“My life is the film”: Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit is still one of contemporary cinema’s best kept secrets

After over a decade spent making some of the sharpest arthouse films the medium has to offer, it can still sometimes feel like Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit is contemporary cinema’s best kept secret. 

Though the Thai filmmaker is well known in niche cinephile circles for his inventive films exploring human nature in the present day, with films like Mary Is Happy Mary is Happy (2013), Die Tomorrow (2017) and Happy Old Year (2019),  his impressive filmography often falls under the radar. With his latest—the patient, expertly crafted Human Resource—one hopes that the greater movie-watching world finally wakes up and give Thamrongrattanarit his roses. “I just appreciate the process,” he tells me. “That’s all it is for me. If one day my film can talk to as wide a group of people as possible, that would be cool.”

I’m sitting with Thamrongrattanarit at the Albergo Quattro Fontane on the Lido in Venice, where a day earlier he had premiered Human Resource to an enthusiastic festival crowd. We’re near the end of our conversation, and are discussing the directors that impacted him the most during his early years as an aspiring filmmaker. “Apichatpong Weerasethakul”, he submits, without a second thought. “Mysterious Object at Noon is hardcore [laughs]. It was very experimental. Apichatpong travelled around Thailand interviewing people, but letting them alter the story even as he was telling it.  As he travelled from Bangkok to Northern Thailand, the story evolved based on local life there. Then he made the feature from those interviews. That hybrid of documentary and fiction was inspiring to me at the time.” 

He maintains that though he looks up to Weerasethakul, their work is totally different. On the other hand, put Thamrongrattanarit’s early films under the microscope and the shared DNA between the two Thai auteurs become clear as day.  His breakthrough Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy saw Thamrongrattanarit adapt the story from a series of real-life tweets by teenage Twitter user @marylony (“She has a baby now,” he laughs. “It’s very surreal”), while Die Tomorrow—a series of vignettes on the nature of death—was inspired by real-life stories that Thamrongrattanarit had read in the newspaper. Much like Weerasethakul’s Mysterious Object, there’s an innate boldness to Thamrongrattanarit’s filmic sensibility—a willingness to play with the boundaries of the medium—that runs through even his most commercial work, like his excellent Netflix drama Happy Old Year and the internet meme-coded Fast & Feel Love (2022), an underdog sports flick about the competitive world of cup-stacking—Marty Supreme eat your heart out. 

Human Resource—which, unbeknownst to Thamrongrattanarit, is about to win the festival’s Fondazione Fai Persona Lavoro Ambiente Award for best film addressing global societal issues—sees him return to his arthouse roots (if he ever really left in the first place). Set in present day Bangkok, the film follows young HR manager Fren (Prapamonton Eiamchan) who, after falling pregnant, must reckon with the reality of bringing a baby into a capitalistic, dissociative modern society. “With this film, I wanted to explore the idea of birth very carefully. I thought it should be slow cinema to give the audience the time and space to think about it, because the subject is debatable. I have no solution. I have no real ending. That’s up to the audience.”

We met with Thamrongrattanarit at the Venice Film Festival to discuss Human Resource, the timeline of his career so far, and the influence of internet culture on his movies.

Luke Georgiades: It seems like you really make an effort to understand people in my generation, and you’ve always had this understanding of internet culture that I have always been so impressed by. 

Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit: I’m from a generation that stays in between the analogue and digital era. I was among the first users of the internet as we know it today. Facebook, social media. I’m in that first group. So I’ve seen the situation before and after internet culture. It’s not just about technology, it’s a thing that changed the people themselves. Especially in Thailand, we use the internet a lot. It’s changed our behaviour. I’m interested in that. It’s about humans, but the story comes from technology. 

LG: You’ve always been very creative in your approach to depicting the internet on film, like in Mary Is Happy, with the tweets literally showing up on screen. Were you ever nervous about how that would land with audiences?

NT: Twitter was quite new at the time. Looking back on my previous work, I always used elements of the internet to tell the story, but now, it’s less and less on the screen itself. It’s less about the equipment itself. Now I’m digging deeper. Social media and internet culture is in our body now. It’s expressed in our dialogue with each other, in our discussions with friends. I don’t need to tell a story about the internet using a picture of a phone or computer—at this point, the internet is us. 

LG: You also seem to understand the experiences of young women very well. They’re almost always the protagonists of your films.

NT: Growing up, all of my friends were female. I have a lot of friends who are female, and we talk a lot. I don’t know why, but they always tell girly stuff to me [laughs]. I have no problem with that. I like listening to them, and a lot of what they’re saying is very complex. There’s a lot of things that I never would have considered as a man. When I eventually became a filmmaker, those kinds of stories were already inside my body. Even now, when I write something, a picture of a female character comes out naturally. For this film, pregnancy is, of course, not possible for me, so I did a lot of research by talking to my friends who are pregnant, who have families already. I’m trying to tell the story of the meaning of birth. I needed a real account of what that was like. 

LG: After deviating stylistically with Happy Old Year and Fast & Feel Love, this film returns you to your roots. Can you tell me a bit about your choice to return to that stripped back pace?

