Mouly
Surya’s latest genre smash hit, Marlina
the Murderer in Four Acts, was screened last month in Singapore as part of
the 28th edition of the Singapore International Film Festival. A
work that resists easy classification, SINdie had the privilege to catch Mouly
and her effusive full-bodied laughter outside of her busy schedule for a
quick-fire interview.
Zhihao:
I notice a lot of the movie was shot at 90 degrees. It was your main visual
motif. Can you share more about this?
Mouly:
This has to do with my cinematographer whom I have been working with since my
first film. At the early stage, I decided that we don’t want any camera
movement for the film and we wanted to have some kind of a, how do I explain
this…...We decided very early we wanted to make a Western, but we were not sure
what kind of a Western. Aside from the genre elements, we also wanted to have
other elements in it. The flat angle was one of it, perhaps to maintain a
certain formality? Like Ozu? To look at it in a very objective way. That’s the
brief I gave the cinematographer.
Z:
So, you are shot a very personal revenge tale from a distance?
M:
Marlina is kind of mysterious. Somehow i find her mysterious, when we look at
the character. When someone is labelled a hero, you tend to look at them from a
distance. As opposed to people like ourselves who are, haha, not heroes. In
this particular character, Marlina, she is the kind of hero that is mysterious.
You cannot guess what she is going to do next. So I kind of like that.
Even
ourselves, when we try to do something very life changing, you often find
yourself simply doing it instead of thinking a lot about doing it. So you know,
from her point of view, everything may not make sense, but from audience point
of view, they can see everything objectively. Of course, we are not from the
village, we are city dwellers. So this is some kind of folklore, something you
see on stage.
Z:
What was the process of getting the actress into the mental space of the
character while still maintaining the distance? How do you create the
environment for the actress to act out some of the more difficult scenes in the
film?
M:
We chose them for the reason. I am not the kind of director that likes to
control the scene a lot. We did not stereotypically cast her in that kind of
role. But she has that kind of strength and yet vulnerability as well. I have
those images in my head but I do not tell my actors those images, I just
explain their motivations, if they need it. This is how I usually direct
actors. I put them in certain places. e.g. when Markus first came into the
house, you would expect me to have that kind of blocking... face to face, she
would serve him. But the way I chose to just put them in the scene and tell
them to sit in certain way, and by doing that , they will find a natural way of
delivering the scene.
Z:
So your direction comes from the blocking.
M:
You see, in acting it is hard to tell people the way to do certain things. They
are artists, they have their own imagination, their way of doing certain
things. So that’s how I do it.
Z: So you give your actors more space to move because you hold the camera so long and so wide, they have a lot of space to explore the space and the characters.
M:
Yea, I mean from my previous films, I realise too much direction can be too
much. It can be very constricting. I kind of like my shots long, but I don’t
actually use all of them. By doing that, they have freedom to explore their
lines and spaces.
Z:
Was the approach the same for the child actor?
M:
She is not trained. Not just her, but for Novi, it is not her first time acting
as well. I was giving her more directions than the rest of them, but the
direction is not just tell her what to do but also giving her confidence
because she was acting against experienced actors. But for the
little girl, I was basically concentrating on making her feel comfortable,
being herself and being as natural as possible. It’s hard for a non-actor to
feel comfortable on set, so that’s the most important thing.
Z:
Were her all lines scripted?
M: It
was totally scripted. But how to make it seem as it came out naturally right?
She is a very smart girl, it’s just that she has not acted before. Like right
now, i can feel someone is taking a picture of me. Hahaha. (turns to
photographer) Sorry i do not mean to
pick on you. (pause) It makes you act in a certain way. You want her to forget
that we are recording her actions.
Z:
Can you talk about all the dead bodies in the film? There was one in the living
room that starts out the film?
M:
It’s actually the village culture. It’s the culture of the people at Sumba, we
have several of these things in Indonesia in several islands. Sumba is one of
them. They usually keep the body because the burial ceremony costs a lot. So
they preserve the body first until they can find enough money to finance the
burial and this usually takes years. I have seen one that has been there for 30
years. And they are very particular about the funeral. You can google.
Z:
Zumba?
M:
It’s pronounced like Zumba the dance but with an S. (laughs) I thought it would be
interesting to showcase people in the village living very closely and very
naturally alongside death in a way. I mean when I went there, in the many
villages, they basically bury the dead in front of the houses. The cemetery is
literally right in front of the house. It is just in the city that this is
separate. But in the village, you live alongside them. If you have a cemetery
next to your side, it is not a scary thing. It is your family! I also wanted to
put that culture on screen.
Z: I
found the setting of the film interesting. Because the world that you created
felt like it was coming out from the past, like from a book, very mythological,
but then there was also the cell phone.
M:
That’s the word I was looking for earlier - mythological! (pause) What we wanted to show in this film was that this is a modern world. I think
you would think it is set in 1920s or something and then suddenly your phone
rings. I think that is what is unique about this world. The contrast. You have
a phone but things are still very primal in this island.
It’s
like the Japanese , they are very high-technology but also very traditional. It
was that contrast that I wanted to show. There
was one time, we were suddenly invited to this party, not really a party but a
celebration of a king but the king is like wearing shorts and has tattoos.
Unlike the Thai king; the king of a village. So they just slaughtered a pig.
Suddenly he is like looking at his smartphone and flicking the screen. And the
guy next to him was showing him the heart of a chicken or pig. I think it was
to show him something about the future, like a prophecy. And throughout that,
he was still holding his phone in his hand and I really wanted to have that in
my film.
Z:
The chapters in your film. I feel like giving each chapter a title creates an
expectation of what will unfold.
M:
The story is actually from Garin Nugruho. When I received it, it was all in
chapters. And I kind of saw it like a stage thing. Marlina the Murderer sounds
like a very gory film, but Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts adds a lot of
drama to it, so that was why I did it. And then to put it into four acts, I
thought it would be interesting. But yeah I titled it to give the audience
something to expect, even with the film title, you enter the film waiting for
Marlina to actually kill someone. I
wanted to set those expectations and play with these expectations. Also, the
language matters. Actually the first acts title when translated in English
reads ‘The Robbery in Half an Hour’ which sounds strange.
Z:
My last question is where you think you film sits in relation to Indonesian
cinema as this film has a very uniquely female voice.
M:
Yeah I think it is very new. The thing that was very hard when I tried to pitch
this project was that nobody has seen anything like this in Indonesia. When we
usually do rural area films, we are very authentic about it. We don’t usually
put genre on top of it. But then I wanted to make this film more accessible so
that international audience, so you don't feel too distant. I wanted to give it
some kind of familiarity to the audience. So that was my intention. I did not
intend to make a new sub-genre but suddenly it was called that. This is like a
Feminist-Western set in Indonesia. But then it was quite peculiar, I kind of
liked how it sounded at first when the film was done, and it went further than
I thought it would go. I don’t really know, I am kind of excited about how it
will affect our industry, our cinema industry, what kind of films we are going
to do next. But yeah, the audience in Indonesia said “wow, I have never seen
Indonesian cinema made this way”, even though my previous films were not like
that. I am pretty excited, and was also quite proud of it. Who knows... I don’t
want to compare my films to others in Indonesia because they are very different
films with very different strengths, but yeah I think maybe if this was a way
for Marlina to be remembered by the audience so be it.
Interview by Koh Zhihao
