WOMEN CHARACTERS

In this film the influence of my own mother on my life underpinned the way I approached the film. I made this film for her. I am an only child. My parents did not plan my career for me - they trusted me in what I wanted to do. My mother would give me money from her pay packet to buy books. Up to the time of this film I felt I had not done much for my parents. I worried about how to repay them for my life. Our Sri Lankan society is basically very patriarchal. Women are treated as objects most of time. Mothers are respected but put on a pedestal to be worshipped. The fact that they are human, have their own desires, are full of complexities and contradictions like everyone else - these aspects are not allowed to surface.

I have a tremendous respect and regard for women. This comes from my mother. I try to give women strong, dignified roles in my films. I think that all the actresses in my films have given good performances because I am comfortable around women. They are more honest with their emotions and open to the search for the truth. Male actors in sri lanka have great difficulty in getting close to their true emotions. I think it is only Joe Abeywickrama who was able to do this. His role goes against the grain of much of Sri Lankan cinema. He was able to show the feminine sides of the character of Wannihami because he was not afraid or shy to draw on his own feminine characteristics. We all have masculine and feminine characteristics but the side that conflict with our genitals is bred out of us from a very early stage. I am grateful that I can still draw on and express my feminine nature. This is one of the great gifts my mother has given me.

When I was young my father displayed some habits, which irritated me - for instance, the way he sometimes muttered to himself. I used all this in my relationship with Joe Abeywickrama and the character of Wannihami in Death of Full Moon Day. I made an effort to accept the characters as he unfolded through Joe. In real life we sometimes fail to or refuse to understand and accept people as they are.

The dramatic premise of this film was arrived at in a much more complicated and personally humbling way. In 1997 I was approached by NHK, Japan to be one of the four directors chosen to make a film for their second Asian Film Festival. This was a great honor and privilege and I was very proud to be selected. The script I had planned to make never materialized. I couldn't get the necessary permission from the armed Forces to use their personal and shoot near the war zones. The story of the present film was only a sub-plot in the original script. Looking back I can see that in my heart I was not happy with the original script - it seemed contrived and too consciously written. I had a deadline to meet so I had to think of something else quickly. When I went to the actual location, which I later used, I found that I had made some wrong assumption about people and their motivations. I had been looking at them from above. From a from director's or scriptwriter's point of view. Suddenly this 'seeker of truth' realized what he had written was artificial and even false. So I had to be brought down from my heights. It was necessary to be humbled again, to live among the people and learn from them I could not begin by putting my directorial stamp on things, the situation had to speak for itself.

I learnt a profound lesson from this film, namely that the search for truth cannot be carried out too consciously or deliberately. Truth presents itself and we have to be sensitive to receive it - in whatever walk of life. If we are arrogant and think too much of ourselves we become blind and deaf to the truth. In that sense, my fourth film is a kind of cleansing - I like to think that it is stark and lean, free of the fat of a director's arrogance. Continue