Interview with Director of Oscar Submission ‘Apprentice’ from Singapore
Academy Award Submission for Best Foreign Language Film Nomination: ‘Apprentice’ from Singapore
To speak with 33 year-old Junfeng Boo, the Singaporean director of “Apprentice” is to enter an entrancing conversation that goes far beyond film talk. Granted the subject matter of this deeply-layered and extremely well-written story is capital punishment, a very weighty subject, but still our discussion went beyond that into the realms of personal psychology.
When I finally saw it in Mobile New Horizons Film Festival after it had premiered in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard, I was astounded by the heft and emotional weight of it.
Playing now in Tallinn’s Black Nights Film Festival after the Hawaii Film Festival where it won for the Best Acting Ensemble (“Moonlight” got the big award), it will go on to Taipei’s Golden Horse Film Festival and to Dubai.
How did you become interested in filmmaking?
I fell in love with make believe. I liked Hollywood films — not the big actor ones but the drams, adult films, before I was of legal age. And I wanted to know how films were made. That was the big draw for me. How a frame took the audience to a different place. How lights, special effects, a boom operator made something that the director wanted to do to take the audience on a journey.
What films are examples of this?
1997 when I was 14 was a big year from me and I saw so many, like “The English Patient”, “Titanic“, “L.A. Confidential”. So I went to film school when I was 16 for a diploma. It was the only film school at that time in Singapore. There I saw many other world films that you could not see anywhere else, like the films of Kiarostami, Ozu, Kurosawa. They really brought to light what could be. There were no cinemas showing such films.
Was that diploma all your film education?
in 2015 I went to the Asian Film Academy for two seeks during the Pusan Film Festival where the theme were films by Wang Xiaoshuai and I saw films from Taiwan of the 80s and contemporary Asian films like those of Hou_Hsiao-Hsien and Kore-Eda. I related to those forms of contemporary cinema. They were a great inspiration to me on my first film “Sandcastle”.
Could you tell me more what you see as “make believe”?
It’s like playing God. In film school everyone wants to direct, but I did not. I was interested in set design; that was “make believe” in a more physical form.
It was only in my final year at age 19 in an exchange program in Barcelona that I directed my first film. “Un Retrato de familia” was in a language (Spanish) that I didn’t even speak. “Apprentice” is in Malaye, another language I don’t speak.
But cinema transcends language, which is why I’m in love with cinema. The human condition is always relatable.
Why did you make the film in Malaysian?
Malaysian is a nationality, but the language is called Malaye. In Singapore there are four official languages: English, Chinese, Malaye and Tamil (also in Sri Lanka and South India).
I had the intention of casting “colorblind” from the start and was ready to sculpt the characters according to the chosen actors. We invited actors of different races to try for the lead roles. In the end, we found Wan Hanafi Su and Fir Rahman to have the best chemistry between them. That was when I decided to make both characters Malay. This required a substantial rewrite to include cultural and racial nuances, but we kept the characters and their relationships intact.
Moreover, I believe the race factor added an interesting layer to their relationship in the film. Both characters were originally written as outsiders who did not completely fit into the system. Now that they are both from the same minority group and speak the same language, they form an even stronger bond with one another.
It would have been more commercial to make the film in Chinese with Chinese actors because in Singapore 70% of the population is Chinese and the film would be more exportable to China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, but we decided the chemistry between the two actors was more important thn rce. It is similar to what happens in the U.S. with Chinese vs. “white”. So we had two actors, one Malayasian and one Singaporean.
Then we translated the script from English to Malaye.
Do you speak Malaye?
No I speak Mandarin and English. But because I wrote the script I knew what was being said. And there are many common traits shared in Singapore’s culture so I could grasp the nuances, intonations which are sounds I hear every day, certain words are in common… I do have a natural grasp of languages like Spanish and French. I don’t speak them but understanding a language is a lot about context, knowing a few words, observing body language, intonation. In a multicultural society, you kind of learn this.
Did the film generate conversation about reforming the law for capital punishment?
It generated new interest but has not driven discourse as much as I would have liked. Media was more interested in Cannes and the festival experience rather than about the death penalty. And that was important for getting an audience in to see the film. the word of mouth was also very good so it should for eight weeks in the theaters which is a very good turnout. Even the second run in arthouses sold out. The Oscar entry was a miracle and gave it another round of publicity.
Why didn’t it generate more conversation, since that is the suspense point of the film in the end?
A clean, efficient and prosperous island vs. the darker side of poverty, capital punishment, there is a bit of a mismatch and the two images don’t sit well together. As it was, it was rated M-18 in Singapore, the second highest rating. It could have been banned or rated R-21 so no youth would have been able to go see it.
How did you get to be interested in the death penalty?
I was only 15 when I was exposed to capital punishment. I was given an assignment to take the con side on the debating team that capital punishment is dehumanizing. I lost the debate. I didn’t even know what dehumanizing meant. I had to look it up and ask adults. This was pre-internet. I went to the library. There were lots of resources about the death penalty from the U.S., how electric chairs evolved to fatal injections.
It’s important to discuss this in Singapore. Most countries in the region have the death penalty but there is not much discussion. It did leave an impression with me.
Later I got in touch with human rights activists and when I thought about what I wanted for the film it was still difficult because people live in their comfort zone. Singapore is very safe, secure and comfortable and that is attributed to their laws. People don’t want to question that for fear that things might change for the worse…
The idea of capital punishment as an effective deterrent — it’s the punishment for murder and drug trafficking — people want to imagine these laws are effective deterrents. But in fact there is no proof that the death penalty is better than life imprisonment or other punishments, and the fact is these crimes (in relatively smaller numbers) still continue to occur in spite of the perpetuators knowing there bill be death penalty. Could it be there are other factors that make people commit these crimes? Maybe we should address the root of the problem rather than rely on capital punishment as deterrent. That’s what I want to do. To present a different point of entry to the issue.
So we are tackling the spaces in between. People who are ambivalent about the issue will see the film and experience the reality of the characters and contemplate it more as opposed to just keeping it out of sight which is how it perpetuates itself.
All of us are in our own “echo chambers”, or our bubbles, so we don’t engage beyond our own comfort zone. And that is why I am interested in getting the middle, undecided, ambivalent people to be aware of this from different points of entry.
That is the first step to any kind of engagement. You present a point of entry for people to empathize. That is central. It is too easy to say on the onset: Death penalty — take it or leave it, I am against it. To find that space in between, to engage and have a dialogue, not to shut out the other side, this should be the new form of activism. It is the only way to change hearts and minds.
This brings to mind our own state of politics today and that only through dialogue and getting out of our own echo chambers and engaging with the other side, hearing and listening to them, can we change our own hearts and minds.
Thank you for such a far reaching discussion!
Film Movement will release this in the states in 2017.
International sales agent Luxbox has sold “Apprentice” to Film Movement for U.S., Clover Films and Golden Village Pictures for Singapore, Condor Entertainment and Version Originale for France, NDMantarraya for Mexico, Videorama for Greece, Weird Wave for Greece and Cyprus, Aurora for Poland, Bir for Turkey, Arrow Film for U.K. and Encore Inflight Ltd. for airlines,
Official Selection — Cannes Film Festival, Un Certain Regard
Official Selection — Toronto International Film Festival
Official Selection — London Film Festival
Official Selection — Busan International Film Festival
Official Selection — Chicago International Film Festival
