Saw: It was very special to be able to move people in such a way with your story... (Photo: SooPhye)
Horses, rain and luck. It is tempting when speaking to Saw Teong Hin to link him with zodiac compatibility. Born in the Year of the Tiger, a pairing with the sign of the Horse is said to be perfect. Think of the scenes in Puteri Gunung Ledang — undoubtedly his most lauded film — and the images of horses emerging upon the rise is always invoked. Think then of the spectacle that was the opening of the Southeast Asian Games (SEA Games) in Kuala Lumpur in 2017, and the image of the Bajau horsemen with their well-heeled ponies striding across the stadium remains one of the most dramatic (and proud) recollections.
“In Puteri Gunung Ledang, we had an issue with horsemen coming over the rise; we also had issues with not having enough horses or horsemen to ride them,” Saw recalls. “And just before the opening ceremony of the SEA Games, there was a terrible downpour and we were so afraid that the ground would be slippery and not conducive for the Bajau horsemen.” Meanwhile, on the eve of the staging of his theatre adaptation of Hái-Kînn Sin-Lōo (You Mean the World To Me) — his searing autobiographical reflection on mothers, family tensions and “sacrifice” — the sky glowered, the clouds gathered and a tempest unleashed.
The play took place at the historic Khoo Kongsi in Penang, in the open air, as part of the George Town Festival in 2014. “It was the technical rehearsal,” he remembers. “The whole writing process of the film, which I adapted into a play for the festival, had been exhilarating and cathartic, and it was the same with each night of rehearsal — I wept each time. But the night before the opening, we had the most horrendous technical rehearsal: A huge storm tore down the stage, and the stone carvings on the rooftop were struck by lighting and came crashing down, even cutting one of our technicians. We had to abandon the rehearsal altogether. When we regrouped the next day, everyone was just quiet, attending to their own thing: We were still sewing back props and curtains at the point when the doors opened, and I really thought to myself this would be the end of my theatre career,” he confesses.
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The play, however, performed entirely in Penang Hokkien, intense in its stage interactions and expansiveness, inspired much of the deep sense of community and empathy that only a theatrical experience — with its immediacy and palpability — could afford.
“The opening night’s audience were largely people from the neighbourhood — we had disrupted their lives all this while, after all, and so we invited them,” Saw explains. “But when the lights went down after the performance, there was complete silence. People stood still and they seemed so moved. When we looked closely, many of them were in tears. It was very special to be able to move people in such a way with your story. I never thought I could get that, and it was actually one of the magical moments in my career. So, given all that happened the night before, I really do believe in luck.”
“Luck,” as the fat angel of cinema, Alfred Hitchcock, insists, “is everything.” And in the course of conversation, “luck”or “being at the right place at the right time” remain constant refrains, seeming to belie the meticulousness, keen sense of proportion and perspective that audiences have to come to expect from a Saw Teong Hin film, or stage production.
From his earliest creation — the music video for KRU’s Fanatik — the first Malaysian video clip nominated for the MTV Video Music Awards in New York; to the famed Puteri Gunung Ledang, which bagged five awards at the Malaysian Film Festival 2004 including Best Director for Saw, with the film later screened at the 61st Venice Film Festival; and the grand spectacle that was the opening ceremony of the 2017 SEA Games (with music created by the redoubtable Michael Veerapen) encapsulating the most dignified array of Malaysian cultural life, from the voice of the Mak Yong grand actress Che Siti binti Dollah to the majesty of Bajau horsemen all within the confines of the Bukit Jalil National Stadium.
Saw’s “versatility” is explained instead, by him, as “foolhardiness” and a kind of “lack of knowledge of what I am getting myself into”. A coming together of what must be a sense of “thrill” and certain “impulsiveness” appears to serve as his aesthetic impulse. “What really works for me,” he says, “honestly … is this lack of knowledge that gives you a certain fearlessness. If you stop and consider everything, you will be paralysed, you simply won’t move. To some degree, the ignorance of the realities sometimes props you up. It works a lot like that with me. From the time I started with the KRU Fanatik video, then Puteri Gunung Ledang, then the SEA Games opening, and later You Mean The World To Me, it is courage born out of the lack of consideration of the realities.”
