"DogGod": Interview with Writer/Director Ing K. & Producer/Cinematographer/Editor/Actor Brian Bennett

DogGod: Interview with Writer/Director Ing K. & Producer/Cinematographer/Editor/Actor Brian Bennett

By: Nathaniel Simpson

    Throughout the history of cinema, there have been many changes to the ratings and guidelines that are put in place to warn the audience of what they are expected to see in each and every film. However, with each government around the world and their own unique rating systems, there are times where a government can decide to totally ban their audiences from seeing a certain film, whether due to protecting human decency or to not incite outbursts or political/social movements. In recent years, more banned films have been shown to the public, usually in restored formats due to the movie having come out decades prior. Ken Russell's The Devils is a major example of an incredibly controversial film now being shown to the public, and when I started to do coverage for this year's Fantastic Fest, another banned movie caught my attention - Ing K.'s My Teacher Eats Biscuits, which has been retitled to DogGod.

    DogGod follows a man who is convinced his wife is being brainwashed by a cult, prompting him to hire a cult investigator to go with him to try and bring an end to this cult. The cult in this film worships a dog as God, doing similar activities such as mating like dogs and eating out of a dog bowl. The entire movie, while satirical, paints a gripping and uncomfortable portrait of how dangerous and dehumanizing cults can be. The film was banned in 1998, citing that it was offensive to religious institutions, especially Buddhism. 

    Now the film is being shown in a restored cut in Austin, TX today for this film festival, allowing American audiences the chance to see the film in the way the filmmakers intended. Leading up to the premiere of this film, I was lucky enough to talk with Writer and Director Ing K. and Producer/Cinematographer/Editor/Actor Brian Bennett to talk about this picture and what went into making this film. 

Q: At the time of making this film and gearing up for its release, were you expecting the film to be banned? If not, were you surprised by the decision and did you try to appeal the ban?

Brian: Of course, we were on pins and needles. Interestingly, we were not especially worried about the ashram or “My Teacher” himself. What concerned us more were several scenes involving Buddhist monks that were drawn from situations already being openly reported in the Thai news.

One was the monk enjoying himself while lying in a coffin. That had been a major news story, but recreating something like that within a fictional film was another matter entirely. We were also concerned about the interview with the monk who is receiving a massage from a young boy and then casually smoking a cigarette, and the meeting between the religious investigator and the head monk, who rather casually dismisses the investigator’s findings.

These kinds of incidents were being discussed and shown in the news at the time, so the material itself was not hidden from the Thai public. But we knew there could be a very different reaction when those same kinds of situations were dramatized on a cinema screen.

So yes, we were worried that the censors might object. What we could not have anticipated was that the film would effectively disappear for more than twenty-five years.

Ing: No, I wasn’t expecting the ban. I’d set out to make a silly movie, inspired by John Waters’ ‘Pink Flamingo’—inspired by the way he didn’t wait to have everything to make a movie but used family and friends & a fun script that works even if you just recite the lines like a zombie. The challenge was to make a 16 mm full length feature as cheaply as possible.

The first warning sign was when the main villain dropped out just one week before shooting began (on 5 Dec 1995), out of fear for his work visa (he was a foreign freelance journalist) after I gave him the final pages of the script. I ended up having to change the villain’s sex & play her myself, which was crazy & made the film more extreme—the monk’s scenes are from her past life etc.). We had a blast making the film, so it was a real shock when they told me at the opening party of the very first Bangkok Film Festival that we were banned. Our producer Brian Bennett  couldn’t do anything because he was the founding director of the film festival; it was impossible for him to defend the film. I went to the censors (which was still under the police then; now it’s under the ministry of culture) to appeal but they said “not possible because it’s not banned, but it can’t be shown”—straight out of ‘DogGod’ logic!  I was also summoned to be interrogated by the Parliamentary House Committee on Culture, Arts & Religious Affairs, which was quite distressing & led them to conclude that I was “EVIL”. They were all men, members of parliament (congressmen) & I was put in the middle of the room, boxed in by them, like a 360 degree court room: “The whole thinking behind the film is wrong” and Princess Serena, played by my mother, is clearly to make fun of the King’s sister!!! (My weak defense: Why would I do that to my own mother?) That level of gang-raping witch-hunting insanity, which meant I made no other film for almost ten years.

Years later, in 2012, when my Macbeth horror movie ‘Shakespeare Must Die’, funded by the ministry of culture, was banned by the ministry of culture as a national security threat, I could sue the censors & the ministry of culture in Administrative Court—for cases of governmental power abuse. Such a court did not exist back in 1998 when ‘My Teacher Eats Biscuits/DogGod’ was banned. I lost in the first court but appealed & finally won, with the ban lifted & awarded damages, in the Supreme Admin Court in Feb 2024. It took almost 12 years.

Q: When approaching this film, you satirize numerous aspects of life and religion that people around the world face and wrestle within themselves. What was the most important thing for you to capture with this movie and what were you hoping for the audiences to take away from it when it was supposed to originally be released?

 

Ing: The most I had in mind for ‘DogGod’ was for it to be totally absurd and a good laugh. I came to filmmaking as an investigative journalist on environmental issues, so my previous 3 films (‘Thailand For Sale’; ‘Green Menace’; ‘Casino Cambodia’) were all serious, hard-hitting, explicit, libel-proofed documentaries. This dog worship movie was my film school (first time using film, first fiction) & a fun holiday from facts. I wrote the script out of what & whom was available. I’ve never lived in an ashram but I’ve seen a lot of interactions between famous Buddhist monks & their VIP disciples—the flattery, the icky miasma of shared self-congratulation and pretend-holiness. I just basically ripped these scenes off from memory. I had fun writing the script with the actors. I didn’t set out to leave a message per se, except perhaps to say people believe or pretend to believe what they want to believe so you can’t wake them up with facts. This is a challenge I’d often faced as a writer on environmental issues, so I guess it seeped through somehow. The satire is very black and very broad, but strangely, 30 years after we shot it, I realised as I watched it again that the satire is no more, because reality has caught up with our satire. It feels much darker now than when we shot it.

