‘Oculus Quest is really the way’: film-maker Apichatpong Weerasethakul interviewed

There always comes a moment in the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul where you’re forced to scoop your brain up from the floor. In his last, Cemetery of Splendour, this occurs at the point where the sky is invaded by a colossal blimpish amoeba. You stare. Blink. Adjust eyes. It slowly dawns that you’re peering into a crystal-clear lake, cloudy heavens and whirring mitochondria in blissful, cosmic coexistence.

Man, however, is weak. And the first time I was introduced to his films, one of the most significant, sensual, startling, transcendent bodies of work by any director this century, I fell asleep.

‘Amazing,’ beams Weerasethakul over Zoom. ‘Even I slept in my films sometimes. It’s normal…You are always conditioned to see the film and be awake but why? Why can you sleep to music but not cinema?’ His commitment to sleeping through his movies has extended to him nodding off during his own premières at Cannes. The juries seem not to have noticed; he’s won four times.

My excuse was that I’d been battling through a 24-hour, all-night screening of his entire oeuvre at Tate Modern. Fuelled solely by two Lion bars and a banana, I would doze off in one film, and wake up in another, while on screen two lovers were themselves starting to drift off.

That morning I got my tongue around that name: ‘A-peach-a-pong We’re-ascetical’; learn it. Learn, too, and be reassured, that his are not the kind of art-house films whose claims to profundity rest on being long, slow and boring. Stuff happens: reincarnations, transmogrifications, erections. In Tropical Malady a man becomes a tiger and his lover takes advice from a talking baboon. In Uncle Boonmee a princess has sex with a fish; try sleeping through that.

Yet, people do nap throughout. In Boonmee mauve mozzie nets shroud curled up monks in gauzey coffins.