It’s just a Thai royal custom

Prince Chatri Chalerm Yukol, a scion of the Thai royal family, is a slender, soft-spoken, gray-haired gentleman who speaks lightly accented English fluently and looks at least a decade younger than his given age of 60. He is also a world-class film director, one of Thailand’s best.

“The Legend of Suriyothai” is the 23rd film the prince has made since his low-budget science-fiction debut, “Out of the Dark” in 1971. “Suriyothai” depicts a complex historical period in which four royal dynasties jockeyed for dominance. Murderous palace conflicts ooze to the surface just an as army from neighboring Burma (Myanmar) pours across the northern border.

The title character, Queen Suriyothai, is said to have ridden her elephant into battle against the Burmese in 1548, risking her life to defend her husband and the nation. The Sony Classics Pictures release opens Friday in Los Angeles.

A link between moviemaking and royalty isn’t a novelty in Thailand, it’s a tradition. Prince Chatri’s father, Prince Anusorn Mongkolgala, was a Thai cinema pioneer who apprenticed under “King Kong” directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack when they filmed the silent docudrama “Chang” in Thailand in 1927. His son studied geology and film at UCLA in the 1960s, and became friendly with classmate Francis Ford Coppola. Almost 40 years later, Coppola’s company, American Zoetrope, is presenting Chatri’s lavish battle epic to U.S. moviegoers.

Before “Suriyothai,” Prince Chatri had never made an identifiably “royal” movie. Although his reputation is tempered by his longevity, in his homeland he is known as a stalwart independent and something of a radical. The films that established his reputation were mostly about social outcasts: mob hit men, drug smugglers and prostitutes. Chatri says he simply isn’t interested in making films about the world he already knows well, and he is famous for meticulous research. He lived for nine months in a brothel when he was writing “The Angel” (1974) and drove around Bangkok for weeks with cab drivers gathering anecdotes for “The Citizen” (1977).

Financial freedom

The main perk of Chatri’s status has been financial independence. He has been able to pay for most of his movies out his own pocket. While other royals were acquiring yachts and racehorses, he was accumulating movie cameras and editing equipment. He told an interviewer in 1993, “I feel I have the freedom to do anything I want, which most people don’t have.”

Several of Chatri’s earlier films are available on DVD with English subtitles from the online retailer EThaiCD.com. “Salween” is a violent film set in a lawless area near the Thai-Burma border. The action scenes, especially sequences depicting the flight of a band of Burmese rebels pursued by helicopters across the Salween River into Thailand, show that the epic physical sweep of “Suriyothai” is nothing new for this director.

It would have been beyond the resources even of a prince, however, to self-finance “Suriyothai.” The movie’s lavish reconstructions were said to cost around 250 million Bhat, or $5 million, an unheard of sum for Thailand. Reigning monarch Queen Sirikit instigated “Suriyothai,” financed most of it, and arranged for palaces and historic sites to be opened to a film crew for the first time. Three thousand Thai army soldiers were ordered to work as extras in the battle scenes, along with 160 elephants.

Some of the queen’s contributions may be less fortuitous. Discerning filmgoers will not be surprised to learn, for example, that M.L. Piyapas Bhirombhakdi, who plays the title role, is not an actress. In fact she is Queen Sirikit’s royal dresser, or lady in waiting, handpicked for the part by her majesty. If the prince has any reservations about this casting decision, he has not expressed them.

But in terms of its content, the prince insists, the movie is completely his, and it is not a whitewashed view of Thai history. He based his research not on official Thai sources, but on a book written by Portuguese diplomat Domingo de Seixas in the late 1500s. “De Seixas was a neutral observer,” Chatri says, “reporting to his own king, and he had no reason to lie.”

Some aspects of the legend that sounded like folklore were later confirmed by research. A fiery omen known as “the arrow in the sky” corresponded with the historical appearance of Halley’s comet in 1531.

Other details were validated during the five-year pre-production phase. “When you actually do it,” Chatri says, “it all makes sense. Why do their weapons look the way they do, a long spear with an extra hook on it? What for? Is it a goad for the elephant? When you actually put people on elephants and try to fight, you understand. The hook is to grab onto the other person’s elephant, so you can draw it in close enough to strike.”

