00:00You did a very heavy emotional drama in Cambodia. How did that impact you personally?
00:13Well, very much, and I think for everybody here and for those of us who acted and spend
00:17less time on a film, when you direct, it's going to be years of your life, and I think
00:22you're only going to be doing it well if you need to do it, and you need to do it well.
00:27In Cambodia, this is a subject matter that has been debated. This history is not known
00:31internationally. It's not known, and it's something that has made me upset when I was
00:35in country. I've seen how it affects the people, and I have a son who deserves to know his history,
00:40and I want him to know what his birth parents went through, and I want this country to speak,
00:44but did I feel I had the right to be the one doing that? It was hard every day to know if
00:49I was good enough or the right person to do it, but I did feel so honored to be welcomed
00:54into another culture and allowed to witness and bear witness and encourage and share and
01:01really put forward their history as this is what it will be, and this is what many of the
01:05young people, 70% of Cambodians are under 30, so this is how they're going to know their history.
01:11Kenji!
01:24Kenji!
01:26Kenji!
01:30Kenji!
01:34Kenji!
01:36Kenji!
01:38What changed in you in the course of making that film?
01:44We had this day where we were going to blow up, it was children, it was at night, and
01:49then suddenly we were going to have explosions and we were all going to run and the kids
01:52and I got there with the crew saying, okay, we've got X amount of hours with the kids,
01:55we've got to get that thing up, we'd hardly have anything, the logistics are impossible,
01:58you get the wire up the thing and it blows and it's not big enough, we've got to do it
02:04again, where are the kids and suddenly somebody said, they can hear children crying in the
02:09jungle and we didn't have enough lights to light up the jungle and there are landmines in the
02:14country and I said, so gather the children, we've got to count the kids and we counted
02:18the kids and everybody was there and then somebody came up to me and they said, we're
02:22Buddhist, people died on this land, they're hearing crying because it's the spirit of
02:29the ancestors and you blew a tree and so we stopped production and I got incense and water
02:37and got on my knees with the rest of them and we took the time to think about the people
02:44who had been there before, what we were doing and just stopped everything and then carried
02:50on and it went easily and beautifully.
02:52I was there just taking and making and moving and shaping instead of just understanding really
02:59my place in not just in the country or in a moment as a director but as a human being
03:04in a moment with other human beings making something.
03:14There's that moment where you, at least when you're beginning and you really want to because
03:18you do, it's like a family and you want to keep everybody in the family happy and you
03:22want everybody in the family to take care of each other and you feel that you are the
03:26one who's kind of being, you know, taken to places ahead of the family so you better be
03:31responsible to everybody, make sure everybody's okay and I think one of the hardest things
03:36is also your instinct to when you have to push your family, right?
03:41So whether it's you need that one extra hour or you know the actress or actor is in so much
03:47pain because they don't want to have to keep doing this or this person is this or you're
03:51going to have to push your crew and you know they'd love to say, come on, just let us go
03:54home or, you know, or not even the length but even just the way you have to push them
03:58to say this is not going to be easy, we're going to have to do this, I'd rather them not
04:02like me and not have wasted five months of their life because I want them to be proud
04:06of the end result.
04:07And at the end of the day, I know that real leadership is pushing people to do something
04:15that at the end of the day they're happy they did and they're proud of and they're happy
04:17to be a team and work as a team, not to try to...
04:20No, you're not there to make friends.
04:21Not there to make friends and that's a very hard thing, that was, that's a...
04:25But also trying to give people a sense of ownership of the film.
04:28Always, always.
04:28Like so that it's not my film, it's our film.
04:31Yeah, it's our film.
04:32Then they help you.
04:34You must have things that you, like, are critics or didn't like and it almost made you, if
04:44you're sure and you loved it, you know, there's the noise of the crowd and then there's the
04:48singular voice and is there that too?
04:50Have you had that?
04:51When has criticism made you feel stronger about your convictions?
04:54I had that on a film I did By the Sea, which I don't think is a perfect film by any means,
05:00but I had a moment when I put it forward, and even when we were making it, people were
05:05saying, well, people aren't going to understand this or this isn't going to be taken this way
05:07or this is more like this thing and that's not going to be what people want or they're
05:10not going to...
05:11But I think I needed, after I'm broken, to just be an artist.
05:17It was like a talk of myself, like, don't lose your sense of you got to do what, you got
05:22to do your best and do what you feel and don't become safe.
05:25Don't become safe from this.
05:26If you become safe from this, you're never going to do anything worth anything.
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