The skies of Thailand are filled with dust particles that barely anyone takes any notice of in “A Useful Ghost” until a difficulty to breathe makes it impossible to ignore. The pollution is thought to be acceptable as a measure of progress – the dust rises from massive redevelopment and from factories where goods are being produced that are expected to improve people’s lives, yet Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke allows it quite literally to be seen in a different light when instead it reflects all who have been reduced to rubble in the name of such progress and there’s an incentive for those in power to make the past disappear.
It’s what led Boonbunchachoke to imagine friendly spirits in his absurdly wonderful directorial debut when in fact history is not something to run away from and though it speaks to the complex realities of a country that has endured over a dozen coups in the past century, “A Useful Ghost” is fashioned like a fairy tale where the idea of keeping memory alive can be romantic but also offers the crucial hope to endure. That’s the service that Krong (Wallop Rungkumjad), a vacuum cleaner repairman unexpectedly offers to a dissatisfied customer who goes by the name of Academic Ladyboy upon making a house call for a seemingly errant appliance. The vacuum has a mind of its own, turning on and off at will, and as Krong starts to explain, that’s because it’s become inhabited by a ghosts as many recent products that have come off Thai factory lines have been. He may have a limited amount of luck retooling the vacuum cleaner in question, but he does start to deliver some peace of mind as he relates the story of a March (Wisarut Himmarat) and Nat (Davika Hoorne), a husband and wife separated by death but reunite when his love for her is strong enough he can recognize her even when she takes the form of plastic.
Boonbunchachoke finds great deal of laughs in March being enamored of a Dust Devil to the bewilderment of his friends and family, but there is a sneaky serious dimension to all the silliness when March’s mother Madam Suman (Apasiri Nitibhon), a factory supervisor who has a mess to clean up at work with the accidental death of a worker named Tok, sees a utility in Nat to calm down fellow spirits and rather than accept them as existing side by side with the living, there’s a desire to subjugate them. When history around the world is being reshaped to fit dangerous political agendas, the director offers a bold and boisterous counterpoint when “A Useful Ghost” disarms with its originality and humor before revealing that the past is truly a force to be reckoned with and it’s already encouraging that Thailand made the film its official selection for this year’s Oscars. On the eve of screening at AFI Fest in Los Angeles after a celebrated festival run that began at Cannes this past summer, the director spoke about coming out the gate so strong with his first feature, drawing on a grand storytelling tradition to make sure a dialogue about history continues and having to get a soulful performance from a vacuum cleaner.
How did this all come about?
Before making a feature, I also made short films before and in my shorts, I was always interested in the colonial history of Thailand and use some historical figure, real or fiction, to play with. I subvert it and create a story out of it, so when I thought of the feature, I looked into what kind of historical figure I would be interested in turning into a film and there’s this legend from the 19th century, Mae Nak Phra Khanong, the most powerful ghost in Thai history. Her story has been adapted several times in films, TV series, theater, animation, comic books, and the story is so very simple as well – just about a woman waiting for her husband who became a soldier to return from war. Ironically, the husband survives, but the woman dies from giving birth at home and the husband doesn’t know that his wife is already dead when he returns and what he’s seeing is actually a ghost of his wife and the society, all the villagers, are [somewhat] disgusted and repulsed by this happy couple being together, so eventually they try to break them apart.
I found this story interesting because in Thailand there’s many human/non-human romances like a man with a ghost [or] a Nāga, which is like a local dragon spirit, or a man with a crocodile. When I look at the story, I tend to read it through a queer lens, [wondering] why can’t two individuals be together because of society? It sounds like what we have with same-sex couples [being forbidden]. A man cannot fall in love with another man and a woman cannot marry another woman. So I thought of a story to revolve around this idea. Another idea that also came to me quite early was this image of a ghost walking in an office building, but not to scare people, but to work because it’s such a difficult time that we live in that even the dead need to make a living to survive. So I combined these two stories.
The idea of dust is such a great visual idea as it is a poignant metaphor. Did that come early?
Very early. Dust is such a tricky figure. When I started writing this in 2017, dust pollution had become so real in Thailand, it was an actual disaster. It existed for a really long time, but no one or no media started to talk about it until the late 2010s, but there was a shockingly high amount of dust in the air, especially in winter in Thailand and mostly in the north because there’s a lot of factories there and I was interested to incorporate this detail into the story. Also, dust is also a slang [term] in Thai culture – it means from the point of view of the people in power, normal people are like dust because they’re so tiny and insignificant that they could be easily swept away, so for me, who lives in Thailand dust is a powerful figure to play with.
When it’s a legend being passed along, did the framing of it that way come immediately?
Yeah, because in the first three drafts, I only have the Nat and March story. But after the fourth attempt, I could not manage to finish the screenplay and I was wondering why I could not bring myself to finish it. Then I felt like I needed an Academic Ladyboy to save the story – and I like this, I like artificiality and the audience being reminded that they are watching film and this act of storytelling. So I needed a narrator and someone who listens to the narrator’s story and once I had this in mind, suddenly things fell into place to the point that it actually answered the thematic question because the whole film is talking about the attempt to remember those who are forgotten and I feel this act of telling [the story] is the way to pass on the knowledge and to keep the memory alive.
