January, 2006
Way back at the beginning of this century, I made a movie in Chiang Mai. Of course, technology was limited in those days and I was actually forced to write it, direct it, film it and act in it myself. Nowadays you can just double-click a Spielberg-shaped icon on your Macintosh, wait for the computer to do everything, and email the result off to Hollywood. Life was hard back in 2001. But we liked it that way.
I didn't do it alone, of course. In fact it was a joint effort with a guy I met one fortuitous day at Grace restaurant over a plate of backpacker grub. Turned out that this guy, Jon, had some filmmaking experience in New York and a wicked sense of humour. Totally out of the blue, we decided to make a movie together. We didn't have a story, any equipment or any actors, but we had a beer buzz at one o'clock in the afternoon, and that was a start.
Over the next two days we threw together a twenty-page story in which we ever-so-subtly lampooned two types of tourist we loathed: the sanctimonious spiritualist and the sex-and-drugs hedonist. It seemed quite funny and (dare I say) even profound to us at the time. Never mind the fact that all our characters were the same two-dimensional cutouts you can find in every single English novel ever set in Thailand, nor that a four-year old could guess the ending after watching the first five minutes. We were sure we had a film-festival darling on our hands. Everyone who read it thought it was brilliant, even the ones who understood English.
There was one nagging problem, however. We had no video equipment and no money to buy any with. We couldn't find anyone to borrow a camcorder off, either. No worries – that would work itself out. But first we would have to start casting actors. Surely a university as grand and grassy as Chiang Mai University would have a robust theatre department with actors just chomping at the bit to work in an internationally-financed film (budget: $50). After hours of searching we finally located the theater department. It consisted of a single gangly boy strumming a guitar who didn't understand a word of English and couldn't even act interested.
“He would have made a terrible pimp anyway,” Jon noted.
Things suddenly weren't looking so good. Until the patron saint of independent films intervened, that is, and cast his holy grace upon our fledgling little project. To our amazement, there was a flyer pasted up just outside the theatre department that read: “Want to make an independent film? I'm a media studies student from San Francisco with a professional camera and editing equipment. I'm looking for someone with a script.”
It seemed too good to be true. But it wasn't. The guy, a giant man incongruously named ‘Sky' turned out to be friendly, intelligent and as we would find out soon, somewhat incapable of operating his own camera. Jon and I were wise not to complain – we proved somewhat incapable of making an entire movie.
After failing to find any skilled actors in the backpacker community around us, Jon and I decided to play the two main characters. I would play Wilson, the smug student of Buddhist meditation and he would play Douglas, the corrupt connoisseur of hedonistic vice. We envisioned our pimp character (Mr Song) as a typical squat and sturdy Thai man but were forced to settle on my thin friend Gof, who could have been easily beaten up by any one of his employees, should he have chosen that line of work. Nevertheless, outfitted in big sunglasses and ridiculous gold jewellery he exuded a certain anaemic menace, like a Thai version of Trainspotting 's Begbie. Only, Gof's English was more comprehensible.
Other characters quickly fell into place. However, we were soon confronted with a major casting problem. The script called for two prostitutes – one stereotypically evil and conniving, and one of the ‘heart of gold' variety. Now, at the risk of sounding not only presumptuous but derogatory to this wonderful country, I wouldn't have imagined it would be terribly difficult to find two women here willing to play hookers. This misconception underscored how little I understood the vast gulf between surface and substance that lies at the root of so much of Thailand's inscrutability. Not only were the morally pure women we knew loathe to cast themselves in such a sullying light, but prostitutes themselves balked at the idea that people might actually imagine them as prostitutes.
I did not expect this. Ask any Western woman to pretend to be a hooker at a costume party or on film and she'll be rummaging in her closet for fishnets and fake fur faster than you can say “ground-breaking performance.” For twenty dollars we could have done virtually anything we wanted with these ladies, yet for no price could we film them with their clothes on acting the part of a prostitute in a clearly fictitious story.
So we started filming any scenes that did not involve hookers. Slowly things began to click, however, and once Sky figured out how to work the camcorder, time positively flew.
Coming perilously close to the end of the two week shooting schedule, we still did not have our hooker. In a fit of anguish, and seeing that I was doing most of the work, I instructed Jon to go to Bubbles Disco and find someone, anyone, that could play the part of the hooker. It was his fault, after all, that he had to leave in two days and would not see the project through to its completion. He announced that he would go and save the day and return in the morning with Thailand's answer to Julia Roberts, or maybe Jodie Foster.
Jon hit the jackpot that night. The next day he introduced me to a stunningly beautiful Thai woman that not only spoke perfect English, but had substantial acting experience. She promised to come to the set that night and wrap up the final scenes we needed to cut the movie.
We knew something was wrong when she showed up with her own entourage. It was, in fact, her entire extended family. Smiling sheepishly, she pulled the script out of her bag and said “I think maybe it's a little rude.” I shrugged and excused myself and let Jon clean up the mess. He was forced to hang out with them all night, assuring all her brothers and uncles that by ‘sexy prostitute' we had meant ‘strong-willed schoolgirl'.
By the following day, Sky, Jon and I had given up trying to find a hooker in Thailand. Sitting in the Rasta Caf?, the site of much of our filming, we mulled over what might have been. Sky's wife Etsuko, a Japanese-American with some feminist leanings had joined us. She had never really liked the project anyway, found it demeaning to both women and Thais, and thought we were a bit lame for thinking it up in the first place. At that point, it was difficult to argue with her.
Then suddenly, having drawn blood, she provided us a fantastic bandage. She volunteered to play our streetwalker, or barsitter , rather. Though Etsuko was of Japanese descent and spoke English with a Japanese accent, at this point we would have accepted anyone slightly more Asian than Ben Kingsley. Even more unexpectedly, my good friend Goi also agreed at the last minute to play the other lady of the night, though she adamantly refused to engage in anything that looked even remotely like intimacy with Jon. Given the extraordinary facial hair he had at the time, I really couldn't blame her.
All the film miraculously in the can, we parted ways. Jon went on to meet his girlfriend in Europe and Sky and Etsuko returned to California, where he would edit the final product on his computer. I remained in Chiang Mai, already working on the next film I wanted to make (I still haven't quite got around to doing it.).
When all was said and done, ‘Nice Illusion: The Movie' turned out quite a bit less impressive than we'd originally hoped, and we decided not to submit it to any film festivals. Still, as the old aphorism goes ‘the journey is the destination'. We had such a grand time making the damn thing that the end result hardly mattered. Moreover, it was a concrete testament to a time and a place and a group of friends that got together over two weeks to do something ridiculous and diverting and delightful. I still watch it from time to time and cringe, laugh, and remember.
At the very end, Sky and Etsuko came to our rescue one more time. Though we never filmed a bedroom scene between ‘Douglas' and his hooker, oddly there was one in the final product. On closer examination, of course, it was Sky and Etsuko grunting hysterically away on a bed littered with condom boxes. It stands out incongruously, like a sore thumb, but then, the entire movie plays as an unbroken series of sore thumbs. I never got to thank Etsuko for lowering herself to our sophomoric level, but from the looks of things, she seemed to be having a good time.
Looking at the movie again, it seems we were all having a good time. At least I was – I'm obviously too lousy of an actor to fake it.
To download the final product, visit: www.oliverbenjamin.net/niceillusion.html
By Oliver Benjamin |
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