Friday 29 Mar 2024
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This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on December 1, 2016.

 

Dain Iskandar Said as a filmmaker is a visually driven storyteller. Five years since his lauded action-drama Bunohan: Return to Murder, the director presents Interchange — a fantasy noir thriller that traverses his love for folklore. Starring a cast of Malaysian and Indonesian actors, the film is inspired by a photograph captured when Norwegian explorer and ethnographer Carl Lumholtz travelled across Borneo between 1913 and 1917. 

The story opens on the latest in a series of ritualistic murders that have taken place in an unnamed Southeast Asian city. Because of the cases, forensics photographer Adam (Iedil Putra) begins experiencing hallucinations which leads him to retreat from the world. However, he is forced to confront the mystery of it all when Detective Man (Shaheizy Sam) comes knocking, needing his help to unravel the murders. As they delve deeper, the duo discover the city’s mystical underbelly where the supernatural and century-old superstitions are still very much alive. 

Live It! sat down with Dain for a question-and-answer session:

 

Tell us about the movie.

You know I’ve done a lot of work with communities in Asia whose lives are connected to nature. That is a very major element in the film Interchange. In a way, it is an ode to nature, a celebration of it and also a lament, for things that we’ve lost. The people in it, the characters, they represent the spirit of people who live with nature.

 

What inspired the script? 

I think what inspired me was this idea that tribal people believe if you take their photo, you would steal their soul. When I saw the picture of women washing themselves — about 20 women bending over the river, with the caption “Women washing themselves from the evil effects of being photographed” — I thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice to explore this idea and turn it into a film?” The idea of this whole clash, a meeting of two worlds where tribal people came head on with 20th-century technology for the first time, what an interesting proposition this would be. 

 

How much of it is historical?

It only remained true to the original story in that the photograph we used was the actual photograph that Carl Lumholtz took. The rest is about inventing a world in which the characters can move into. And I wanted to set it in the Nusantara region; I wanted conflicting characters in a contrasting world because that is the reality we live in. We always live among spirits, with different beliefs, with those from different tribes. 

 

What in the film resonates with you most personally?

I relate most with the notion of an image being captured and the soul being trapped; these people believe in magic, and they believe that the image can destroy them. If you look at it from another angle, the Western world also believes that to a certain degree, the image destroys. Today, everything is about the image. There are very few authentic experiences anymore, and so in many ways, there is truth in that belief.

 

Did you already have the cast in mind for each character?

When you write a story — and I wrote with June Tan, Nandita Soloman and Reza Minhat — you can’t help imagining a world where you see faces. So, yes, some of them were already in my head. I would discuss with Nandita, my producer, and names would come up. I already knew who we wanted for Adam, because I have watched Iedil in the theatre and in a short film made by Rewan Ishak. I also watched Reza Minhat in Kil. I really liked it. Prisia Nasution, I met her before I watched her in Sang Penari, and we got on really well. Nicholas (Saputra) was an obvious choice. This man is a handsome, beautiful man, and I thought it would be quite a challenge to cast him in that character, like a beauty and the beast idea. Then, of course, Shaheizy Sam. I’ve seen him in Songlap, and he’s a good actor.

 

It has been five years since your last film came out. Was it a deliberate choice to wait that long?

Anywhere in the world and not just in Malaysia, funding is very hard to come by. We were trying to raise funds, which Nandita was in charge of, while also simultaneously writing the story. She did point out that if I do one film every five years or so, I will be an old man with only a few movies made. She managed to get me a slate funding, meaning we got equity investors to come in for four to five films, so the next one wouldn’t take that long.

 

The biggest challenge while making the film?

They say it’s always people management, because what makes the film is people. Also, we shot in the city, and I prefer live sound, so there’s so much to deal with in terms of noise pollution. Then you have to deal with security in buildings, and lastly, when you go to certain places to shoot, you have to deal with the local gangsters.

 

The film opened for the 27th Singapore International Film Festival recently. How did that come about?

I think they saw the film in another festival in Locarno (Switzerland), and asked for a screener. They really loved it, saying that it was very apt and kena (spot on) with their objectives — that is to showcase talents and films from the Nusantara region. In many ways our film is from Borneo, and we worked with Indonesian actors, and a Filipino editor. More importantly, the story celebrates Asean and Nusantara culture. Nevertheless, for them to say “We would love for you to be the opening film for the Singapore Film Festival”, to us is a real honour. That’s what we hope for, that we can all work across borders.


Interchange is now showing in cinemas nationwide. 

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