Enjoy the trip

Uri Marantz: 'I really like that how the guy talks is sort of one big stream of consciousness' Photo: Courtesy of POFF

Uri Marantz’s King Khat is a high energy hybrid that, appropriately for a film about ‘legal highs’, is mixture of live action and animation filled with trippy visuals. It tells the story of Gabi Shalev (Oshri Cohen) who became an accidental - and extremely low key - drug lord, of sorts. A scientist with an expensive coke habit, his solution for the lack of cash in his bank account was to set about devising his own synthetic drug that mimicked the effects of the psychoactive plant khat. The resulting substance became a sensation in Israel and beyond, with this film charting the journey in parallel with recounting the love story between Gabi and his wife.

This latter element is crucial to the tale - and the main reason that Gabi - not his real name - is kept anonymous in the film. Speaking to Marantz at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival , where the film had its premiere in the Rebels With A Cause section, he said: “If it was up to him, if his wife wasn't part of the decision, he would stand up on the table and say, ‘This is me’.

Marantz describes the film as “a broken love story”, although it could be perhaps considered a dual romance since it is about Gabi’s love of his wife and party drugs. Marantz says that, in fact, he knew Gabi for a long time before he realised he had any connection to the drugs world.

He explained: “It was a classic Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde story. I actually knew Dr. Jekyll for 20 years. One night, about 12 or 13 years ago, I I met Mr Hyde and I said, ‘I want to do a film about you.’”

Director Uri Marantz: 'For me, cinema and art are always something you build one on top of another' Photo: Courtesy of POFF

Using the animation began because of the need to retain anonymity but Marantz also says: “I really like that how the guy talks is sort of one big stream of consciousness.”

It’s a film that generally goes with the flow, as ideas tumble over one another and motifs emerge and re-emerge as it goes along. An elephant, introduced as an example of animals who like to get drunk, will later be seen in Ganesh form and as an elephant in the room.

Marantz says the use of voiceover was one way of retaining the stream of consciousness feeling of the film. Given the light-hearted and breezy tone, the inspiration for the animation came from an unlikely source - Ari Folman’s First Lebanon War documentary Waltz With Bashir.

“It sort of gave me the idea,” he says. He adds that it helped him to raise finance for the film as well because “every film fund wanted to do the next Waltz With Bashir”.

Animator Nir Matarasso collaborated with him on the project. “He really built the animated language of the film,” says Marantz, “We should also mention Dafna Englander who made the backgrounds.”

Noting that they shot using green screen, he adds that he “didn’t want it to be realistic” but stylised instead. He adds: “Nir is a genius and working with him isn't easy. So I figured out I should tell him what I want the scene to do and if I have some certain elements or even a very specific one like, ‘Use this artwork as a reference or I want to see that specific building in Tel Aviv’. But most of it, I really gave him an entry point and an exit point and told him, ‘Do the best you do’, because that's his best work.”

When I ask him about the inclusion of specific artwork, including Campbell’s soup cans and a direct reference to Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, he says: For me, cinema and art are always something you build one on top of another.”

Marantz notes that he also references Moby Dick, when Gabi says, “Call me Gabi Shalev”, and adds “if you look for those tools, they are there”. He says the use of classical music, including Mozart’s Lacrimosa, was down to a question of cash.

Uri Marantz: 'I really like that how the guy talks is sort of one big stream of consciousness' Photo: Courtesy of POFF

“If I would put my soundtrack, as someone who grew up in the Seventies and Eighties there would be a lot of British post-punk. But we couldn't afford that,” he says. And, in the spirit of that building he was talking about he notes that the inclusion of Wagner’s Ride Of The Valkyries was more of a reference to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now than the original opera.

He adds: “Sometimes it’s open, you make the connection you want.”

There is original scoring in the film as well, from Stav Ben Shachar and Noam Vardi, and when I say it puts me in mind of silent cinema accompaniment, it turns out that Marantz is a fan.

“One of my childhood heroes is Charlie Chaplin. My grandfather sort of adored him as a cinephile and he has had these 8mm rolls of his shorts. And I think he is a great director. If you take the Claire de Lune moment, I tried to direct Chaplin dialogue. Another thing I took from Chaplin, it's a small thing, if you notice sometimes when you see the extra talks, but it's sort of rubbish. That's also from City Lights. Sound came and he didn’t know what to do with it so he did this wonderfully funny gibberish.

When it comes to the genre of the film and I suggest it’s a docufiction hybrid, Marantz says: “I can live with that term”. He’s very clear, however, that he doesn’t want King Khat to be pigeon-holed as a straightforward doc.

“My premiere screening was in the Haifa Film Festival and I didn't want it to be in the documentary section.” In the end that’s where it was placed, however, with Jerusalem Film Festival also wanting to give it a documentary slot.

“It’s not a documentary - I’m the director. It’s the worst gas-lighting of my life!”

He adds: “ I think that it doesn't matter. I think people have a wrong perception of what a documentary film is. If you're a journalist and you're doing a TV piece and then you have to bring the facts. But a documentarian isn’t a journalist, he’s a filmmaker and he has to be loyal only to one thing, telling the story. I think the first film in the world that is regarded as a documentary is Nanook of the North, by Robert J Flaherty, from 1922. The term was coined later for his second film, Moana. And it was considered and it's still considered, the first anthropological film and the real way of the Inuit - then they called it Eskimo - life and I think, in every Western culture, the vision of the Alaska Native is from the poster of the film. Now, we know that this documentary's true story is that he actually cast Nanook, who was an Inuit, but grew up with white people in some place in Alaska and never hunted like an Eskimo till Flaherty showed him how. The igloo he built is actually half an igloo because he needed lighting. And that's regarded as the first documentary!”

As for what’s next, definitely no more animation, which Marantz admits he doesn’t really like “as a concept”. His future project will be “a vampire movie”. He add: “It happens in Israel, 20 years ago, there’s also some context of the conflict. There were sort of riots in the 2000s and then it finishes on 911. It’s an adaptation of a book a friend of mine wrote.”