Singapore director’s elephant movie headed to Sundance Film Festival

For Singaporean director Kirsten Tan, making her first feature-length film in Thailand with a towering elephant as a co-star turned out to be an unexpected mammoth task.

The hottest summer in the kingdom in 40 years, the unforeseen logistics of filming with the elephant and managing a production crew that eventually doubled in size – these were just some of the challenges Tan faced in making “Pop Aye”.

“We all thought that having an elephant was a very charming idea. But once the shoot started, we realised, holy s***, this is a really, really big undertaking,” said Tan, who is in her early 30s and based in New York.

“It was about the resilience and the stamina to finish the whole shoot, while staying true to what you wanted to say originally.”

But a decade after Tan started making short films and four years after she began working on the script for “Pop Aye”, all the hard work has paid off. The film, about a disenchanted architect who takes a road trip with an elephant, is screening at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival in Utah, USA, later this month.

“Pop Aye”, which is entirely in Thai, was filmed mainly in Bangkok and the northeastern Thai province of Loei in early 2015. Tan said that the title is an “off kilter and eccentric” spin off of Popeye, the name of the elephant in the movie.

A long process

The inspiration for the movie came during a two-year stint living in Thailand, when Tan saw a group of boys pulling a baby elephant to the sea to bathe. “That image has stayed in my head ever since,” said Tan, who is a graduate of National University of Singapore, Ngee Ann Polytechnic and New York University.

To prepare for the shoot, Tan travelled to camps in Surin, Ayutthaya and Chiang Mai in search of the right elephant. “I initially wanted an elephant that was more abject, more miserable, more poor thing lah,” explained Tan, who also wanted to see if the animal could be directed to execute simple tasks like holding a gaze.

A month later, after she had seen hundreds of elephants, Tan decided to cast the first pachyderm that she met: Bong, a 21-year-old male Asian elephant. She told Yahoo Singapore, “When I was with him, I felt like he was a very kind and generous elephant. There was something about him when I looked in his eyes. So I went with him even though he looked very majestic.”

Man and elephant

In preparation for the month-long shoot, Tan got lead actor Thaneth Warakulnukroh to spend a week with Bong in order to build chemistry. They took long walks with each other and even lay down together “just to form that tactile connection with each other, so that their connection would be tangible and no one would question it.”

“It was really interesting to see Thaneth being placed in a position where he was made to react, time and time again, to the elephant’s complete unpredictability. That really helped to create a lot of natural moments in the film.”

During the production, Bong had to be managed by five elephant handlers. As the temperature often exceeded 40 degrees Celsius, he had to be pulled aside between takes to be watered down.

Given that filming often took place in locations where there was no shelter, the crew of 60 also suffered from the heat. Tan recalled, “We huddled in tents and were handing out wet towels just so that people wouldn’t die of heatstroke.”

A new wave of local films

Last year, two Singapore movies were in competition at the Cannes Film Festival: Boo Jun Feng’s “Apprentice” and “A Yellow Bird” by K. Rajagopal. Pop Aye is produced by Giraffe Pictures, helmed by director Anthony Chen, who also won acclaim at Cannes in 2013 with his film “Ilo Ilo”.

Given the success of these Singaporean directors, does Tan hope for greater things to come for Singapore cinema? Tan reckoned that it shows “a certain kind of new movement” is happening for Singapore cinema.

“Making independent films in a country as pragmatic as Singapore is really difficult, and I know of the sacrifices that filmmakers here have had to make, so I feel really happy when I see how well these films are doing.”

The movie “Pop Aye” is expected to be released in Singapore by late 2017.