Five Inspirations | Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke

For MUBI Notebook's Five Inspirations series, in which directors are asked to name five things that shaped their film, the Thai director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke discusses what fed into A Useful Ghost (2025), now showing exclusively on MUBI in many countries. The first is Hou Hsiao-hsien's Good Men, Good Women (1995). Not a ghost film, Boonbunchachoke says, and not remotely a horror film, yet it has done more than anything else to shape how he conceives of haunting, because it shows haunting on several levels at once: its protagonist is shadowed both by her own personal history of a few years earlier and by a national history reaching back decades before her own parents were born. He is fascinated by how a life can be shaped at once by personal memory and by the history of a country. The second is naive art, and in particular Henri Rousseau and Niko Pirosmani. He loves the idea that these are trained, skilful artists who choose to paint like an untrained child; the work is childlike and playful and the skill behind it remains undeniable. The third comes from Joao Cesar Monteiro. Watch the opening of Recollections of the Yellow House (1989) without sound, Boonbunchachoke says, and you are struck by a serene, beautiful image of Lisbon; turn the sound on and you find an old woman's blunt and unlovely monologue. That mischievous contrast between sublime image and unabashed speech stayed with him, and through preproduction he kept using the phrases elegantly perverted and perversely elegant to describe the tone he was after. He also loves an anecdote about Monteiro, who is said to have arrived on set, found that his cinematographer had composed a shot too beautifully, and deliberately sabotaged it, saying he was freeing the film from being confined by cinematicness. It feels liberating, he says, to think of film outside the frame as cinematic. The fourth is Milan Kundera's novel Immortality (1988), which he read young, in Thai translation, and which astonished him with the cleverness of its construction; he had never read anything like it, and admires the way Kundera weaves an essayistic quality into his characters' lives so that the book is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally affecting. The fifth is Theo Angelopoulos's treatment of time. Boonbunchachoke admires how Angelopoulos always anchored his films in Greek history and yet transcended those boundaries. As a Thai filmmaker, the question he keeps wrestling with is how to tell a story so deeply invested in the Thai context to people outside it. He points to a scene in Ulysses' Gaze (1995) in which several decades pass in a single shot, and no one could work out how it was done. It is amazing, he says, that time can be filmed like that.

Read the full story at MUBI Notebook →