[Tlc] "The Actors' Actor"--Soraphong Chatri

[Michael Montesano]

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> http://www.bangkokpost.com/entertainment/entertainscoop/13696/the-actors-actor
>


THE ACTORS' ACTOR Recently honoured as a National Artist, Sorapong Chatri
talks about his journey from tending cattle in Ayutthaya to becoming one of
Thai cinema's greatest leading men By: KONG RITHDEE Published: 20/03/2009 at
12:00 AM Newspaper section:
Realtime<http://www.bangkokpost.com/advance-search/?papers_sec_id=9>

He came to the trade when he was 20, in 1969, and ever since Kreepong
Tiamsawet - better known as Sorapong Chatri - has played a gamut of roles
that read like the rainbow of humanity: he was a peasant, fisherman,
elephant keeper, taxi driver, rickshaw driver, tuk-tuk driver, bus driver,
truck driver, train driver, likay performer, warrior, photographer,
policeman, hitman, spy, convict, soldier (land, air, navy), scientist,
doctor, teacher, lawyer, gangster, pimp, prince, monk, thief, tramp, slave,
hoodlum, politician, murderer, madman, blind man, crippled man, deaf, mute,
hunchback, scar-faced, cross-eyed, heterosexual, homosexual, homophobic,
ghost, werewolf, tribal chief, sorcerer... and more. The list is long, like
life, like art. And at 59, after 500 films and 38 years as a professional
actor, Sorapong Chatri still tells all directors: bring it on, bring it on.

 They will. Sorapong, recently honoured with National Artist status by the
Office of the National Culture Commission, has had such a long and winding
voyage through the evolution, or devolution, of Thai cinema that he now has
his misgivings.

"There used to be more serious roles, socially relevant roles, roles that
have something to do with poverty, injustice, struggle, national pride,
because the country used to suffer and the movies used to be based on those
sufferings. Now we have a developed society, a happy society. Without
thinking about our problems, without the hardship, there won't be many good
roles for actors,"says Sorapong.

In February Sorapong - fit, deeply tanned and with four grown children - won
the Subannahongsa Award for best supporting actor for his role as a turbaned
bandit of unspecified ethnicity in Ong-bak 2. Despite the fire burning in
his gaze, the stately thief felt like Sorapong's minor, campy exercise
compared to some of his powerhouse performances in the '70s and '80s,
especially in the films by his mentor, MC Chatrichalerm Yukol: the savage
pimp in Theptida Rongram (Motel Angel, 1974), the idealistic doctor in Khao
Chue Karn (Doctor Karn, 1973), the ex-convict/taxi driver in Isarapharp
Khong Thongpoon Khokpho (The Citizen 2, 1984), the hitman in Mue Puen (Gun
Man, 1983), the drunken mahout in Khon Liang Chang (The Elephant Keeper,
1990).

And this too: the image of the young Sorapong on a buffalo in Cherd
Songsri's Plae Kao (The Scar, 1977) has been seared permanently onto our
retinas as a defining moment of cinematic bliss and heartbreak. In this
tragic story set amidst the green paddies of old Bangkok, Sorapong also
realised that acting could come very close to life - his life, that of a
rustic young man with a prathom-4 education and no other skills.

"Than Mui [as MC Chatrichalerm Yukol is known] is my teacher, my master.
Without him I would've had nothing, and I still serve him today," says
Sorapong. "But in Cherd Songsri's films, from Plae Kao to Puen Paeng (1983)
and Ploy Talae (1987), I found roles of country folk that were very close to
my life, and I enjoyed them a lot."

Sorapong grew up tending cattle in a small district in Ayutthaya. After
finishing por 4, he was ordained as a novice monk and moved to Wat Daodueng
in Thon Buri. That's the life of a country boy, he said, going to the temple
since the chance for education was non-existent. He studied Pali with the
monks, though he admits he wasn't very good at it. When he was 18, he
disrobed but continued to live at the temple, and soon he got a job holding
the umbrella for a TV actor on Channel 7. Sometimes he held a reflex for the
cameraman during shoots, or worked as loader on the set.

Sorapong Chatri on the day he was honoured with the National Artist title
last month. SANTIPONG SUEBSANTIWONG

That was in the late 1960s, the boom years of Thai cinema. Some 200 local
titles were made each year, and screen heroes like Mitr Chaibancha, Sombat
Metanee and Chaiya Suriyan were demi-gods in the collective fantasies of
nationwide audiences, before TV later conquered them. Sorapong moved up from
being an errand boy to playing an extra in feature films, and while on the
set of Piak Poster's Tone, someone recommended him to meet an aristocratic
director who had just returned from his studies in California.

"I went to see him, and there I met Than Mui, who was shooting a TV series,"
recalls Sorapong. "He asked me where I stayed, I said I was living at a
temple. Then he asked if I could swim, I said yes. So he ordered me to jump
into the river, because he was shooting a scene in which a man rescues a
woman from drowning. So I jumped, still in my clothes. He shot the scene.
That was my first role with the prince. Then I waited for my clothes to dry
and took a bus back to the temple.''

Than Mui called Sorapong back to be in a few more TV dramas, and soon the
prince told him to leave the temple and move to stay in his Wang Lavo
compound on Sukhumvit soi 39. A year later, Than Mui put the young actor in
the lead role, playing a scientist fighting a monster, in his feature film
debut Mun Ma Kab Kwam Mued (literally, ''it comes with darkness'').

