BAAN MUAY THAI - Interview with Charlie Garrett

Charlie Garrett has recently completed his directorial debut BAAN MUAY THAI (reviewed HERE), a fascinating docudrama dealing with his character’s journey to rediscovery. I was able to throw a few questions at Charlie recently, and got the following fascinating answers…

1. Where did the idea for this film come from? Is it based on past experience?

The film was originally inspired by my time training Muay Thai at an army base in Nakhon Ratchasima. While I had no involvement in film at the time, I was very aware of how “cinematic” the whole experience was. Then, a few years later, when I made my decision to get into film, my immediate thought was to produce a film based on those experiences. (I had only ever intended to produce!)

In terms of the story itself, parts of it were based on reality then other parts, which weren’t true, became true in the process of production, blurring the lines between fiction and reality. Quite trippy really!

2. What made you decide to shoot the film in this semi-documentary, cinema verite style?

My inspiration to pursue the low-budget route came from the director Gareth Edwards (Monsters, Godzilla, Star Wars) and this in turn led to the semi-docu style. I met Gareth at a film event in London where I learnt how he had made Monsters almost single handedly on an absolute micro budget. I had seen Monsters but had no idea it was done on such a budget, or even that anything like that was possible.

Incidentally, that same night I also met a notable Exec Producer, who had just won a best picture Oscar the previous year. He went on to put his name to doing a big budget version of the film, however, inspired by Gareth and Monsters, I decided to take the low budget route.

As for the semi-docu style, I knew this was something that we could achieve, even with our limited resources and various constraints. Furthermore, realism and authenticity were always the most important thing for me so I knew it would lend itself well to that.

3. What challenges did you face during production?

How long have you got?

First off, I had zero experience or track record in anything film-related, which made everything a lot harder. After walking away from the big budget offer, I ended up partnering up with another group of execs for quite some time developing what was intended to be a ‘low budget’ version - around £300k but ended up being around £750k. We had a UK distribution deal and international sales deal but it turned out that they wanted to own the rights to the film.

I feared we would sell out if I didn’t have creative control so I left them, the money and the deals and had to start again from scratch with nothing. That was one of the hardest decisions of my life.

I partnered up with my mate, who also had no experience but could use a camera. After developing a micro budget version of the project, we flew out to Thailand together to co-make/direct the film, however, after a few weeks he got sick and had to return to UK. I had to start again, rework the script, build a new team, raise finance and so on.

The night before start of 6 week shoot one of our lead actors was in a bike accident, messing up our schedule. You may have noticed the bandage on his arm!

The day before my scheduled fight, I had a bike accident and wasn’t allowed to fight.

After the main 6 week shoot, I was well into the edit when we had a disaster with our hard drive & backup hard drive. The leading recovery specialists in Thailand said it would take 6 weeks to get the parts they needed and once they did they would be lucky to get 20% of the footage back. After a couple of months of despair and a miracle operation from Seagate, we managed to get an almost full recovery. Although I lost the edit so had to start again from scratch.

We still had more left to shoot and had taken on and started to renovate a gym but we started to have problems with local mafia resulting in death threats, intimidation and us having to close the gym before we had even opened. But not until after we had renovated it! There were also threats made about my visa status then, a couple of weeks later, after a routine border crossing/one-day visa run to Cambodia I was denied re-entry to Thailand on dubious grounds. Perhaps a coincidence, I’m not sure. I ended up stuck in Cambodia for a month then had to return to the UK and get a new passport.

In addition to the above “highlights", there were countless dramas along the way - injuries, cast falling out, quitting, running out of money (constantly), technical issues, computers dying - I edited the entire thing on an 11inch 2011 MacBook Air - that was a challenge!

4. what are your plans for releasing the film?

Plan to self-distribute the film focussing on Vimeo and other online platforms. Hope to get into some festivals along the way and possibly some theatrical showings.

I return to Thailand in October then to Cambodia at the beginning of November to start pre-production on Part 2.

MANY THANKS TO CHARLIE FOR HIS TIME IN ANSWERING.