At his home in Pak Chong, Piak Poster sits on a stool before a half-finished painting, the raised platform encircled by stacks of tools, drawers, paintbrushes and all imaginable colours. “I call this ‘my throne’,” he says with a laugh. “This is where I work, and I still work every day.”
Piak is 83, though he doesn’t look it, especially when you see the crisp movement of his walk and hear the clarity of his memory. Next week, he will officially become National Artist in the field of cinema, a long-overdue honour for the man respected as a filmmaker who helped shape the Thai screen of the 1970s, at the onset of the 35mm boom in Thailand.
The National Artist title rightly recognises his contribution in making movies — 29 of them — though Piak’s name is in fact synonymous with something else that also helped define the image of Thai cinema: before writing and directing films, Piak was a prolific painter of film posters and cut-outs, those dramatic, earnestly realistic and colour-splashed pictures recognisable from miles away. Thus the moniker that became the only name people know him until now: Piak Poster.
“I was trained to do that — painting,” says Piak, whose real name is Somboonsuk Niyomsiri. And that’s what he’s gone back to doing after quitting filmmaking. Twenty years ago he found a quiet place in Pak Chong, on a small hill roughly two hours from Bangkok, where he moved with his wife to enjoy the clean air and the neighbours who can join him in playing tennis. There he set up a studio and went back to painting portraits for clients who have known him from way back.
“I’m not painting for fun or to relax,” he laughs as he speaks from this throne. “I have to earn some money too!”
It’s been a long journey from painting to cinema and back to painting. A Bangkok native, Piak’s father was a soldier and naturally the old man wanted his son to follow in his footsteps, though the boy already set his compass on the opposite direction — he only wanted to paint. When his father died, his brother-in-law, a high-ranking officer, arranged to pull some strings to get him a job in a barracks, only that Piak had to sit an exam to make it convincing. He did go to the exam — but he turned in a blank paper, then proceeded to leave the house to become a painter.
Teenaged Piak studied at Poh Chang Academy of Arts, funding himself by doing odd jobs and at one point as a labourer, carrying tar for building roads. In the early 1950s, when he was 17, he got a job painting advertisements for consumer and agricultural products at a shop in Bang Khunprom (“I did a lot of ads for fertiliser,” he recalls). The turning point came when a movie promoter saw his work.
“He asked, ‘Can you paint actors?’,” Piak says. “I never did it before but I was sure I could because it was just the picture of a person, so I said yes. The first film I did was called Pi Chai [Brother], starring Sor Assanachinda.
“Back then, you painted on a large sheet of plywood then cut out the actor’s face and put it up in the lobby or the roof of a cinema. It was in super-large size — 4-5m tall. Sometimes just the nose of the actor was bigger than a person.”
Basically, they were murals; remember that the printing technique was still very expensive then, and all artwork had to be done by hand. There had been other painters specialising in movie actors before, but soon Piak’s work became outstanding. Work came pouring in and he had to employ other painters as his solo endeavour became a studio dedicated to painting movie billboards, cut-outs and large one-sheet posters.
They would work on five to six movies at a time, and Piak had the pleasure of painting some of the most iconic faces of cinema: Clint Eastwood, Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, Jean Simmons, Audrey Hepburn, Sophia Lauren, as well as local superstars Mitr Chaibancha, Petchara Chaowarat, Sombat Methanee, Yodchai Meksuwan and countless more of Hong Kong and Indian stars.
Krung Srivilai and Wandee Sritrang in Choo.
“I painted from the photographs of those people, they never sat for me!” Piak says. “I used to live near Mitr Chaibancha, who was the biggest star at that moment, and I saw him around the soi sometimes though I never spoke to him. I painted him so much I felt like I knew him.”
Piak couldn’t see those films before he painted their posters. The familiar style of movie paintings — the pulpy colours and lush composition that felt at once real and sensationalised, at once cluttered and logical, and which is still done today in cinemas upcountry — existed before Piak came to the scene, though he refined it and popularised the montage technique when he put scenes that were the selling points of a movie in the same painting (the promoter would tell him about the “key scenes” and he would put a train explosion next to a love scene, for instance, and always with the faces of the stars prominent). Other young painters came to study with him, and movie painting became a subgenre of the practice in itself.
