of the sand it looks like that, but actually inside, very deep down, it’s maybe something like crystal and it looks beautiful. Maybe like every human is beautiful…even if you don’t touch them from the outside, something like that…It’s also so that the audience can have an idea, or think about it.

TB: You have that lovely kind of swerve into magic realism towards the end that’s connected with the grandmother’s stories. And I wonder what the inspiration for those stories, where did they come from?

PB: It is also a part that I wanted audiences to really experience. Because as I found from listening to audiences in many countries where my film has been screened, everyone has their own interpretation. They have their own interpretation of the material, like the ending of the film with the two possible endings…something like that. They can have their own interpretation. But from the beginning, before letting the audience think and interpret in their own way, there’s the part with… it’s like the bible in Islamic culture. It talks about a city where people are doing something wrong, like a sinful city. They have LGBTQ people in the city, and God caused a meteor to burn down the city…. Actually I don’t want it to be that clear, I want it to be something else like the judgement day, where what they do is to trigger something, and something happens from up there…something falling down. It can be many things, like the thing that make the multi-world happens after that…So actually for the ending part, I’m really interested to listen to the audiences’ thoughts… 

TB: Oh, I was wondering what was the strangest interpretation of the ending that you’ve heard when people have come up to you and had a conversation with you?… There must be a huge range of different sort of interpretations of it. And I’m just wondering if you’ve had anyone come up with a very strange version, their own very strange version of it. 

PB: At a Q&A session, one person told me that she felt really sad that in the end (Shati) is with the man. She was really convinced that Shati is with the man. Then another person asked a question, but before he asked it, he told this first person that he didn’t think that was the end (that Shati is with the man). So everyone has their own interpretation. But why they are convinced, I think it’s because everyone has a different experience and that makes them really sure…convinced that it ends this way. Something they are reflecting back to themselves, like a mirror.

TB: I was wondering, I think it’s twenty years, maybe a little more than twenty years, since Apichatpong Weerasethakul won at Cannes with Tropical Malady (Sud pralad, 2004), and it seems to have taken a little bit of time, certainly from a European perspective, for independent Thai cinema to make its way over here. I mean, certainly we are starting to see films now like, Anatomy of Time (Wela, 2021) or Manta Ray (Kraben rahu, 2018), both of which you worked on as an assistant director. I was wondering, does it fell like there’s a movement happening in Thai cinema?Does it feel like there is wave happening in Thai cinema, and do you feel like common cause with other filmmakers there?

PB: Many years ago, we didn’t have much support form the government for independent filmmakers. It was very hard for filmmakers to make films… and to go abroad to apply to film labs and funding for grants. But right now, I think the government is trying to bring back some funding and support for filmmakers. I hope it gets better. For now, I think the good thing is that there is a greater variety of films with different genres… A film like mine is different from other independent films. I hope it will show people that cinema can be many things…and not to have to follow rules…that you can be yourself and make the film that you believe in. That’s what I hope for young film directors, like the new ones, to make something interesting in the future.

TB: Listen, thank you very much for talking to me today. It’s been really, really interesting. And congratulations again on your film. It’s just magical. It’s just wonderful to watch.

PB: Oh, thank you so much!

END