Saudi filmmaker Malik Nejer discusses his movie ‘Head to Head’ and his ambitions for future work

DUBAI: Few within the Saudi leisure trade know the view from the highest fairly in addition to visionary filmmaker Malik Nejer. His beloved animated collection “Masameer County” is extra standard than ever, greater than a decade faraway from its humble YouTube beginnings, having conquered each the native field workplace and international streaming. However what do you do when you’ve reached the height? For Nejer, the reply was easy: discover one other.  

With the brand new Netflix movie “Head to Head,” Nejer has ventured into uncharted territory for him, directing his first live-action mission from a script by his long-time collaborator and Myrcott Animation Studio co-founder Abdulaziz Almuzaini. Whereas the daring aesthetics and madcap sensibility will really feel acquainted to his legion of followers, the transfer out of the animated world was a tough take a look at for the 38-year-old storyteller, and one that can perpetually change his method. 

“It truly gave me enormous respect for my colleagues who’re doing live-action (movies), as a result of the logistics of this factor are a nightmare. In animation, it’s solely a query of money and time. However with live-action, you possibly can’t simply throw cash at one thing and count on it to get higher. There’s a lot that may go flawed,” Nejer tells Arab Information. 

“However somewhat than deter me, these limitations ignited my creativity. I grew to become fascinated by all the issues that wanted to be solved, and that battle goes to tell my work going ahead, each animated and live-action. I’m going to place limitations (on it) and see what occurs,” he continues. 

“Head to Head”, (Ras B Ras in Arabic), is about within the fictional Saudi metropolis of Bathaika. If Riyadh is the nation’s New York, then that is its Gotham Metropolis, a darkish fantasy conceived by Almuzaini that allowed Nejer’s creativity to run wild.  

“This was a piece of beautiful creativeness, from high to backside. It was a totally realized world,” says star Adel Radwan, who performs certainly one of three bumbling heroes trying to navigate the lawless metropolis. “The artwork course, the costumes, the colours, all the things. Even for us within the forged, we had been dazzled by all the things round us whereas on set. Each single element, from the names of the road indicators and retailers to the costumes of the consumers, was one thing particular.” 

The problem of making the world was an surprising one for Nejer. Initially, the movie was imagined to mark Almuzaini’s first main mission unbiased from Nejer along with his new manufacturing firm Sirb. When he obtained the decision, he was initially resistant, ultimately satisfied as a result of he knew in addition to the producers did that nobody understood Almuzaini’s distinctive imaginative and prescient fairly like he did.  

“This movie discovered me — I didn’t go trying to find it,” he says. “However I stated to myself, ‘Although this isn’t my story, I’m going to do my greatest to direct it and hopefully put one thing of myself in it, too. My crew wants me, and I can’t allow them to down.’”  

To make the transition much less daunting, Nejer’s first transfer was to create the complete movie within the medium he’s most conversant in, then use that because the template for what he created on set.  

“We truly animated the complete movie, an hour-and-a-half of it. That was massively useful for me, as a result of we had been in a position to take a look at all the things from a storytelling perspective, after which throw all of it within the bin and begin from scratch realizing precisely what we had been going for,” says Nejer.  

The director continued to lean on his creative expertise all through manufacturing, along with his sturdy visible sense serving to to create an immediately recognizable search for every of the lead characters.  

“What actually helped us make these characters so iconic is Malik’s drawing expertise,” says Radwan. “Although he had already imagined how the characters would look on the whole, every certainly one of us had an entire day to attempt each doable outfit and look. Malik would then enter and go, ‘No, not that one.’ Nothing labored proper till we tried what he had drawn. Every time we lastly did, that was the second after we would say, ‘That is the one.’” 

For Radwan and fellow stars Abdulaziz Alshehri and Ziyad Alamri, Nejer’s insightful directing fashion helped them unlock points of their characters that hadn’t been clear simply from studying the script. 

“Malik helped us by evaluating every character to an animal, and that helped us rather a lot in figuring them out,” says Radwan. 

“We’d follow it throughout rehearsal, and it gave us a lot extra confidence. I used to be a lion,” provides Alshehri. 

“I used to be a porcupine. Adel was a panda!” says Alamri with fun. 

As joyful because the expertise was for Nejer, who reveled within the absurdity that Bathaika demanded from him, he sees the movie as a enjoyable train somewhat than an exemplar of the work he’ll make sooner or later. At 38, Nejer is fascinated about making movies which can be extra mature than the fabric that excited him as a younger man. He sees himself shifting into the world of drama subsequent.  

“I believe my profession will find yourself having an analogous trajectory to filmmakers like Adam McKay and Todd Phillips, who spent years making motion pictures like ‘Step Brothers’ and ‘The Hangover’ respectively earlier than shifting into award-winning initiatives like ‘The Huge Brief’ and ‘Joker’ as they obtained older,” says Nejer. 

These examples, nonetheless, don’t paint the right picture of what he aspires to. Nejer doesn’t lust after Oscar gold, and has no actual aspirations within the arthouse world both. What he needs, as a substitute, is to inform tales which can be extra private to him and the experiences he had rising up exterior of Riyadh. 

“That is simpler stated than carried out, in fact. The market has an urge for food for movies aimed toward massive field workplace, and there’s all the time a spot for small pageant movies, however pure drama? That’s a troublesome ask in the mean time. Nonetheless, that’s the place my coronary heart is. I grew up in a area ridden with trauma, and there’s a whole lot of issues I wish to course of by means of my work,” says Nejer. 

“I believe I’m at a stage in my life the place I’ve had sufficient industrial success to be ok with myself, and I don’t have aspirations to be a world-renowned director. I’m very fortunate to be on this place and have so many individuals supporting me, and I need to use that to inform private tales. Perhaps I attempt that for 5 years after which I’m going again to pure comedy, however proper now I need to experiment on a deeper stage. There’s a lot buried deep within the coronary heart of Saudi Arabia that I have to discover.”