Interview with Gubra actor Allan Yun
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Interview with Gubra actress Sharifah Amani Yahya
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I HAVE just checked into The Syuen Hotel in Ipoh, when the phone rings. “You want girl service?”

“Huh?”

“You want girl service?” the voice repeats, and then the line is breaking up in chortles. “Oi Apek, you check in already, ah?” Yasmin Ahmad says merrily. This is the official welcome she gives me when I drop in for the shooting of her new film, Gubra.

Yasmin Ahmad

That’s Yasmin for you – she is as likely to quote from the Quran and refer to the Almighty in conversation as make a bawdy joke. In her works and in person, she defies conventional categories, whether racial or religious. This is what makes her so interesting to some, and so threatening to others – the ease with which she breaks down stereotypes and inhabit seemingly disparate worlds.

It is mid-August, the choking haze is just clearing, and Yasmin, 47, is in the news again after pulling Sepet from the upcoming Asia Pacific Film Festival. She did this following vitriolic attacks questioning Sepet’s Best Film win at the Malaysian Film Festival. This included a seminar at Universiti Malaya entitled, believe it or not, Does Sepet Deserve to Win Best Film at the FFM 2005?, which one Malay daily described as “narrow” and “as if full of hatred”.

Reportedly, the film was accused of having “pornographic elements” and castigated for not reflecting budaya bangsa for featuring the many Malaysian languages.

That a film directed by a Malay (Sepet) should be renounced and a film directed by a Chinese (Puteri Gunung Ledang by Saw Tiong Hin) should be championed instead, is a beautiful irony only Yasmin seems capable of inspiring. All the same, all that sniping hurts.

“They have been criticising me everyday in Berita Harian non-stop. Every morning before shooting I cry 15 minutes. Then, I shout (striking the Titanic pose), ‘I am the king of the world’.

“No, the criticism doesn’t make me want to stop making films. I must make better films, but I must keep my mouth shut, because in the end if – if I make a good film, the film will speak for itself,” says Yasmin, who has found lately that responding to her critics only gave them more ammunition.

Gubra, Yasmin says, takes place three years after Sepet, and has two disparate stories. One follows the plight of Orked and her family and the other concerns itself with an open-minded bilal, his family and the prostitutes who are their neighbour. As with her earlier films, the stories are culled from life, hers and other people’s.

“You could say Gubra is Sepet grown-up, and yes, it will be darker. I just felt compelled to make it because I wanted to examine betrayal. I wanted to be forgiven for the time I betrayed the people that I loved and to forgive people who betrayed me. I want to forgive and forgive and forgive. Can you imagine, it’s just one word but I can’t even fathom how the world would change if we all could forgive.”

I ask her why she is drawn to filmmaking.

“It’s embarrassing to say, just too ambitious, so I usually resort to the second reason: to amuse my parents. But it’s about the world. It seems there’s a trend of anger and hatred in films and in the world, to the point that models on catwalks don’t smile anymore. To be arrogant and dismissive, to rip a person apart, that’s cool? The guy took a knife and stuck it in his gut – that was so *&%# cool.

Yasmin and Sharifah Amani a.k.a Nani in Ipoh filming Gubra.

“And I’m thinking what’s so cool about this? I would like to persuade people that compassion is cooler.

“When my husband and I were writing commercials for teenagers, people said we had to do them the MTV style. There was someone who said she had comprehensive research data on teenagers that we could use. But no, I don’t want to make commercials MTV style with (singer) Reshmonu going, ‘Yo-yo-yo’.

“You cannot reduce teenagers to their hairstyle, dress sense, the music they listen to, etc. Teenagers fall in love, experience rejection, get pimples, face peer pressure, and these things screw up the mind. People interest me more than anything else. If I had a scenery of beautiful blue sky, fluffy clouds, pristine beach, swaying trees, but in the corner there are two teenagers holding hands, I would look at them.

“When I was going to do Sepet, I was thinking that teenage love stories are such a staple, and I wondered if I could do a teenage film that didn’t insult your intelligence. I didn’t want the MTV style to be important. I didn’t want to think in terms of target audience.

“I think perhaps the problem with our films is that the people are smarter than the filmmakers. The filmmakers think people are really stupid – let’s just do anything. It might work for a while but not forever. People are going to the pirates and buying Pablo Almadovar. So how?

“So mati-lah.

“There’s a preoccupation with slickness, with pretty cinematography, crane shot, orchestral music. Some filmmakers are irritated that Sepet is not slick, so how can it get so much recognition? If you watch the local dramas, they crane and track everything because CSI does that. For me, that’s the easy way out. Money can buy that.

“All a film needs are two things: a story that is honest and good actors,” she asserts.

Yasmin cites Abbas Kiarostami’s 1990 film Close-Up as an inspiration. “Scorsese says it is probably the best film ever made because there is so much truth. Close-Up will spoil HBO for you because after that, you will only see techniques.” W

Random quotes “You know, my favourite Chinese curse is nia ma fu latt – your mother’s pants drop. Ha-ha, it’s so cute. “I want my films to be a series of unnecessary events which, when you put it all together, makes you go: “Oh I see what you mean.” “Someone said at a film appreciation session that, ‘Your film Rabun is just a succession of jokes which amounted to nothing.’ “But then a young man stood up and said, ‘My parents are in their 70s, and when my father had a stroke, my mother had to bathe him. And she was very jijik (disgusted). When I get married I want to make sure I bathe with my wife everyday like in Rabun, so that if one of us fell sick, the other would not mind bathing him or her.’ “So I looked at the guy who criticised me and thought, ‘Well there you go. That’s all I need.’ It proves what Woody Allen said, that ‘intellectuals are proof that you can be brilliant and have no idea what’s going on.’ Intelligence is overrated. “I pick the actors for my films by observing them, by talking to them. Sometimes, they come to you . . . in shops, on the streets. It’s like what (poet Pablo) Neruda wrote: ‘I didn’t go in search of poetry. At that age, poetry arrived in search of me.’ That’s exactly how I feel. “I tell my actors to come for rehearsals around 8pm, and we would have dinner and cigarettes and we don’t rehearse till 10. And I observe them – their interactions become louder, their conversations move to something else. I pick up a lot from the actors and this goes into the story. But the essence of the story remains. You pick the right cast, and then you let their quirks take over. These are things I can’t script. I’d be a genius if I could.” “I remember the first time I had the actors rehearse. I said, ‘That was nice. But let’s try it this way: The neighbours listen and they think, ‘Eh diorang tengah berlakun’.” I wanted them to act bersahaja (natural), so that the neighbours would think that they were really fighting. “Everybody has got a well of experiences and emotions. Its got purity and impurities. Instead of acting, I say go to your perigi (well). Because I love people, what I do is I tell the actors, ‘Tell me your pains and I’ll tell you mine, and maybe we’ll heal together. I love people’s perigi.” “I never intended to get into commercials, and while I was doing commercials, I didn’t intend to get into filmmaking. Two of my commercials – one for a handicap society, the other on World Cup fever – won prestigious awards. So from there, I thought I could move into films, use my skills lah. “When my father collapsed (of an illness) I decided to go ahead and make films. If I were a basket weaver I would weave a basket depicting two old people who liked having sex. As it were, I made Rabun. I wanted to show the world how silly my parents were, how crazy they were.”

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