I sat down in a Notts cafe with Naphat Boonyaprapa, a young writer, director, and filmmaker, based in Nottingham, to chat about his latest short film, Blossoming Hearts.
Naphat’s film career began, naturally, with an undergraduate degree in medical physiology and therapeutics at the University of Nottingham. Whilst studying, he joined the university’s filmmaking society and things grew from there. Serving popcorn at Beeston’s The Arc cinema then led to Naphat teaching himself projection and landing the responsibility of technical manager at Beeston’s Film Festival. He now makes up a quarter of Elevate Film Collective, an East Midlands filmmaking company. Their latest projects include Lazar, The Yellow Wallpaper, and House keeping.
His most recent short film, Blossoming Hearts, is currently enjoying its rounds of the festival circuit. It’s a narrative-driven short film, shot in one room, which tells just part of a bigger story of a relationship between two characters, Adam and Aiji, who flicker between friendship and love. Adam pays Aiji for his friendship, which creates a complex and unique dynamic. It’s a film where everything and nothing happens. A moving portrayal of intimacy, closeness, and boundaries, I caught up with Naphat to hear all about it…
First of all, congratulations on the film. It’s delicate, yet really powerful. Could you start by telling me a bit about the film?
I didn’t have any prior film knowledge so I applied to Broadway’s writing course with Keith Allot. He’s incredible and such a great teacher, and at the end of the series of classes you finish a screenplay. I knew I wanted a couple arguing about falling in love but I didn’t know where it was going. Then I saw a VICE news article about a guy who gets hired in Japan to be someone’s friend and I thought that’s interesting. So I started to write a script.
At first, it was a straight couple but it didn’t quite work, it didn’t feel right. Then I was out with some of my friends, and my friend who’s gay was talking about this guy, ‘he doesn’t know if he’s gay or straight, I don't know where I sit’, he was saying. Hearing this was a breakthrough moment, so I interviewed him. I also interviewed a songwriter called Finn at the Lord Roberts as well as some of the patrons of the Lord Roberts. As well as that I interviewed a professor at the University of Nottingham who is in charge of Queer East Films. I wrote what I could from all these interviews into the script and it progressed into this exploration of loneliness and identity.
Were there any moments in making the film that stood out to you?
One thing I have to say about this film is the lighting team were amazing, especially Louis Leivers. I wanted to change the neon lights and then shoot in the wrong order. Louis looked at me like he wanted to kill me, but I knew he could do it. He did fantastic because bear in mind the hotel room was six floors up, there was no ledge on the balcony, so all the lighting was inside, it was crazy filmmaking.
The characters Adam and Aiji were well-created. What was your process in writing them?
Adam came from some personal ideologies, about really wanting to find connections whether that is paid, whether that is someone you’ve just met, there’s an anxiousness there. Whereas Aiji is a stern and a black-and-white-thinking character. The two characters are almost a dichotomy of two extremes. I wrote what happened before and what happened after with this short as the middle part, I wrote it like a feature film so I could develop the characters.
Dialogue is hard to write in a natural way, but it does feel natural here. How did you ensure a feeling of authenticity?
I watch a lot of behind-the-scenes and writers who talk about their work, especially someone like Aaron Sorkin, who says there’s a rhythm in dialogue. You have to get into the rhythm of the character, and how they would speak and then it becomes natural. Sometimes in Hollywood they want to convey a message first, and the character comes second but when you put characters first, you get great dialogue.
It’s a dance between power, a dance between a relationship and what’s real and fake.
As you say, the film is dialogue-driven, rather than relying on dramatic scene changes or moments of action. You shoot in only one room and the focus is on the conversation, which makes space important in the film. Would you say that how the actors move in the space almost broke up the film into micro scenes?
Yes, the blocking in the film was really important. The way the characters move in the film and how the lighting moves throughout the film was really important because I wanted to show their power dynamic. It’s a dance between power, a dance between a relationship and what’s real and fake. I wanted the blocking to reflect that. I thought, this is two guys in a room, how do we make this interesting? How do we make this dynamic?
It struck me that in this film the conversations they were having were intimate. They knew each other, but weren’t necessarily partners or ‘properly’ in each others’ lives. It illustrated that often we can have some of the most profound and intimate conversations with people who we don't know. Does that resonate with you?
Definitely. I think it’s because they don’t know you, so they can’t break your trust. The power dynamic between Adam and Aiji is similar because Adam has paid Aiji, so he doesn’t have the power to say anything. He can pour his heart out and Aiji will just have to hold it. Aiji has to hold so many personalities and identities, so many emotions that he just doesn’t feel like himself. Vulnerable conversations with strangers, I mean it’s the same with therapy, you pay someone and they can’t say anything. There’s no responsibility to uphold an image with a stranger because that image is completely blank.
So, what’s next for you?
A film called Repetitive Nature with Ben Fletcher, which is completely different to anything I’ve worked on before. Another I want to make is called Tie which is a love story to my brother. Eventually I these films to combine into a feature film at some point with some studios that I met in Cannes. Hopefully, fingers crossed, they will all culminate into a feature film script and lead to bigger things.
Once Blossoming Hearts has finished its festival run, it will be made available to watch online.
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