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Perhaps the “foolhardiness” is not so incredulous for one whose sense of cinema and a long involvement in the industry could best be described as remote. “Honestly, it never ever occurred to me that I would get into this industry,” he says candidly. “As a child, my father and I used to go to the cinema every weekend, but that was just ‘our thing’ — my father and I.
“What I went on to do was study double physics and mathematics at the NUS (National University of Singapore). But I went astray and didn’t graduate. Embarrassed, I didn’t want to go back to Penang. I couldn’t face my parents and thought I would come to KL and just make good of myself.
“Here, I was involved in a TV commercial shoot and thought to myself ‘this is pretty interesting and I can do this’, so I actively sought a job in TV as a lowly crew — making coffee, sweeping floors — but I was so happy.
“It was as if I had found my rhythm, and this is where I was meant to be. I was making really bad money, but I was still so happy, felt so fulfilled, and at that time, the advantage of starting in an industry was that there was no specialisation — you came and did everything. That was a great education.”
After a series of “poachings”, which witnessed forays into advertising, production and setting up a post-production house, the opportunity to direct arose. KRU’s Fanatik paved the way for the making of other music videos for artists such as Ziana Zain, Ning Baizura and Amy, among others, before “I got bored and was questioning where I was at”.
A chance meeting with actress Tiara Jacquelina and scriptwriter Mamat Khalid led not just to his directorial debut, but also a near-complete revision of the film’s plot. “We were just having a social conversation and I didn’t know Tiara wanted to make a film. She asked me what I thought of the Puteri Gunung Ledang story, and off the cuff I said, I think it’s a dumb story. Why? Because you don’t know why the Princess turned down the King and you don’t know what eventually happened to her. It was so open-ended, and I just couldn’t understand the obsession with a legend in which you don’t know what happened,” he says. “Then Tiara said, ‘Oh, but we want to make a film …’ and to her credit, she passed me the script, asked me to read it and tell her how I felt.
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“The script was an action adventure with a love element in it. And what I thought worked for me was the love element, more than the action adventure. That night — very late at 3am, 4am — I wrote a treatment to say what strikes me most is the love story, and that this is a great platform for us to highlight our culture, language and our people, and then I faxed it across at 5am or something.”
“The next morning, I got a call from the producer at that time who said Tiara loved it and that’s how it all began. My one principle for Puteri Gunung Ledang was that you never learn your history from a film,” he cautions. For all that is said of luck, there is also the sense of adventurism (or “foolhardiness”), giving to chance, and of filmic possibilities, that carves the Saw Teong Hin way. His film Ini Kalilah, made to commemorate the “euphoria of GE14”, was completed within the shortest span of time, and his latest venture, the horror film Laknat, affirms this further.
Laknat is set in a small village, and is about a man whose sister dies a violent death. Being overwhelmed by the episode, he turns to black magic for answers and, as in all such films, everything unravels. The film, which stars Aeril Zafrel and Puteri Balqis, among others, “treads a line between what is real and what is not. So much of it is in your head. It really explores what prompts a person to abandon reason and go all the way towards the supernatural knowing that it never ends up in any good. The state of mind that compels you to believe whatever you come across. That aspect really floats my boat,” Saw explains.
Where the contemporary, popular horror film landscape is populated by the variety of the ghoul and the garish, Laknat may offer insight into the enigmatic and deceptive. “Actually, every time I work on a film, I look for resonance or a challenge. If you look back on my filmography, everything I’ve done has been different, from the historical epic to black comedy to satire to a sports movie to a musical. Horror, I realise, is something I have not done, and so I jumped on the bandwagon. So here we are,” he offers. “Of course, we only know how to do things our own way, to fall back on certain sensibilities. I hope this sensibility towards horror will resonate. I don’t know.”
On the eve of the screening of You Mean The World To Me, a moving short film of Saw and the cinematographer, the steady and reliable, rather legendary Christopher Doyle, was produced by The Peak magazine: A scene features Saw looking plaintively into the distance, speaking of the intimacy of the experience, the healing of pain, and being firm in the matter of “creating only what you believe in”.
Yet, it would seem that there comes a point in a filmmaker’s pursuit when the quest is one of surrender and faith. Or, in the words of Saw himself, “to hold your breath and create magic”.
Watch the trailer here:
This article first appeared on May 26, 2025 in The Edge Malaysia.
