'You don't have to understand everything': Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Apichatpong Weerasethakul's surreal new film was this year's surprise Palme D'Or winner. The Thai auteur talks to Steve Rose about never playing it straight
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Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Palme D'Or-winning film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Apichatpong Weerasethakul has been asked to explain himself a lot in recent months. One reason is that his new film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, won the Palme D'Or at the Cannes film festival this May, surprising most of the world's critics; the other is that it's about the least straightforward movie to have done so in living memory – an episodic, non-linear, open-ended head-scratcher. So for the past year, touring the world's film festivals – Toronto, Chicago, Rio de Janeiro, New York, Sitges, and, most recently, London – Thailand's auteur of the moment has been in a Groundhog Day of perplexed questioning. Why is your film so slow? Why the sex scene between the princess and the catfish? Is the runaway buffalo really Uncle Boonmee? Is the cave a metaphor, or just a cave? Do you believe in reincarnation? What the hell does it all mean, Mr Weerasethakul?

  1. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
  2. Production year: 2010
  3. Countries: France, Germany, Rest of the world, Spain, Thailand, UK
  4. Cert (UK): 12A
  5. Runtime: 113 mins
  6. Directors: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
  7. Cast: Jeerasak Kulhong, Jenjira Pongpas, Natthakarn Aphaiwong, Sakda Kaewbuadee, Thanapat Saisaymar
  8. More on this film

"But that's life, no?" says Weerasethakul. He is a delicate, softly spoken man. "Sometimes you don't need to understand everything to appreciate a certain beauty. And I think the film operates in the same way. It's like tapping into someone's mind. The thinking pattern is quite random, jumping here and there like a monkey."

Weerasethakul possesses an aura of gentle, zen-like calm that's all of a piece his films. Far from being a showy, cryptic mind-melter, Uncle Boonmee is a hypnotic, sensual, rapturous dream of a movie. It doesn't so much confront western notions of reality as casually disregard them. Boundaries dissolve between the living and the dead, the past and the present, man and nature, the strange and the everyday. Before you know it, it becomes perfectly natural to see Uncle Boonmee chatting on the verandah with the ghost of his wife and their long-lost son, who turns up looking like Chewbacca with glowing red eyes – the result of having mated with a "monkey spirit". "Why did you grow hair so long?" his translucent mother asks him matter of factly.

Weerasethakul prefers not to explain anything about the film. "This is open cinema," he says. "I have my own take, but sometimes that spoils the audience's imagination. I can say, in short, it's a movie about a dying man. It talks about death and at the same time life and dreams, and also the memory of how I grew up with this landscape."

The landscape in question is northeast Thailand, close to where Weerasethakul grew up. In 2008, he was commissioned by the cutting-edge London-based animation outfit Animate to create a multimedia project called Primitive, which centred on a village called Nabua. This peaceful place was once the centre of violent clashes between government forces and communist forces. Uncle Boonmee was an offshoot of Primitive, partly inspired by a book he chanced upon about a real-life man who really did claim to be able to recall his past lives. But other memories are folded into the story: Weerasethakul's own father, who died of kidney failure; the area's violent history; the ape creature and the stylised jungle settings that hark back to Thai movies and comic books of his childhood – elements of a rapidly disappearing landscape. "I want to treasure them and say goodbye to them, because they are dying, like Uncle Boonmee."

The collision between spirituality and modernity in his films is easy to find in today's Thailand, says Weerasethakul. He cites the street protests that gripped Bangkok earlier this year. Crowds were campaigning for modern democratic reforms, but one of their actions was to draw their own blood, mix it together and daub the ministers' gates with it. "This kind of very primitive, animist belief is still ingrained in daily life. When we shoot a film, we make a ritual offering of food to Ganetra, the god of arts. Everybody does it.

"Also, when people in the film industry feel they're having bad luck, they make offerings of black-coloured food to the god of darkness, because we associate darkness with cinema. But at the same time, you see new Tescos springing up everywhere."

