Very little has been heard from Indonesian filmmaker Mouly Surya since her buzzy 2017 Cannes title Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts.
“I’ve been in the pandemic like everybody else, wearing a mask, staying at home afraid if I step out of the house that I might die, and taking the whole family with me,” Surya told Deadline at the Tokyo Film Festival, where she is set to receive the honorary Kurosawa Akira Award.
Surya has released three features. Her debut, Fiction, won four awards, including Best Picture at the Festival Film Indonesia in 2008. Her second feature, What They Don’t Talk About When They Talk About Love (2013), was the first Indonesian film to be selected for the Sundance Film Festival. In 2017, her third feature, Marlina, was released in theaters in 14 countries, including the US, Canada, and Japan, following it’s Cannes debut. It also won the Grand Prize at Tokyo Filmex and was selected as Indonesia’s Oscar entry.
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Next year, she returns with two features, including an English-language Netflix feature titled Trigger Warning, starring Jessica Alba. Below, Surya chats with Deadline about her absence from the industry, making the leap into Hollywood feature filmmaking, working with Jessica Alba, and how the new “burst for content” has changed filmmaking in Indonesia.
DEADLINE: It’s been a while since your last feature, Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts. What have you been up to?
MOULY SURYA: I’ve been in the pandemic like everybody else, wearing a mask, staying at home afraid if I step out of the house that I might die, and taking the whole family with me. My next film, This City is a Battlefield, was almost ready to shoot in 2020 when the pandemic hit Indonesia (and the world). We decided to postpone the shoot, and I dove right back into developing the script again because I didn’t want the focus of the production to shift to COVID-19 prevention instead of making a good film to keep the long story short. I did a lot of writing and ended up doing a commercial that year that thankfully could pay the bills.
And in 2021—an American/Hollywood project I’ve been developing suddenly was given the green light to go into production. So I flew to the US and shot another film there first before finally filming Battlefield when I came back to Indonesia earlier this year.
DEADLINE: It feels like a lot has changed in the world, and also the industry since 2017. What have you made of the last few years?
SURYA: The world has changed. The cinema has changed, and the audience also has changed, and we watch how everything is shifting so fast in front of our very eyes. The rise of social media and how it kills the video star — I find it quite fascinating. And how one platform kills another so fast in less than a decade.
Suddenly, you find yourself watching very short reels on Instagram Reels if you are older, or on TikTok if you are younger; a 90-minute fun and light movie on a streaming platform; or a three-hour film in the cinemas. There is a lot in between those categories, but then the world seems to need a lot of content now. It’s crazy.
In Indonesia, there has been a significant rise in resources alongside new talents and new voices. In the last few years, the government has given significant help and boost to the cinema industry and filmmakers. New funds, great support for co-productions, and our audience are anticipating the next big thing, and they are very excited.
DEADLINE: How do you feel about the current filmmaking ecosystem? What are the biggest trends you’ve noticed?
SURYA: The burst for content. Everyone in Indonesia is busy with web content, web series, series, and, of course, thank god, features. It is a big change for a smaller industry such as Indonesia, and hopefully with more and more productions in the works, our resources will grow as well. The popular movies that do well in Indonesian cinemas—horror films or melodramatic films that make people sob, this hasn’t changed, and I think you see it in streaming as well. Even though streamers have the approach of having everything for everybody. Hence, there is a lot of content to do, but not enough people to do it yet, and no existing system yet to regulate it. It sounds crazy, but having experienced another system, I think it also gives you, the filmmaker, a lot of freedom. The kind of freedom you get in a developing industry and nowhere else. Sometimes it can be very liberating.
DEADLINE: IMDb states that you have two projects currently in production and set for 2024. Is this true? Can you tell me about those projects and when will we see them?
SURYA: Yes, it’s true. I mean, I haven’t released a film in 6 years, and I will have two in 2024. How crazy is that? I also have a new film in development right now as we speak that is set to shoot early next year. It is a script I wrote early in the pandemic. Now, I am doing tweaks to the script, and the clock is ticking as it nears the timeline for production.
DEADLINE: You’ve worked independently on your last features. What has the experience of working with Netflix on Trigger Warning been like? Has it changed anything about how you work?