The 1971 sci-fi adventure, low-tech but high concept, marked the beginning
of a 36-year collaboration between the blue-blooded director and the cattle
boy from Ayutthaya that still continues uninterrupted. (Sorapong will soon
appear in Than Mui's The Legend of King Naresuan 3, slated for release later
in the year.)

''It was right after Mitr Chaibancha died falling from a helicopter, the
industry was in a panic trying to find a new actor who could replace him and
bring the audience to the cinema,'' recalls Sorapong. ''Each studio was told
to groom new stars, so I got the chance to be on screen.''

But while Mitr in his peak was an icon, a megastar who drove fans to swoon
and faint, Sorapong Chatri was slowly groomed into a different breed: a
professional actor first, then a star. This had a lot to do with the fact
that Thai cinema in the 1970s took an interest in reflecting social ills;
politics, left and right, was the fabric of daily life, and the movies took
it to task.

Sorapong's famous roles were those that allowed him the aura of dramatic
gravity that seemed to be stem both from his humble origin and from the
simmering turmoil of the decade. The fascist pimp in Motel Angel signified
the violence not unlike the crackdown of the 1973 student uprising, while
his role as an upright MP who was gunned down after winning an election in
Surasee Phadham's Pu Tan Nok Sabha (literally ''the MP outside the
Parliament,'' 1983, with a cameo by the late MR Kukrit Pramoj) was a brutal
irony about our democracy, particularly our election system.

During the anti-communist years, Sorapong found himself a small cog in the
Cold War by playing soldiers and mercenaries in perhaps 100 action films in
which he fought the red menace in the jungle. Most of these were
low-profile, though some were popular as they played to the national
sentiment. ''In almost every film I played in the late '70s to the early
'80s, you'll see that I always carried a machine gun, ready to fire'' he
said. ''All actors carried machine guns in those films.''

When the communists were defeated, action films faded, and Sorapong enjoyed
a diversity of roles again. Between 1977 and 1990, the man starred, on
average, in 30-plus movies every year, from realist dramas to madcap horrors
and good old slapstick comedies.

Like most stars of his day, Sorapong didn't study acting. There were no
talent workshops, no idol contests. The path along which he became one of
Thailand's greatest actors was autodidactic, not in an intellectual but a
homespun sense. ''I didn't go to drama school, there weren't any. Are there
a lot now?'' the actor muses. ''What I did was simply look at the real
world. All humans perform the same activities: eat, sleep, sit, stand, walk,
speak, think, do. That's it _ like the monks say in their sermons. So that's
all I have to do on screen.''

Sorapong watched Dustin Hoffman, Steve McQueen, Alain Delon, Charles
Bronson, Robert DeNiro. He isn't familiar with the legendary Method _ the
intense approach to acting in which an actor submerges himself completely in
a role, as mythologised by Marlon Brando and DeNiro _ but during his long
career Sorapong came up with his own immersion technique, Siamese-style,
that manifests the kind of devotion we hardly expect from contemporary Thai
actors. ''When the director wanted me to vomit, I told him to bring me
liquor, egg yolks and some congee. I ate them all, and I vomited for the
camera. When they wanted me to pee a lot in many takes, I drank lots of
water. If they asked me to look like I'd eaten something poisonous, I drank
a bitter potion. If they wanted me to look exhausted, I ran for half an hour
before shooting. If I had to look like I hadn't slept, then I didn't go to
sleep. If they wanted me to look like I'm dying, I'd stop eating and
drinking hours before. I'd check if my lips looked dry and parched enough,
or if my eyes were already sunken. Then we shot the scene.

''Once Than Mui wanted me to look like a man who'd spent every drop of his
energy. I came to the set in the evening. I stayed up all night, and we
started shooting at 6 the next morning, when I almost couldn't go on
standing.''

Yet after all these years the man still stands tall, still a trusted actor
even though showbiz has thawed into an era of short-lived shooting stars,
and there's no secret why: Sorapong, a modest and cordial person who wais a
young journalist to apologise when he's late for an interview, never forgets
that hard work, respect and discipline are what's gotten him this far. He's
a product of a period that taught him that stardom, like power, comes with
responsibility _ to the audience, to the director, to the profession. In
short, he takes his job seriously.

On stage at the Subannahongsa ceremony last month, Sorapong, in disarming
fashion, lectured young stars (many, as it happens, from rich families)
gathered in the hall that they shouldn't behave like angels, because they're
not, and that they shouldn't come to the set late, and that they should work
harder and be better.

''If I hadn't become an actor, what would I have turned out to be, with so
little education?'' Sorapong asks, as if this is the question he's posed
himself a thousand times.

''Maybe I'd be driving a taxi or a truck. Who knows? But I was lucky that I
found acting, and I love it. The moment when the camera zooms into my face,
the moment when I have to show all the emotions my character is feeling, the
moment when everything seems to be quiet _ that's when I'm very happy.''

Today Sorapong lives with his second wife, Duangduen Jithaisong, at their
house in Si Khiew district, near Nakhon Ratchasima. He has four children
from a previous marriage, and when he's not shooting a new film, Sorapong
dedicates himself to the mission of finding the money to build a giant
Buddha image in Si Khiew that has already cost over 50 million baht. On set,
Sorapong is known for showing up on time, and for spending a lot of time
praying in his room as he waits for the shoot.

''No, I didn't think I would've spent my life as a monk if I hadn't started
acting,'' he says laughing. ''But the faith has always been with me. It's
very important to me, it's made me what I am today.'
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