Were there things that you’ve learned from actually hearing the dialogue from the actors during the workshops?
It depends on each actor. Like with Davika [Hoorne], we just had a one-day workshop with her and we salute the main guy [where we said], “Okay, Davika, you need to have this default face as a character, a very limited range of emotional expression, so she might be a little bit joyful or depressed, but the range of emotion displayed on her face would be a certain limit and after she expressed something, her face will be returned to the default normal stage.
But I was very worried before the shooting was Academic Ladyboy and Krong, because they are the first characters to introduce the audience into the film, so I was quite [concerned about] how to get the tone right. We had a long workshop and it was a very technical issue for the actors, like academic lady boy, eventually he found out that he apart from saying the line verbally, he also had to add an emotional expression. So every time he would say his line, he would add a comment in his mind and show it on his face, so we could get the tone right. We only found that during the workshop process because as a writer as well, I feel like my characters are not realized until actors perform them. Before that, they’re just ink on the paper until the actor brings their own experience, skill, and personality, then my character is born. Before that, it’s not there yet, so I discover my character during the workshop, and sometime during the shooting, [I realized] “Okay, you are this person, actually.”
I understand that there was puppetry involved to pull off the movement of the vacuum cleaner. How did you figure out the effect? And what was it like for the actors to engage with it on set?
I didn’t want to do CGI at all. I like practical effects instead of doing CGI because it would be too smooth and too flawless and I particularly like when the vacuum cleaner or any haunted appliance in the story moves awkwardly. [The objects] are limited by their own physicality. So with the vacuum cleaner, we used a remote control to move her around and we [had puppeteers] in green suits to puppet her around, [helping] to move the tube around or moving stuff, and then we deleted them after in the post-production, yeah.
And Wisarut [Himmarat], who played March, said he just imagined it to be really his wife. He just imagined the object to be in a human form, so he could do it without [another actor to interact with] because in the story, he’s the only one who perceives her as a human being, so I think for him to work with this character, he really had to see this vacuum cleaner in a human form.
The production design is often breathtaking throughout as well. What was it like to design that lab where Nat goes to be tested?
The lab is real. It actually exists. Actually, we were quite anxious because the shooting was happening soon and we still hadn’t found the place yet for this shock therapy room. When I talked to my location manager team, they found this place in a university outside Bangkok and it’s actually a room to test electric cars and appliances. So you drive a Tesla inside and they’ve got to radiate some stuff into this car and see like afterward like if the car still works or not. But the design is so breathtaking. The first time we walked into the room, it’s like, “Oh my God. We’re going to shoot it in here.”
I really have to give credit to my location manager team and production designer. There were a lot of locations that were so amazing to find – an island with one single tree, and behind it is the whole industrial colony, which is real. And in the script, the island [was written simply as] Nat and March sit by the river, but then the location team found this island. I think they had it in their file for years, but they could not find a film that fit because it was so spatial that it had to be a certain story. But when they presented it to me, I [thought] this is very beautiful and we could shoot a film there. Your collaborators bring something new that you have haven’t thought of when I was developing the story and they brought it to the table and I was so impressed with their choice.
Even though you have a wealth of experience from your shorts, was it a different feeling on set for a feature?
Yeah. I was the least experienced person on set. When I made short films, I made them with friends, so it was a very small crew. This one [had] full lighting and camera crews and I’m really grateful that I worked with this team because they were very kind and supportive and took me through this whole journey. It’s so different because on a short film, you have the whole film in your head before the shooting starts because it’s not that big. You have every scene and every shot in mind, at least from my experience. But with the feature, you cannot have that. The feature is so enormous that you cannot not picture the whole thing inside your head before, so [throughout], I wasn’t quite sure if it’s going to work or not. I kept asking all the people on the film, if the atmosphere of shooting is happy, does it normally result in a good film? And I was told, “No, it’s not related. Maybe you have a happy shooting experience, but the film is bad or maybe you have a very toxic working environment, but the film is good. So I had no idea the whole time whether the film was going turn out good or not.
It seems like it worked out well. What’s it been like seeing audiences respond to it?
Yeah, it’s really heartening and I enjoy traveling with a film and meeting audiences. I’m interested in how people react to the film in each country. I’ve been to Australia and New Zealand, and Africa, and then I found that Thai audience and non-Thai audience had a very different way of enjoying the film and that’s interested me a lot.
This film led me to dig into the recent history of Thailand, and made me think what you did was even more extraordinary than when I first saw it. It seems quite poignant that you were selected by Thailand for the Oscars. What does that mean to you that you’re representing the country now?
Honestly, I never expected to be a representative of Thailand for the Oscars. That was beyond my expectation and I feel honored to be selected. I was also [a bit] stressed because the announcement was before the local release, so I [worried] that it might set up some people’s expectations like “Oh, this is our country’s representative?” They’re going to have this high expectation, but luckily, most of people who watched it enjoyed it. In the West, it might be normal to talk about politics, but in Thailand, we don’t have much luxury to talk about politics in film this much. Lots of [people] were surprised that, “Oh, how this could get past the rating system?” And I’m happy that Thai audiences are open to the film and appreciate how the film could be so political.
“A Useful Ghost” will screen at AFI Fest on October 26th at 8:30 pm at the TCL Chinese 3 in Los Angeles.