The prince’s attention to detail helps the movie transcend its origins as an official state project, designed to boost national morale at a time when the Thai economy is at a low point amid uncertainty related to the spread of globalization. When the picture became a hit in Thailand in 2001, a royal source told Internet journalist Julian Gearing that Queen Sirikit wanted the Thai people “to appreciate the historical events of the past that have seen the creation of the Thai state and the avoidance of colonialism.”

The local view

Thailand is indeed the only East Asian nation that has never been a colony, and this seems to have had a bracing effect on its culture, including movies. Several other regional film industries, including South Korea’s and Hong Kong’s, are rushing to adopt a homogenized “global” film style that will ease their expansion into foreign markets. But in Thailand, even the most popular horror and action movies are full of rich local flavor.

Thai filmmakers see no need to look to the West for validation. According to Hong Kong filmmaker Danny Pang (“The Eye”), who has been living and working in Bangkok for more than a decade: “The Thai market is big enough that no need is felt to gear films toward international audiences. Most of the films made in Thailand are still about very local subjects.”

If Thai cinema has undergone modernization in recent years, it has been with the goal of regaining control of the local box office. “Ten years ago, Thai cinema was dead,” says Hong Kong-based producer Peter Chan, whose Applause Pictures produced “The Eye.” At the industry’s peak in the 1980s, Bangkok’s six major studios were cranking out more than 200 movies a year. But when import restrictions were relaxed in the mid-’80s, films from Hollywood and Hong Kong flooded in. By the early ‘90s, fewer than a dozen movies a year were still being made in Thailand.

The turnaround came in the late ‘90s, spearheaded by young directors familiar with Western production methods. Most of them learned the ropes making TV commercials. Their aim was to produce films that remained recognizably Thai but were slick enough to compete with technically impressive imports.

Estimated 2003 productions are up to 60 projects from 22 last year. Homegrown movies now dominate the box office. The kickboxing saga “Ong-Bak” was overshadowed last year only by “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.”

Although most of these films are still being made only for local consumption, they are beginning to attract attention on the international festival circuit. At the Cannes Film Festival this year, “Monrak Transister,” directed by Pen-ek Ratanaruang (Prince Chatri’s pick as the best of the young Turks), became the first Thai movie screened in the Director’s Fortnight program.

As an established filmmaker with nearly 30 years of experience, Prince Chatri can afford to remain aloof from the hoopla surrounding new Thai cinema. Like South Korea’s classicist Im Kwon-Taek (“Chunhyang”), a director who makes cautionary films about indigenous folk art traditions in a country rushing to Westernize, Chatri continues to follow his own path. His movie “ Last Love” was a remake of a story he first filmed almost 15 years ago, a then-scandalous story of a love affair between an older woman and a younger man that “was deemed out of date by contemporary audiences,” according to Thai film critic Anchalee Chaiworaporn.

Back into history

Evidence suggests the prince is perfectly comfortable with being out of date. If anything, like Im, he’s now more interested in cultural relics that are in danger of being swept aside as people scramble to embrace the new. Chatri is planning a movie about the nearly forgotten history of “the real Thai cinema.”

“It will be called ‘Klang Plang, which means ‘Middle Paddock,’ ” he says. “This refers to the way films were shown by touring exhibitors in villages as recently as the 1960s, with the screen set up at one end of a paddock and the audience inside the fence. All you have to do is say ‘klang plang films,’ and everyone in Thailand knows what you are talking about. It brings to mind a whole era. These were three-hour movies in 16 millimeter, somewhat like Bollywood movies only much cheaper. They were shot without dialogue, and the traveling exhibitor also served as a live ‘dubbing artist’ who supplied all the voices. Our story is about a dubber who is trying to teach this dying art form to his own daughter.”

The prince concedes that the story line “is a little bit like ‘Cinema Paradiso,’ when it turns out that the projectionist has been revising the films. All of these ‘klang plang films’ were very much alike, and there were really only five or six stars who appeared in all of them. They made so many films at once that they could never change their hairstyle. They always had to look the same. So when the prints started to wear out, the dubbers would mix together reels from several films and make up a new story in the dialogue. And nobody knew the difference.”