INTERVIEW: ‘Pop Aye’ finds man and elephant journeying throughout Thailand

Pop Aye, the new film from writer-director Kirsten Tan, is a unique take on the road trip sub-genre. In her tale, Thana (Thaneth Warakulnukroh) is a successful architect who decides to leave his comfortable life and hit the road in search of meaning. Accompanying him along the way is Popeye, an elephant he remembers from his youth.

The film is currently playing at New York City’s Film Forum.

“I lived in Thailand for two years, and I think I was in my early 20s at this moment in time,” Tan said in a recent phone interview. “I was very much in my formative years, so I think a lot stuff I saw in Thailand just really stayed with me. And so when the time came to do my first feature film a couple of years back, all these memories of Thailand just came back to me really. So I think that the film is just very much a mixture of my memories and also my rather surrealistic imagination.”

When Tan was writing the script, the idea of having an elephant in the narrative was the first aspect to come to mind. Secondly, she thought about having this elephant involved in a road trip. Perhaps the next thought was the difficulties of filming a movie with an actual elephant on a road trip.

“I would say this was definitely a pretty, pretty tough shoot,” she said. “I mean, firstly we were working in one of the hottest summers of Thailand. It was the hottest summer in four decades, and even though the elephant himself was very, very nice, the speed of the shoot slowed down a lot just because we had an elephant on set. So I feel like half the time on set was spent resetting the elephant, and everything just slowed down a lot. And also logistically it was a huge challenge just to put everything together, to … get people to even agree to have an elephant in their location. That was quite a big part of the challenge.”

The phrase mid-life crisis is tagged to Thana’s journey, but Tan finds what happens to the main human character a little deeper. She sees it as a “certain condition where you’re just I guess in a stage of your life where suddenly you’re not sure what you’re doing, and you start questioning the certain fundamental meanings of your life. So I think for him, he’s just at a point in his life where I mean he’s starting to become irrelevant at work, and I guess things at home are starting to feel a little cold as well. I guess to me I’m not sure if it’s something just as basic as a mid-life crisis, but it’s at a point in his life where he’s starting to feel like really, really insignificant and I guess really, really unimportant.”

Even though it’s easy to view the elephant as a metaphor for something else, or perhaps anthropomorphize the animal, Tan did not see Popeye that way when writing her script and filming her movie.

“I was trying to avoid thinking of the elephant as a symbol,” she said. “For me, I was just trying to direct him, his behavior and I guess his relationship with the main guy as truthfully and as authentically as possible. Although I know that invariably symbols would be read of the elephant, and I guess even when I was writing it, I was aware that certain symbols could come from the elephant. But when I was directing it, I was just trying to keep him as real as possible.”

The film was entirely shot in Thailand, and Tan said the surroundings allowed her to have a certain “looseness,” especially when filming scenes with the elephant. There’s one part of the movie in which the animal and its large tusks were in a house; Tan doesn’t believe the scene could have been shot in, say, New York.

Warakulnukroh is new to acting, but he is already leaving a mark. Besides Pop Aye, he can also be seen in Bad Genius, which plays this year’s New York Asian Film Festival. Tan wanted to cast the film with nonprofessional actors because she was after authenticity.

“A professional actor would maybe be less convincing in terms of the authenticity, so then we wanted real people,” Tan said. “This main guy [Warakulnukroh] was actually suggested to us by a friend, and he wasn’t an actor or an architect. But he used to be an ex-rock star in Thailand, and he was very famous in the ’70s. And all of a sudden I guess he dropped out of the scene at the height of his fame, and so there was a kind of mystery surrounding him in Thailand. To all of us, we had no idea what he was doing with his life, so when I approached him, I thought it was very interesting how he looks right now, which is really different from how he was in the ’70s. Like the ’70s, he felt really very much like a rock star, almost in the vein of like Mick Jagger. He looked really, really wild and out there, and he always had a cigarette in his hand. But right now when you saw him, he seems like this really gentle, restrained soul, and somehow the difference and the juxtaposition was very interesting to me. And it felt to me like he’s someone who understands the ups and downs of life, and he felt to me like someone who led a very colorful life.”

After audiences leave the Film Forum, Tan hopes they are considering the importance of time. That’s the ultimate lesson to be learned from Pop Aye and its road trip.

“I was very much trying to talk about time, and I was trying to talk about the inevitable passing of time,” she said. “If people can realize time, and they can I guess feel this movement of time in their lives, to me that’s one of the key themes.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Pop Aye is currently playing New York City’s Film Forum. Click here for more information and tickets.