SURYA: Work changing? Try life-changing. Working with Netflix means that I am doing a full union production with a lot of rules, joining the DGA, and working side by side with my teenage girl crush from Dark Angel. They sent a first-class ticket to New Mexico to live there for five months, rented me a car that drives on the other side of the road, and gave me this fancy trailer during the shoot. In 2016, I was filming Marlina with a 9-inch monitor and a budget of less than a million dollars.
They do a very different, very systematic way of filmmaking, and everyone is very good at their job. This is a film that isn’t in my language or my culture, so I listened a lot to the people I worked with. Directing can be very easy when you are surrounded by great people, and you are working within a system that is already set up for you to succeed. I don’t mean to put a rosy brush all over it. I mean, it was a lot of pressure and very intense — but I embrace it all. But directing is directing – you also already have a vision in mind about how a scene should be, and I’ve sat around with the script long enough to know exactly what I should do with it. The challenge was to communicate it through the cultural barrier. So I guess I do have to change the way I communicate and also dream bigger because that’s what you do in America.
DEADLINE: How did Trigger Warning come about? How was working with Jessica Alba?
SURYA: I was approached by my agent the night after we premiered Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts at the Quinzaine in Cannes. Around slightly less than a year after I started reading scripts from Hollywood, Trigger came with great excitement from my team – because, in a way, Trigger reminds us a lot of Marlina – a strong female lead, a Western-ish setting but with a lot of action scenes. In a way, it was similar yet so different, comfortable but not comfortable, at the same time. That was my first attraction to the film. Then I Skyped with the producers — this is the pre-Zoom era — and shared that sentiment with them. I guess maybe that’s why I got the job.
Jessica began showing interest in the project. I had my first phone call with her. It was so surreal because I was just out of my yoga class that morning and having coffee with my friends. We were sharing both our visions on that one-hour phone call about the film. I remember I said that this would be my first project in Hollywood, and by no means do I know anything about Hollywood or how they work, but I know about making a film, about directing, and I will do the best of my ability to get our vision right. Jessica stood by me throughout the whole process of development and production as one of my biggest allies. I remember watching her speech about supporting other women, especially women of color, and how there is enough space for us all on the big stage. Well, she really does stand by that speech because that’s exactly how I felt working with her.
DEADLINE: Coming back to feature filmmaking now as someone successful internationally, is it now easier to get projects made? If so, why?
SURYA: I’ve been finding it easier since I made What They Don’t Talk About When They Talk About Love. I still remember being rejected by actors to be in my first film. But in Battlefield, I was genuinely surprised by how different it is. It’s been night and day. Even I can sense people’s hesitation to disagree with me. I said to myself, “Wow, am I a big-time film director now?” It’s so surreal but so scary at the same time because there is so much expectation that you wouldn’t believe.
I get it. People put directors on a pedestal after they see their movies succeed. Especially after I made Trigger. Even though no one has seen the film yet, there is that “Hollywood director” title, which I find kinda cringy sometimes, to be honest. But I guess I’ve experienced something not many people back home have experienced. The perception has changed. To them, I am no longer that young, chirpy female director who only makes weird and depressing movies.
DEADLINE: What do you plan to do in this next phase of your career?
SURYA: To be honest, I don’t have a five-year plan or a concrete plan in general. I am one of those who live by today and hope for the best for tomorrow. There is no sure thing ever in filmmaking. I mean, look at 2020 — all of a sudden — there is a plague, and people aren’t allowed to go to the theatres. So I only plan for the next year, which is to finish Battlefield, shoot that other film next year, although I’ve gotta finish the script first, and release Trigger next year. Then let’s see what the next door will present me with.
DEADLINE: Why was it important for you to accept the Kurosawa Akira Award at Tokyo?
SURYA: You see, as we all know, a female director is a rare breed. There are very few legendary names with worldwide recognition, especially from Asia, like Akira Kurosawa for female directors. We just don’t get that kind of recognition because the perception was that we only make things that are niche. But we don’t just do that. There are many examples of female filmmakers who do bigger movies and manage to do amazingly at the box office while staying true to their voices, like Greta Gerwig with Barbie. To receive this award as a female filmmaker from South East Asia means so much more because this isn’t just an award for me but also for future female filmmakers from the region who have dreams so big, visions so unique you need the whole world to see it.