Rizal finds his focus as a filmmkaer

Joko E.H. Anwar, Contributor, Jakarta

Rizal Mantovani has many admirers, people who regard him as a pioneer in the country's music video industry.

There are also many who think that he has not grown as a music video director, despite his many years of experience. Regardless of what people may say about him, the 32-year-old director is refreshingly unpretentious about his passion.

While many aspiring moviemakers here would quote avant-garde filmmakers such as Wong Kar-Wai as their idols, Rizal unashamedly cites popular film directors such as James Cameron as his inspiration.

If you ask him to quickly mention 10 of his favorite movies of all time, titles such as Titanic and Home Alone will certainly be on the list.

"I'm very into pop culture and commercial art," Rizal said. "I love Hollywood movies, I'm not gonna pretend I don't. I like watching Bruce Willis kill thousands of people."

He will also recommend his own website, rizalmantovani.com, if he knows that you want to learn more about him.

Rizal's seemingly harmless tastes probably come from his happy upbringing, spent abroad as the son of a diplomat.

He settled in Indonesia when he was a senior at high school. He went on to study architecture at Trisakti University here but his love of music videos drove him to pursue a career in the industry.

Cynics dismissed Rizal as just another rich kid who had grown up playing with video cameras and now wanted to make a career out of his hobby.

They were wrong. He was 24 when he first touched a video camera.

"People (also) tended to think that I had gone abroad to learn about movie-making. I never did."

It has to be acknowledged that his path from being a dreamer to a doer is inspiring for any moviemaker wannabe.

Rizal's journey into the industry goes a long way back. He loves reading comic books (he is an avid Superman comics fan) and to draw.

He said that as a teenager, he used to draw comic posters and sold them to one of the book stores at Pondok Indah, South Jakarta, to be able to buy more comic books.

"Comics are expensive and I didn't have a day job ... but it wasn't like a survival thing, it was a comic thing," Rizal said.

One day in 1991, a man named Edward Buntario from an advertising agency, Creative Concept, saw his drawings in the store and immediately recruited him as a visual artist.

They soon moved him into the television division and he immediately learned how a video camera worked by asking the crew the basic operations.

"I was very annoying really," Rizal giggled.

After he learned how to edit videos, he was then involved in a few commercials and went on to make a music video for a minor dangdut song and a forgettable boyband that was never shown.

He got his big break after he made a music video for local rapper Iwa K. Since then he has been the most well-known music video director, and one of the most productive, in the country.

However, he said that things would have been different had he not started his career that early.

"I was very lucky because I was around at the right time and right place," Rizal said, adding that there were still not many people working in the industry at that time.

Like many of the American directors he admired, the director of some 200 music videos and 15 commercials thinks that it is now the time to move into making movies.

"Music videos is what I do to make money ... there's a bit more to it in making movies," Rizal said.

He added that he wanted making movies to become a real industry, like his pioneering efforts in the music video industry in the country.

Many consider him a man of visuals who lacks a sense of a story. On this comment, he humbly admitted that he tended to agree.

"But I think it's in the past tense. That is a 'was' ... I have to grow as a filmmaker."

The director's first film effort was an anthology movie called Kuldesak (Cul-de-sac) which was also directed by Nan T. Achnas, Riri Riza and Mira Lesmana.

Nan recently directed the art house Pasir Berbisik (Whispering Sands) while Riri and Mira later went to make the commercially successful Petualangan Sherina (Sherina's Adventure) as, respectively, director and producer.

The segment in Kuldesak which Rizal directed was an incoherent piece with images recalling several popular Hollywood films, including Pulp Fiction.

Rizal said that in retrospect, even he questioned why there was no story in the movie.

"The big lesson that I learned from Kuldesak was that story matters."

But his latest movie, Jelangkung, which was codirected by fellow music video director Jose Purnomo, is still a big hit in the city.

Despite the fact that the movie is feather-light entertainment that is more amusing to teenagers than more mature audiences, it shows his attempt to put the story before the visuals.

Another reason the movie has been well-received by audiences is that it cares about the logic, unlike most locally produced movies that insult the intelligence of the viewer.

"During (the making of Jelangkung) I really looked for loopholes because loopholes leave people unentertained."

He acknowledged that Jelangkung was inspired by several American films, including The Blair Witch Project and Sam Raimi's Evil Dead.

He also shared the opinion that art films were often overrrated.

"Hollywood has bad movies ... but it also has good ones. The same is true for art films ... But all I heard was that art movies were mighty," Rizal said.

The director said that his next project would deal with urban life in Jakarta.

"I want to make a love story, I want to go deeper without having to go to that line where it becomes an art movie."

He added that this next project would be a cross between Ben Stiller's Reality Bites and David Fincher's The Fight Club.

The idea may sound like a head-scratcher, but it will be interesting to see how it turns out.