Q: How did you first meet Ing and get involved with this project, and what encouraged you to wear so many different hats during the shooting?  

Brian: I actually met Ing in a very accidental way. I met her mother on a train to Chiang Mai, and Ing was at the station to pick her up. Her mother later invited me to their house for lunch, and that is how Ing and I first met.

From there, we discovered that we both loved to travel and shared a strong interest in environmental issues. We eventually began working together on independent documentary projects, and by the time we made My Teacher Eats Biscuits, which later became DogGod, we already had a strong working relationship.

The reason I ended up doing so many different jobs was really the nature of independent filmmaking. We were working with limited resources, so if something needed to be done, one of us had to do it. I never thought too much about switching roles. You simply dealt with whatever the film needed at that moment.

There were certainly times when it was exhausting, but I never felt that I had taken on too much. In some ways, working across so many areas gave me a very complete understanding of the film, from the original shoot through the editing process and eventually its return to audiences.

Q: I couldn't help but pick out similarities between this film and films that have since come out that grapple with religions and cults. A major one that comes to mind is Ari Aster's "Midsommar". Have you noticed there being some sort of influence from this film that has then translated into projects that have been released since this film came out? 

Ing: Funny you should say that, other people have told me they thought of ‘DogGod’ when they saw ‘Midsomer’, which I like a lot; it’s like ‘DogGod’ with a proper budget, though I’m sure Ari Aster never saw our little film.  I was definitely influenced by the original ‘The Whicker Man’ (1973?) though, especially by the scene of the sexy temptation that the religious cop resists in order to keep his precious virginity, only to find that (spoiler alert) his Christian virginity makes him the perfect human sacrifice. It made a great impression on me when I saw it as a teenager in a double bill with ‘Don’t Look Now’.

Brian: I haven’t seen Midsommar, so I really can’t comment on the similarities you noticed or whether there might be any connection.

More broadly, because DogGod was banned and remained virtually unseen internationally for so many years, I would be very hesitant to claim that it directly influenced films that came afterward. If audiences now see parallels with more recent films about religion, cults and belief, I find that fascinating, but I think those comparisons are better left to viewers and critics.

Q: There are, without a doubt, moments in this movie that are incredibly uncomfortable and make the viewer squirm in their seats. What was it like filming these sort of controversial and hard-to-watch scenes? In addition, what was the vibe usually on set? 

Ing: The atmosphere on set was hilarious. We had a lot of fun. That’s why the official response took us so much by surprise. On the horror movie ‘Shakespeare Must Die’ I did have to shoot a very nasty scene indeed—the Lady Macduff gang rape in the middle of the night at a security checkpoint. I felt really really bad asking the guys to kill the child and rape the woman. I explained that we had a good reason for depicting such a thing, for the sake of all the people who were killed in extrajudicial killings or ‘disappeared’ in the Southern Unrest and the War on Drugs. This might sound like a director’s manipulative bullshit but I meant it. 

Brian: For me personally, one of the most challenging scenes was the evening sequence in which Malee confronts Victor Strong while he is investigating around the ashram.

I was already juggling several responsibilities on the production, and then suddenly I had to switch completely into Victor Strong, the cult investigator, who finds himself unexpectedly drawn into Malee’s sensual power. Going from crew member, to investigator, to an actor playing a man being seduced was quite a transition. It was challenging, but also a lot of fun.

Despite some of the difficult or provocative material, we always had a very good atmosphere on set. It was a bare-bones production, both in terms of crew and resources, and everyone understood that we simply had to do the best we could with what we had.

Ing was always extremely focused and determined. Even with the most testing scenes, her attention was on finding a way to make the scene work and getting what she needed onto the screen. 

Q: This movie was banned more than twenty-five years ago, and it is now having a major slot at Fantastic Fest. Why do you think now is the best time to show this movie, and what do you hope modern audiences take away from it in this modern climate?

Ing: It’s amazing. I just hope people have a good laugh & enjoy the film. The world has caught up with the movie in the most eerie way, so it hardly seems satirical any more. The Day-Dream Session scene is even more relevant now with cellphones & social media addiction. 1995 is not that long ago, really, yet it was the cusp of total change.

Brian: I don’t really think it is a question of “now.” To me, DogGod has no particular time boundary. Its story and its ideas are universal.

The film was essentially kept in a closet for twenty-five years before it finally received a theatrical release on a single screen in Bangkok. The audience response was wonderful. Word of mouth began to build, and we were even selling more tickets than some of the Hollywood films playing on the other screens.

What was frustrating was that we could not persuade the major cinema chains to take the film, and distributors showed little interest. I have sometimes wondered whether the old description of the film as being “offensive to all religions” continued to follow it. Religion is such a sensitive subject that even an old label like that can make people cautious, regardless of what is actually in the film.

At the same time, I feel DogGod may be even more relevant today than it was twenty-five years ago. It deals with belief, power, charismatic figures and the extraordinary things people can be persuaded to accept.

There is a line from Victor Strong in the film: “Even a dog worshipper could become President of the United States.”

When we filmed that in 1997, it was deliberately outrageous. Today, I think audiences may hear it somewhat differently. That is one of the remarkable things about finally allowing this film out of the closet: the world has changed, but many of the questions DogGod asks have not.