Actually, Piak didn’t really like watching Thai movies. During those years he preferred big epic films, such as those by David Lean, which made “Thai films look unrealistic”. He is an artist, and in his mind Thai cinema, however entertaining and powerful as an escapist machine, was not “artistic enough”.
So when a friend offered to sponsor him to direct a movie, Piak was reluctant at first, before agreeing on the condition that he would do it the way he wanted it. The big step came when the friend got him an internship at Daiei Film in Tokyo, where Piak spent three months learning how to make film like a pro.
“My mentor was a cameraman, the only person who could speak English in the whole company,” Piak recalls. “He made me understand that the Japanese films were made totally different from Thai films. They had meetings, they planned everything, while Thai films were done almost without any — everything was improvised, without any rehearsal or blueprint. The actors would arrive minutes before because they were so popular they were running around shooting two to three films a day.
“The Japanese cameraman gave me a valuable lesson, something so basic that I never saw in Thai cinema. He told me that the camera was the storyteller, and even the lighting in each scene was part of the storytelling. As a painter, that changed my perception about the way a film should be made.”
Also as a painter, Piak did something no Thai filmmaker had done before: he sketched the storyboard for the whole film. “I found it easier for me that way, and easier for the crew too.”
Piak returned to Thailand with a script and storyboard of Tone, a drama about a poor temple boy and his roller-coaster life in Bangkok. The film was released in 1970 and made huge money to the surprise of everyone including himself and his producer. Because of his status then as an unknown — how could a poster painter direct a film? — Piak couldn’t get the top stars and settled with Chaiya Suriyan and Aranya Namwong. And because it wasn’t bankrolled by one of the big studios, Tone can be considered by today’s jargon as an independent film.
The realistic tone of the film and the way Piak put emphasis on technical details was unprecedented, and Tone was one of the milestones of the 35mm era when Thai cinema enjoyed a surge in quality. Piak followed up with two more hits, Duang (Luck, 1971) in 1971 and Choo (The Adulterer, 1972), and together with Tone, they are now part of the classic Thai cinema canon. The poster man became a fully-fledged filmmaker.
Choo especially remains a film that showed Piak as a director who brought ideas to an industry that was taken for granted as cheap entertainment.
The film — about a woman who survives a shipwreck and ends up with a lone, bearded fisherman on a remote island — is at once a melodrama and a moral study. That the whole film was shot on location in the Andaman was a challenge that hardly any Thai films in those days wanted to risk.
“The film’s climax, when the woman confronts the two men in her life — the savage fisherman and her old lover — was a challenge for me and for the actors,” Piak recalls.
“The meaning of ‘adulterer’ is the central argument of the scene, and of the whole film. For me it became a kind of anticlimax, which was something we didn’t see much in those days.” Piak’s success continued in 1976 with Wai Olawon, a teen romantic comedy that later spawned a horde of copycats.
“Back then, movies were for adults, not schoolchildren,” he says. “No one thought students would pay to see movies. But I made the film based on the experience of my niece, and to promote it, we invited high school students to see it in small groups, hoping for word-of-mouth. It worked. The theatres were packed with students from the first day of release.”
For another 20 years he kept making movies, the last one being Bin Laek, a pilot drama that came out in 1995, when Piak reached the age of 60. Then he called it quits.
He said he didn’t have much money saved up — cinema paid him fine, but not great, contrary to what we may believe. He decided then to find a quiet place to live and take care of his health, and he sold his house in Bangkok and moved to Pak Chong. There he takes long walks and plays tennis (his favourite sport, besides boxing). And now, with this eldest daughter in her 60s, Piak, the father of four, is still in good shape, body and soul, and next week he’ll walk with his back strong and straight to pick up the National Artist title at the Thailand Cultural Center.
In Pak Chong on his throne surrounded by bottled colours, Piak has returned to do what he thinks he’s always done best: painting. “I wanted to paint since I was seven,” he says. “Making movies was a great ride, but now I am happy to do what I love again.”