Weerasethakul has had his own run-ins with the Thai authorities over the years. The homosexual content of his work seems to be acceptable, but in 2007 the censorship board demanded he remove scenes from his movie Syndromes and a Century depicting doctors drinking and kissing, and Buddhist monks playing with a remote-controlled UFO. Weerasethakul refused, and instead jointly founded the Free Thai Cinema movement, which called for greater artistic freedom. In one interview, a culture ministry official responded: "Nobody goes to see films by Apichatpong. Thai people want to see comedy. We like a laugh."

But the campaign appears to have had some impact. In Uncle Boonmee, a monk changes out of his robes to go to a karaoke bar, but the film has had no problems with the censors. "That's the magic of Cannes," Weerasethakul says. "When I won, it was a very dark time for Thailand, so good news like this was embraced. It became a diversion for people emotionally, but also for the government." Contrary to the minister's put-downs, the film was a commercial success, and is the country's official submission for this year's best foreign film Oscar.

It would be a mistake to cordon off Weerasethakul in the ghetto of "world cinema", though. For one thing, he learned film-making in the US. The son of two doctors, he first studied architecture in Thailand as a fallback position, but while doing a masters at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he became absorbed by the avant-garde work of Andy Warhol, Bruce Baillie, Maya Deren and the like. There was no going back. "After that, I said to myself, 'OK, I want to make films in black and white, on 16mm, for the rest of my life,'" he laughs. "It's a shame that when I went back to Thailand, there were no laboratories to print 16mm film."

From then on, technological issues aside, Weerasethakul's career has seen a sure, steady ascent up the international scale. Both his feature debut, Blissfully Yours, and its followup, Tropical Malady, also won awards at Cannes. His next project involves his heroine, Tilda Swinton. It concerns the Mekong river, he explains, and will address the relationship between man and water, the catastrophic flooding which is blamed on Chinese dams and diseases spread by industrial-scale pig farming. None of which particularly brings to mind Tilda Swinton. "It's definitely not going to be a film that will just have a foreign movie star for the sake of it. It's going to be an exchange of ideas, of images, of … I don't know. It's like a game for me: the river, the pigs, and Tilda Swinton." He laughs at how absurd it sounds when he says it, but it's less crazy than princesses having sex with catfish.

Not everyone adores Weerasethakul's jumping-monkey logic. Alongside the critical adulation, his films are frequently accused of being wilfully confusing, impenetrable, pointless and boring – one critic renamed Uncle Boonmee "Uncle bong hit". Weerasethakul isn't bothered in the slightest: "I always say a film should have a personality. And like a person, if he or she is very popular, I would feel very suspicious. Maybe my good film is not your good film. It's very subjective. But if I make a film that divides the audience, I feel like that's a certain level of success. Film should divide people. "

The danger with Weerasethakul is that the public stays on the other side of the divide to the adoring critics. Uncle Boonmee is unlikely to give Harry Potter a run for its money at the UK box office, but in broader terms, it's about time someone shook things up. Even Godard's dictum that a film should have a beginning, a middle and an end, "but not necessarily in that order" is now half a century old. With Weerasethakul's boundary-dissolving films, the very idea of narrative beginnings and ends becomes redundant. It's not spoiling a great deal to disclose that Uncle Boonmee ends with two sets of the same characters in one room – as if parallel universes have accidentally collided, or time has split into two. Furthermore, these are characters who have appeared in his previous films – a self-referential flourish that casts a different light on his other works. Like any good avant-garde film-maker, he's ignoring the rules and finding new possibilities – and in years to come, his methods will doubtless be absorbed by the mainstream, and future generations wonder how we failed to understand what he was doing.

"For me, film-making is still young," he says. "It still has room to grow, and now it's still attached to other kinds of art, like literature, or theatre. I'm not saying I'm trying to create some revolutionary style, but each film has its own language – the movie tells you how it wants to be told. But we tend to stick to very few modes of expression."

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is out next week

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