Mouly Surya became a director almost by accident. In college, she was studying literature in Australia when she befriended a group of fellow Indonesian students who were making an amateur horror film. Surya volunteered to assist with the screenplay "and somehow found myself in the director's chair," she says. "I got my first taste of filmmaking and was hooked! I enrolled in a film school the year after."
Surya made her feature debut with the 2008's thriller Fiksi., for which she became the first woman to win Indonesia's Citra Award for Best Director. Following 2013's What They Don't Talk About When They Talk About Love and 2017's Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts, the writer-director now makes her stateside debut with the revenge flick Trigger Warning, starring Jessica Alba.
"Everything is intensified tenfold in Hollywood, so I felt like a first-time filmmaker again, which was exhilarating in its own right," Surya shares. "It challenged me as a filmmaker, and I came out as a better one — which was exactly what I was hungry for. I fear complacency the most in my career, and Hollywood gave me the drive to aim higher and dream bigger, without any limits. It gave me the American Dream."
Alongside Trigger Warning, Surya also directed the upcoming Indonesian war drama Perang Kota (A Road with No End), which marks her largest production to date in her home country. For Surya, they both represent different sides of herself as a filmmaker. "One is American — outspoken, brazen and exciting. The other is Indonesian — unsettling, poignant and complicated."
The films that most inspire Surya hail from Asia, America, and beyond. Below, she shares with A.frame five of those movies.
Written and Directed by: Stanley Kubrick
When I was in a film school, I watched Barry Lyndon in my apartment on DVD for the first time. I was mesmerized by its depiction of Barry, the antihero, and the duality of the said and the unsaid with each of the characters. With the omniscient narrator and the tone of the film and the music, I became an objective observer of the film with a strong guidance by the director. This film is the first one that made me realize the extent of your voice as a director.
Directed by: Zhang Yimou | Written by: Ni Zhen
When I graduated from film school in Australia and went back home to Indonesia, I was a little bit embarrassingly unfamiliar with Asian cinema in comparison to my peers. So, I tried to catch up as much as I could. I love all of Zhang Yimou's films, including Hero, but Raise the Red Lantern is another animal. I love the subtlety of its cinematic language, and how nobody ever says anything that they’re feeling — but you feel it. You actually never see the main cause of the whole conflict up close. It is a masterpiece.
Written and Directed by: Catherine Breillat
I was invited to the Women Make Waves film festival in Taiwan, which is one of the oldest female film festivals in Asia, where I met Catherine Breillat and saw her autobiographical film, Abuse of Weakness. Her character, portrayed by Isabelle Huppert, is someone who is a strong filmmaker but becomes a victim of her vulnerability, her loneliness. There is no fancy camerawork nor any flashy style; everything is stripped down to the core of the characters and their interactions with each other, and she lets the audience read between the lines.
As a character study, it's a masterpiece and humanizes this woman who, at the beginning of the film, experiences a stroke and manages to drag herself out of the bed and get medical help on her own. It touches something very personal to me, and I will never forget the tears I shed when I watched it that day.
Written and Directed by: Hayao Miyazaki
I have a deep appreciation for Studio Ghibli. It actually took me a while to choose a favorite, because I love so many of them — Howl's Moving Castle, and The Boy and the Heron, and Spirited Away — but the notion of a young girl being the chosen one is something that resonates with me even today. You have Miyazaki's signature dreamlike quality, but it is also very poignant. Whenever I shy away from a sentimental moment in staging a scene, I try to remember this scene from Castle in the Sky when the spell of destruction destroys the castle in sky, the ideal, the robotic angels. It's beautiful, and one of the saddest scenes I've ever seen in cinema.
Directed by: George Miller | Written by: George Miller, Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris
I've never seen an action film so specific yet so impactful to the genre as Fury Road. It is gripping, tense, emotional, with masterful world-building and fantastical action set pieces that you've just never seen before. Yet, the story is very simple. I was working on the script of Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts when I watched it the first time, and my producer, Rama Adi, who was co-writing the script with me, was discussing the new ending that I just wrote. (Spoiler alert: Marlina comes home again after her journey.) So, when Fury Road did the same thing, I literally jumped from my seat and pointed to the screen. "Look, look! It makes sense! It's a fable, and that's a true classic way to end the journey."
