Fresh off capturing Trigger Warning within the U.S., starring Jessica Alba, Indonesian filmmaker Mouly Surya rapidly launched into finishing her fifth function movie, independence epic This City is a Battlefield, which stars Chicco Jerikho, Ariel Tatum and Jerome Kurnia.
This City is a Battlefield will function the closing movie for the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) on the night of February 8.
The prolific writer-director has additionally completed capturing her subsequent movie, Tukar Takdir, primarily based on an anthology of quick tales.
This City is a Battlefield was tailored off a 1952 novel titled “A Road with No End” by Mochtar Lubis, which had been sitting on Surya’s bookshelf untouched for some time.
“I happened to read it by chance,” mentioned Surya. “I had just read a few pages of it, I could not forget the images that it brought to my mind. The prose is written in such a way that you can definitely imagine it. I was totally mesmerised and I said to my producer that this was a very interesting book and I wanted to adapt it into a film.”
This City is a Battlefield follows Isa (performed by Jerikho), who juggles completely different roles: as a faculty trainer, a proficient violinist in addition to a resistance fighter. Tatum performs the position of Isa’s spouse, Fatimah, who’s tenacious and likewise competent with a piano. Isa is quickly tasked with finishing up an assassination alongside fellow insurgent Hazil (performed by Kurnia). However, Hazil more and more turns into drawn to Fatimah.
Embarking on her first interval movie
Surya mentioned that she met with a whole lot of historians through the movie’s improvement stage. However, Surya emphasised that her objective with This City is a Battlefield was by no means to make a documentary. Working in a fictional area gave her extra artistic freedom to attract from completely different sources and inspirations.
“With a film, people expect reality, but I think that the perspective is reality. I shot in real locations so there are just things that are out of our control,” mentioned Surya.
“Making a period film was a daunting task,” mentioned Surya. “The starting is the toughest, as a result of you’ll have a look at footage and older films — and historical past is humorous, proper? Victors get to write down historical past, so it’s a perspective. When you have a look at historical past, on the information and footage, there’s a tone in how movies about that point are often filmed in Indonesia.
“What I worried about the most was to find my own tone and voice, and then I always said, we’re not making a documentary. It’s fiction, it’s a story, and that should be the most important thing. So I have to come up with some impressions, like how do I want Jakarta in 1946 to look like? I remember the first time I went to Amsterdam — and if you’ve been to Jakarta, we have a bit of canals as well — in Amsterdam I saw how the canals were like, and they left a big impression on me, like this is what they planned for Jakarta before [the Dutch] were kicked out,” added Surya.
“It’s what they planned for the city, to make it a port city. My late uncle and my late father were born around that colonial era, in the 1920s and 1930s, and I still remember that they would speak Indonesian and Dutch, just like right now, everybody’s speaking in Indonesian and English. That was an interesting tidbit that I wanted to inject in the film because you’re not just being colonized as a country economically, it’s about culture as well.”
Working on Trigger Warning within the U.S.
Marking her first foray in Hollywood, Surya directed motion thriller Trigger Warning, starring Jessica Alba as a Special Forces officer who takes over the operating of her father’s bar after he dies. The movie additionally featured Mark Webber, Tone Bell and Jake Weary.
Surya mentioned that directing in a special nation was not as a lot of a problem for her — as a substitute, she discovered that the most important areas of development as a filmmaker was in adapting to completely different cultural {and professional} contexts within the U.S., which additionally invigorated her with a brand new strategy in direction of filmmaking.
“With directing, it’s the same thing — if you’re doing a student film, it’s just a smaller pool, or whether you have a trailer or not, which doesn’t matter, like it doesn’t really affect the work,” mentioned Surya. “But the expertise in America, for me, I used to be very impressed with the competitiveness and the human assets that they’ve — the abundance of nice actors.
“Also, coming from Indonesia, I’m definitely an outspoken person here, but in America, I was considered pretty reserved. America is a very different animal, so that was quite an experience. The pressure is definitely different and I did grow up a lot as a filmmaker there. I don’t think I would have had the mental capacity to do a period film in Indonesia without doing that first,” added Surya.
“I realized also how I’ve been self-censoring myself in Indonesia, because when I write, if I know that a certain scene is so expensive that it can’t be done, I unconsciously shy away from it and try to make things more simple,” mentioned Surya. “One of the things that I found in [my third film] Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts, was that I wanted more complexity in the film and I think Americans don’t shy away from that at all and push through it, even though there are limitations, because there’s no such thing as an unlimited budget. So when I went back home, I said that I’m going to push some of the boundaries and resources a little bit more.”
Casting for Battlefield
Surya admitted that casting for This City is a Battlefield was an extended and tedious course of. She first got here throughout Kurnia in This Earth of Mankind, the place he performed a supporting position as a Dutch-Indonesian character.
“He had around 10 minutes of dialogue and he was speaking Dutch all the way through and I had never seen him before,” mentioned Surya. “He was a new actor back then. I was very impressed, and because I had just read the novel, I felt like I saw a glimpse of Hazil.”
Tatum despatched in an audition tape, whereas Jerikho grew to become connected to the movie at a later stage.
“I would say that Chicco was quite a unique choice for the role,” mentioned Surya. “I’ve known Chicco for a while as an actor. We have never really worked with him, but we have always been trying to find a good role for him. Isa was quite a bit of an opposite character that he usually plays. Chicco usually plays the popular guy. I always said during the shoot that if this was a high school movie, Chicco will be the quarterback, but Isa is actually the president of the student council.”
Finally, Surya highlighted how This City is a Battlefield can have a becoming world premiere as IFFR’s closing movie.
“Rotterdam has always supported us from the very beginning,” mentioned Surya. “One of our biggest co-productions is with the Netherlands, because we have three Dutch actors who traveled to Indonesia to be in the film. Half of the DNA of the film is Dutch and so being the closing film was very fitting.”