Seventeen years, to be exact. During which time, Swinton won an Oscar for her role in Michael Clayton and Weerasethakul – or ‘Joe’, as he’s been known ever since he studied at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago in the mid-Nineties – claimed Cannes’ Palme d’Or for 2010’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.
Swinton first met Joe back in 2004, when his sophomore movie Tropical Malady became the first Thai film to play in Cannes competition. “I had the privilege of being on the jury,” she recalls. “And we gave it a prize. And we became correspondents after that. We talked about all sorts of things. And we’ve done all sorts of things together. We’ve made video installations. We curated a film festival in Thailand. But, we were always talking about a film from the very beginning, the sort of the seed of it. And, yes, it took seventeen years.”
Now, when FilmInk encounters both, they’re back in Cannes for Memoria, a typically idiosyncratic work from the Thai auteur that, like Tropical Malady, was awarded the Jury prize (shared with Israeli film Ahed’s Knee). Joe is delighted that their friendship has finally born cinematic fruit. “A film is the ultimate goal because it’s really a shared love and that may not meet,” he says.
Thankfully, Memoria came together at the right time, a story that took them to the South American country of Colombia on the back of some deeply personal events.
In the case of Joe, he’d been suffering from what is known as ‘exploding head syndrome’ – a rare but real condition. Those with it either see a flash of light or hear an inexplicable sound, often experienced after waking up. Following the Cannes premiere of Memoria, the director looked on Twitter. “And some people said, ‘I had the same thing’, so there are some people who have it. It’s not really [causing] suffering but it is something that you want to tell, you want to share, but you cannot explain what it feels like, what it sounds like.”
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
This strange stress-related condition, which Joe experienced on and off for a couple of years, feeds into Memoria. In the film, Jessica – played by Swinton – is a backpacker in the Colombian capital of Bogotá who has also been awoken by an unsettling noise. Sending her on a journey of discovery, the film hints that she’s grief-stricken over the loss of her husband – a plot point that drew from Swinton’s own personal life. At the time, she was “suffering with bereavement”, she says – her own father died in October 2018.
It made her feel disconnected from life’s everyday realities. “I think a lot of people who suffer bereavement experience this sense of disconnection and limbo,” she adds. “That limbo is quite a run of the mill, not exotic, experience for human beings. But it does make us alien, it does make us feel alien, when we’re in that scenario. ‘Hang on, society is going on out there, and I’m just not connecting… my battery is not plugged in’.”
Initially, when Swinton and Joe talked, they considered working in Thailand, but the actress was uncertain. “Very practically, I was the one who said, ‘All your work that I have seen so far has been embedded in and expressing a Thai landscape’. I couldn’t see a way of being in any meaningful way within that landscape. And we talked for a while about staying in that landscape and me being a foreigner there. But then once we got interested in me being a foreigner, we thought ‘You can be a foreigner anywhere, you don’t have to be in Thailand’.”
After Joe attended the Cartagena Film Festival in 2017, when he was honoured for his life’s work, he immediately knew Memoria had to be set in Colombia. “Now of course, it’s unimaginable that it would be anywhere else,” says Swinton, who visited Cartagena shortly afterwards. “It really feels like a Colombian film, just as much as anything else. And I think of all the resonances of Joe’s work over the years… it was daunting to imagine finding another place where he would feel at ease and able to feel free.”
But Colombia? “All the same resonances were there, and yet it was a new space.”
The director also felt this was the perfect setting – a place where both he and Swinton felt alien and where they could explore Jessica’s stasis and search for meaning.
Primarily, it was the country’s landscape and climate he responded to. “When you’re in Bogotá everything changes so quickly,” says Joe. “You carry an umbrella outside with the sun, but then after a few hours, the rain comes and then the wind. It’s like emotion… I feel like it’s communicating. You are dealing with an active climate and landscape. I’m fascinated by that.”
Tilda Swinton in Memoria
Together, he and Swinton sculpted the character of Jessica when they arrived in the country. Swinton took up with a language coach to speak Spanish (just as she learnt Hungarian for Béla Tarr’s The Man From London). “She immersed herself in Bogotá,” says Joe, admiringly. “For me, the big challenge was how to dress down Tilda, how to make this woman blend in with Bogotá pedestrians, which is an almost impossible task.”
When she arrived on set, “she just opened her arms – ‘You can do anything to me, just dress me’ and I found that a very beautiful gesture.”
Joe also expanded on the exploding head syndrome theme in the script, even referencing ‘trepanning’. “Trepanning is a process where you do drill a hole into your skull. Way back in the past where people believe there’s a demon inside the head… And when you have this exploding head syndrome – maybe when you have a headache or something, a migraine – you feel like you need to crack your brain and take something out.”
Curiously, he was not alone in experiencing this inexplicable sound. “Once I started to write, I talked to people who shared this idea of anxiety. I think ten to twenty years ago, Bogotá was not like this. It was more violent. And in Medellín, for example, I have many friends who said this bang is very common. You’re driving but then there’s a bang… you just jump and you’re not sure if it’s someone shooting, or the tyre exploded. So, you’re just frozen. This kind of not knowing – or anticipation of something – is really very important.”
The good news is that making Memoria proved to be a very calming experience for its director, who had also been suffering from insomnia for over a year before he got on set. “He started to sleep once we started to shoot, which doesn’t surprise me actually,” says Swinton. He’d tried everything – including jogging – to tire him out. But it was only when he called ‘action’ that his worries drifted away, “because the crew in Colombia was so beautiful,” he says. To sleep, perchance to dream, as they say.
Memoria is released in cinemas on April 7, 2022