NT: Fast & Feel Love was my experiment. I started with 36, and I came full circle thematically with Happy Old Year, so ater that, I wanted to find a new way to tell a story. I also made a commercial in Thailand during that time. People say my films and my commercials are totally different. My commercials are funny, they’re screwball. But that’s all me. It’s in my features too, it’s just a small part. With Fast & Feel Love, I wanted to try and do that commercial style as a feature film. I wanted the tone to reflect the chaos happening inside the character’s head. The editing style is very internet-coded. I wanted to experiment with what internet meme-style looked like in a film. Many fans of my films didn’t like Fast & Feel Love because of that. But that’s okay. As a filmmaker, I should try something new, not just repeat myself.

With this film, I wanted to explore the idea of birth very carefully. I thought it should be slow cinema to give the audience the time and space to think about it, because the subject is debatable. I have no solution. I have no real ending. That’s up to the audience.

LG: Is it hard to get a slower-paced film like this across the line in Thailand?

NT: What’s interesting is that I made this kind of movie with a film studio. GDS is very big in Thailand, and I’m happy with every film I made with them, but when I talk to them I need to find a story that relates to the people in some way, or is more narrative focused. With this film, I’m going back to something more loose. They said they’re okay with that. That’s new to me. To make slow cinema with a studio isn’t common. Next year, the film will be released in Thailand, and if the film can resonate with a Thai audience, then I think we can expand the audience for this kind of film on a mainstream level. It’s not easy, but we should try. 

LG: You mentioned bringing your films full circle. I’m not sure I can watch Die Tomorrow in quite the same way after seeing Human Resource—they’re spiritually tied in my eyes. Do you consider that when making your films, that one film might inform a previous or future film?

NT: It comes with age. Now that I’m older, the topic I’m interested in has changed. One day I just started thinking about birth. I’m 41 now, I have to think about whether I want to have a baby. So I think it’s cool that you can make the film that came along as your life evolved. My films document my whole life. When you look at my life’s work you’ll be able to say, “at age 20 he thought about death, and at age 40 he thought about birth.” My life is the film. 

LG: With Fren’s character, you withhold the catharsis of the audience ever really hearing how she feels. She never truly verbalises her emotions. A very silent character. What was the thinking behind approaching her character this way?

NT: In Thai society there’s something there’s an invisible pressure on the people. They encourage the people to keep quiet about what’s going on in their heads. Especially when you work in a corporate workplace. They convince you that all you need to do is put your head down and work. Sometimes you get brave people, who will speak up, but there’s a consequence to that. So Fren keeps everything in her mind. But we’re human, we have to express it in some way. So it becomes about facial expression, gestures, movements, the eyes. The eyes can’t stay quiet. So I wanted to shoot with a portrait lens, it was a telephoto lens, in order to record the face. Closely, slowly. We want to give the audience time to see something in the faces of these people. So, yes, there’s silence, but it’s a societal one.

LG: You’ve been a bold filmmaker since the very beginning. I wonder what films and filmmakers influenced your sensibilities as a filmmaker when you were just starting out?

NT: Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Our films are totally different. But when I was in high school, twenty five years ago, I was always seeking out independent cinema  and one day there was a Thai filmmaker who made films like that? I watched his first short film and was blown away. This can be a movie? Apichatpong studied architecture, so he knows how to deconstruct the form and put it back again. He used that architectural knowledge to make his films. Watching his work for the first time gave me a feeling that no Hollywood film has ever been able to, or will ever be able to. I watched his first film Mysterious Object at Noon (2000) in the cinema, which was lucky, because it’s the only time it’s been screened in Thailand. I remember sitting in the cinema thinking, “okay, I can actually make a film.” I was a teenager craving inspiration. Mysterious Object at Noon is hardcore [laughs]. It was very experimental. He travelled around Thailand interviewing people, but letting them alter the story even as he was telling it.  As he travelled from Bangkok to Northern Thailand, the story evolved based on the local lives of the people he was talking to. Then he made the feature from those interviews. A hybrid of documentary and fiction. I didn’t know I could make those films. That excited me. 

LG: A recurring shot in this movie is to see these characters from their side profiles. Why were you so focused on this angle?

NT: Many people talk about this stuff. I’ve never really asked myself why. It’s my aesthetic. When I see those kinds of shots, where I don’t see the full face of the character, I have space to think about what they’re thinking. I want the audience to be the observers sometimes. I want them to feel like they’re reading the news. We’re not the characters, we’re the third person looking from a distance. Distance encourages more questions. Distance can lead you to anything. 

LG: It seems like you were far more interested also in coding the themes of the movie itself directly into its visual language. It’s expertly done here. Do you think currently you are the best you’ve ever been as a filmmaker?

NT: I have to keep getting better. 

LG: Are you a perfectionist?

NT: I always wanted to be the perfectionist. But as I grew up, I realised I couldn’t be that. I see the flaws in my film all the time, even at the premiere last night. I was drowning for two hours watching that film [laughs]. I don’t know when I’ll be able to watch it with a clear eye again. I don’t expect perfection, I just appreciate the process. That’s all it is for me. If one day my film can talk to as wide a group of people as possible, that would be cool.