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Fresh off shooting Trigger Warning in the U.S., starring Jessica Alba, Indonesian filmmaker Mouly Surya quickly launched into completing her fifth feature film, independence epic This City is a Battlefield, which stars Chicco Jerikho, Ariel Tatum and Jerome Kurnia.
This City is a Battlefield will serve as the closing film for the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) on the evening of February 8.
The prolific writer-director has also finished shooting her next film, Tukar Takdir, based on an anthology of short stories.
This City is a Battlefield was adapted off a 1952 novel titled “A Road with No End” by Mochtar Lubis, which had been sitting on Surya’s bookshelf untouched for a while.
“I happened to read it by chance,” said Surya. “I had just read a few pages of it, I could not forget the images that it brought to my mind. The prose is written in such a way that you can definitely imagine it. I was totally mesmerised and I said to my producer that this was a very interesting book and I wanted to adapt it into a film.”
This City is a Battlefield follows Isa (played by Jerikho), who juggles different roles: as a school teacher, a talented violinist as well as a resistance fighter. Tatum plays the role of Isa’s wife, Fatimah, who is tenacious and also competent with a piano. Isa is soon tasked with carrying out an assassination alongside fellow rebel Hazil (played by Kurnia). However, Hazil increasingly becomes attracted to Fatimah.
Embarking on her first period film
Surya said that she met with a lot of historians during the film’s development stage. However, Surya emphasized that her goal with This City is a Battlefield was never to make a documentary. Working in a fictional space gave her more creative freedom to draw from different sources and inspirations.
“With a film, people expect reality, but I think that the perspective is reality. I shot in real locations so there are just things that are out of our control,” said Surya.
“Making a period film was a daunting task,” said Surya. “The beginning is the hardest, because you will look at pictures and older movies — and history is funny, right? Victors get to write history, so it’s a perspective. When you look at history, at the facts and pictures, there’s a tone in how films about that time are usually filmed in Indonesia.
“What I worried about the most was to find my own tone and voice, and then I always said, we’re not making a documentary. It’s fiction, it’s a story, and that should be the most important thing. So I have to come up with some impressions, like how do I want Jakarta in 1946 to look like? I remember the first time I went to Amsterdam — and if you’ve been to Jakarta, we have a bit of canals as well — in Amsterdam I saw how the canals were like, and they left a big impression on me, like this is what they planned for Jakarta before [the Dutch] were kicked out,” added Surya.
“It’s what they planned for the city, to make it a port city. My late uncle and my late father were born around that colonial era, in the 1920s and 1930s, and I still remember that they would speak Indonesian and Dutch, just like right now, everybody’s speaking in Indonesian and English. That was an interesting tidbit that I wanted to inject in the film because you’re not just being colonized as a country economically, it’s about culture as well.”
Working on Trigger Warning in the U.S.
Marking her first foray in Hollywood, Surya directed action thriller Trigger Warning, starring Jessica Alba as a Special Forces officer who takes over the running of her father’s bar after he dies. The film also featured Mark Webber, Tone Bell and Jake Weary.
Surya said that directing in a different country was not as much of a challenge for her — instead, she found that the biggest areas of growth as a filmmaker was in adapting to different cultural and professional contexts in the U.S., which also invigorated her with a new approach towards filmmaking.
“With directing, it’s the same thing — if you’re doing a student film, it’s just a smaller pool, or whether you have a trailer or not, which doesn’t matter, like it doesn’t really affect the work,” said Surya. “But the experience in America, for me, I was very impressed with the competitiveness and the human resources that they have — the abundance of great actors.
“Also, coming from Indonesia, I’m definitely an outspoken person here, but in America, I was considered pretty reserved. America is a very different animal, so that was quite an experience. The pressure is definitely different and I did grow up a lot as a filmmaker there. I don’t think I would have had the mental capacity to do a period film in Indonesia without doing that first,” added Surya.
“I realized also how I’ve been self-censoring myself in Indonesia, because when I write, if I know that a certain scene is so expensive that it can’t be done, I unconsciously shy away from it and try to make things more simple,” said Surya. “One of the things that I found in [my third film] Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts, was that I wanted more complexity in the film and I think Americans don’t shy away from that at all and push through it, even though there are limitations, because there’s no such thing as an unlimited budget. So when I went back home, I said that I’m going to push some of the boundaries and resources a little bit more.”
Casting for Battlefield
Surya admitted that casting for This City is a Battlefield was a long and tedious process. She first came across Kurnia in This Earth of Mankind, where he played a supporting role as a Dutch-Indonesian character.
“He had around 10 minutes of dialogue and he was speaking Dutch all the way through and I had never seen him before,” said Surya. “He was a new actor back then. I was very impressed, and because I had just read the novel, I felt like I saw a glimpse of Hazil.”
Tatum sent in an audition tape, while Jerikho became attached to the film at a later stage.
“I would say that Chicco was quite a unique choice for the role,” said Surya. “I’ve known Chicco for a while as an actor. We have never really worked with him, but we have always been trying to find a good role for him. Isa was quite a bit of an opposite character that he usually plays. Chicco usually plays the popular guy. I always said during the shoot that if this was a high school movie, Chicco will be the quarterback, but Isa is actually the president of the student council.”
Finally, Surya highlighted how This City is a Battlefield will have a fitting world premiere as IFFR’s closing film.
“Rotterdam has always supported us from the very beginning,” said Surya. “One of our biggest co-productions is with the Netherlands, because we have three Dutch actors who traveled to Indonesia to be in the film. Half of the DNA of the film is Dutch and so being the closing film was very fitting.”
