May 2011. Ngorat begins production and I am given the task of basically just holding on to the video assist and marking up charts. But most importantly, I got the chance to see a story that I had been talking about for two years come to life. Back in 2009, Ngorat was originally titled 1001 Hari, and it dealt with my own life, it dealt with me being overweight and at that time a 26 year old man who had never had a girlfriend in my life. This may seem like nothing but did you know that everytime I talked to a girl in highschool my heart would pump like crazy, I would sweat like nuts and have dry mouth by the end of it. I started to change a bit after high school, I managed to talk to girls without being nervous but I was still freaking out on how to actually get a girl to like me. So I was depressed. All I had to make up for that loneliness was my good friends Syazwan, Azoe, Zac and Taf...thats all I had. So one day my friend Syazwan gives me this one book that basically teaches you on how to be a pick up artist and so on and so forth and seeing that the author of this book was hardly a looker himself, I found myself drawn to the book. Endlessly I read up all I could regarding picking up women and honestly, it worked, I was starting to get out there talking to girls, hooking up and +++. At the essence of it what I found out was that all I needed was self confidence in myself and not to shelter myself underneath this shell that I had covered myself with for the past 26 years.
Ever since I finished film school I wanted to write my own movie, I remember back then I wanted to be one of those arty cats who made artistic movies which nobody gets but after I graduated I had a change of heart, I realized who I was. I was no artist, I never got Stanley Kubrick, Terrence Malick or some other art filmmaker. I grew up on Bond movies, Mel Brook movies hell even Steven Spielberg movies. I was a child of the mainstream but because of my surroundings I thought that I was one of those baret wearing "artistic" people which I was not. I was lying to myself. So one night, in front of my friend Syazwan's house I said this " I wanted to make a movie about people in their late 20s and their relationships". Basically what I really wanted to do was make a movie about me, my hardship of being in my late 20s and single and my friends who were settling down or had it all good. So that idea stemmed into Ngorat and in the finished film its still there if you want to find it. I kept the 1001 Hari project with me for months until I showed it to my colleagues Shaheed, Opie Harris and Nazreen who urged me to present it to Prof Razak who is my boss. Now I was doing marketing at the time, god knows why I was there but it did get me my dream job, and I'm pretty lousy at presentations so I was extremely nervous. Planning 1001 Hari to be a 3 season series, I presented the idea to Prof who took a liking towards the idea of having a hero fail so many dates but striving and succeeding in the end. After that, me and a few other helpers came to bounce ideas to make this screenplay what it is now.
October 3rd 2012. A day before the release of the movie. I had gone to the press screening of the movie a week ago, and god was my heart pounding like hell, it felt like my heart was going to pop right out of me. The movie starts, and there are laughs, good start I reckon but I was still nervous even after the fourth or fifth laugh. I finally managed to calm down halfway through the movie after I realized that everyone seemed to have a good time. Okay, I thought, your movie probably does not suck as bad as you think. Overall I'm happy with the finished product, because for me those characters actually gel'd perfectly as a cast, everyone had great chemistry and the best thing of it for me was the theme of "friendship" was carried on to the end of the movie. You felt like these characters would go down a sinking ship together. These characters also, in my opinion managed to capture the things people my age are going through, friends are getting married, you're getting older and single be it a man or a girl which adds pressure to you from friends and family, a friend who seems to have everything but is empty without love inside, a graduate who has a diploma/degree but is working at a local video store, these are things I see in my life and I think that's in the movie although the main focus will always be about an imaginary friend helping out a loser to find a girl but if you could see more than that, like I did, I think your enjoyment of the movie will be 10 times better.
While some people might have called the movie crap, thats their right to say so but if you ask me if I'm proud of Ngorat...I would answer Yes I am, because it is me? Proud of it...You bet your ass I am.
