JUAN ANTONIO BAYONA UNCUT:

on Thailand, empathy, transformation and death in The Impossible

From an 12/17/12 interview with Mike Rea

The whole film is about how the certainty of death reveals how uncertain life is. I tried to portray the end of an illusionary world, of materialistic things falling away that no longer have the same value.

How did you approach incorporating Thailand and Thais into the movie?
All the time the idea was to tell the story from the point of view of the family, to create a sense of empathy. I really like the fact that we chose this Western family, because in the end youre not just trying to tell the story of the tsunami, but to tell how the world of all these people ended in some way; how their innocence and their whole sense of security changed after that. For these people, coming from a very materialistic world and to live through that, the experience transformed them in a way that they will never be the same again. In terms of the Thai people, no matter if it was Thai or other nationalities, my goal was to treat all the people at the same level. So, I never tried to be condescending or to even try to tell the world how much the Thai people suffered. Of course they suffered, as much or more than other people. But in talking to lots of survivors and people who lost family there, I also realized the enormous gratitude everyone, Thai and tourist survivors alike, had towards the community and how it responded. So I decided to portray them as more than victims, from the point of view of the gratitude.

Tell me more about the two most prominent Thai characters, the man who rescued Maria and the nurse in the hospital.
I was always following the story of Maria, and it was interesting to find that when she encounters this man, he is doing exactly the same thing that Maria is doing, looking for his family. And then he found Maria. He stopped his search and took Maria to the hospital before going back to continue looking for his family. So its about their sacrifice amidst their own disaster, and Thais often lost not just their family but also houses and lands and friends. And then I wanted to acknowledge the people in the hospital, not just the nurses but also the doctors and all the staff who took care of Maria and others. Today, those first responders express an enormous gratitude for the film being made, since it was a way to show the world how they behaved during those first terrible days.

On telling the story of this family as tourists during the disaster, and the departure scene.
Once the water arrives everyone is the same. But at the end there is a statement about privilege. Nowadays people talk in a very simplified way talk about disaster and they talk in a blackand-white way, if you live or you die, and the relief you have if you live, but theres a lot of suffering in survival, and that was very interesting for us. Its very symbolic, the journey of these people, going through a door at the end, boarding this plane which is an image of being privileged. Theyre met by the insurance agent who feels like someone from another world, but the ironic thing is that he is a man who represents their real world. On the journey through the airport, you can see the body bags and all the suffering they are leaving behind. So for me that whole scene talks about not just the family but all the people and places and emotions and suffering left behind. For the family, too, life is not the same anymore. They need to fasten their seat belts to prepare for whats next, because they know that life can be like that. So the impossible has happened in their lives and they lived, which is why we put the title at the end.

On personal loss and death, and how they interact with the primary theme of survival.
I have said that you dont need to kill anybody to talk about death, even as the whole film talks about death. From the beginning, its very difficult to talk about death without losing connection to the audience if you go straight to the idea of death. Because -- and this is kind of a filmmaker comment -- people go to the movies and then they go back home. Hitchcock used to say that you cannot kill your protagonist because youre breaking a kind of pact you have with the audience. You will make them suffer, and you can never put them right into the idea of death. You lose connection and when you lose connection, its not a universal story anymore. So my intention was to bring the audience to the theater and to make them feel the whole journey of these people, trying to give them as much a sense of empathy as possible. We didnt want to send the audience a direct message, and there was no big message for the family, either. We want to transform viewers simply through the journey, and its interesting because for the people in the audience, at the end, they cannot talk. They are kind of speechless and they start to think not just about the picture or the film, but they are starting to think about their own lives. And this is because we always kept the connection at the same level.
Photos by Mayra Padilla and Mike Rea, in Thailand and Sri Lanka

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