Karmalink's Jake Wachtel makes Cambodia proud, digs into his sci-fi thriller and talks movie-making

It’s time to put some major respect on Jake Wachtel’s name. The moviemaker’s long-awaited and much-needed first-ever Cambodian sci-fi thriller - Karmalink - has finally released to the masses and gives way to his passion project which puts an entirely different twist to the genre and told through an amazing cast young enough to give the ‘Stranger Things’ cast a run for the money with their superb and heartfelt acting.

The American-born director takes some time with Attack The Culture to dish on everything from the essence of his movie debut’s ultimate goal in storytelling to explaining the importance of breaking new ground in the Cambodian culture. Kick back with some of these interview highlights and keep scrolling to check out the full conversation.

We’re finally at that point where you can unleash your baby to the world. Can you exhale yet?

Jake: Oh yeah, I love exhaling. I’m an avid mediator. That’s actually the movie was born on a meditation retreat. So inhaling and exhaling, it’s kind of a big part of this process for sure. It’s a big milestone in the life of the film and I’m super stoked to finally get to share it with the wider public.

As a director, as a filmmaker is there any extra confidence or excitement seeing the success of your peers of foreign films and I don't just mean Parasite, I'm talking about so many films you saw this with Roma you know the Mexican film a few years back and just in general, all that good stuff. Jake. Excited?

Jake: My love of cinema began, I was obsessed with magic tricks when I was a little kid. I loved performing magic tricks. And then I started making movies to make magic tricks and, and in the very earliest days, movies were about showing magic tricks. And then that sort of evolved when I was in college and I started getting into watching I took a class on the history of global cinema and I got turned on to all of these amazing filmmakers from the history of cinema from all over the world. And seeing that this idea of magic transmuted and transformed to understanding how cinema can collapse distance between us in faraway places but also the people that live in those faraway places we get to be intimately invited into their lives. And that's something that's so beautiful and I love to travel, it is one of my great passions in this life and come into contact with new people and cinema lets you do it. You can sit at home and then you get to be invited into the life into the living room of someone who lived on the other side of the world. Cambodia is about as far away as you can get from Silicon Valley where I come from. So I love this project of collapsing distance.

Having actually taught these two children - going from teaching them to directing them just talk about that and specifically why you went with these two individuals.

Jake: I mean, that was the vision from the very get-go when I talked about this film, popping into my head on a meditation retreat. It happened, everything clicked when I realized that my two favorite film students, you know as a teacher, I'm not supposed to have favorites, but these kids were like, they were my star pupils and they were 10, 11 years old when I was teaching them. I spent a year teaching filmmaking in Cambodia before I had the idea for the film. And it was realizing that these two kids were the main characters.

You got Leng Hem, the constant dreamer. A big open heart and super kind to everyone with a head in the clouds. Then Srey Leak, who is a head shorter than everyone and she’s like the big boss and you don't want to cross her. It was seeing the film materialized with them in the leads, them playing some form of heightened version of themselves, it was a part of it from the beginning. And then getting to go through that process of a long rehearsal period and then making the film with them. It was a crazy thing to do in my life to make a sci fi movie in Cambodia, but to have that long standing relationship with my two lead actors, I think kept the three of us really grounded in this process where there's a lot of like chaos swirling around.

Absolutely. And we wouldn’t be Attack The Culture without talking about the culture and I love the fact I went into Karmalink thinking okay, this is gonna be Goonies meets Stranger Things meets Black Mirror, right? And what I actually end up getting from it is a dose or actually that’s an understatement, a massive dose of amazing Cambodian culture.

Of course the sci-fi element is there, but I could see you know what you were doing, man? The family element, of course, Buddhism, the fact that you know nearly what 95% of folks in Cambodia you know, practice Buddhism or a form of it. Um, there's so much of the culture of Cambodia in this film that you know, sci-fi is there but what I just cannot get enough of all that structure definitely talk about of course keeping true to your love for sci fi, but making sure that you really spoke to the Cambodian culture.

Jake: Yeah, I mean, that was I think that's probably the reason why I was so excited and so committed to this idea is that I haven't seen a sci fi movie in a place like Cambodia, there's just not a whole lot of that out there. This genre can be a little bit I don't know, elitist or something. You think of sci fi, you think of Silicon Valley. And so I wanted a story that felt very, to tell the story. I was excited. I was like, oh, I want to see a story that's dealing with sci fi themes, but that feels like very Cambodian in its DNA.

Obviously, I'm not Cambodian. And so for that I really had to rely on my Cambodian collaborators that every step of the way to, to bring their to bring their culture and share it on screen. And it's something that I'm really proud of that we're able to capture a lot of nuance, and subtlety and aspects of the culture that I really love and for me, I think coming from the West and seeing the way that the family and community functions was something that I really wanted to celebrate, you know, so it's, it's, it's hard. It's a film about relationships. It's got all this crazy sci fi stuff, but it's about community.