Dreamchaser

Photos courtesy of “Dreamchasers”

Vientiane is a sleepy city on the scale of Southeast Asian capitals, and even quieter in the days following Pi Mai (the Lao New Year).

Still, on this balmy April evening, there are plenty of motorbikes, scooters, and other two-wheel vehicles zooming around the Patuxai Arch and down Avenue Lan Xang. Some carry three generations of one family, others a daredevil load of everything and the kitchen sink (sometimes literally).

Two of the riders purposefully follow a pick-up truck with a cameraman standing in the back; he carefully films their every swerve. Also crammed into the bed are a boom-guy and a petite woman with a walkie-talkie (the producer). They roar their way back to the small house serving as their base camp, where the rest of the team waits with the rest of the gear, going over the next day’s route. They’re all exhausted, but filled with the calm energy of people doing exactly what they want to be doing.

This little caravan is the rolling set of “Dreamchaser,” an unconventional travel/documentary show for Thai television focused on a man, a motorcycle, and his search for inspiring people and experiences. Their second season took them from Bangkok to Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and back home again, and though they now have corporate sponsors, the spirit is still pure DIY. What separates this show from typical “on the road” reality TV fare is that it’s a bit of a creative dream for all involved.

The easy rider behind it all is Kamol Sukosol Clapp, aka “Sukie”, age 37, indie-rock impressario turned bike-loving adventurer. Born in Bangkok to a Thai mother and American father but raised partially in the States, Sukie’s fate was sealed when he heard ACDC’s “Highway to Hell” at age 12; he then asked his mother to buy him an electric guitar. In his early twenties, he and a few friends founded a record label called Bakery Music; the first indie label in Thailand, the first to sign acts like grunge rockers Modern Dog and pioneering MC Joey Boy, and the first to profit off of the explosion of the indie sound. He produced big bands and played in his own, the guitar-rock quartet Pru. “We were all young,” he recalls. “We were just kids doing what we wanted to do. We were in the right place at the right time, and it just grew and grew.”

What separates this show from typical “on the road” reality TV fare is that it’s a bit of a creative dream for all involved.

Bakery’s growth led to it being bought by BEC-Tero/Sony BMG in 2004, at which point Sukie left the music biz. Which is when the mid-30s crisis hit. “Since I was 12 I had wanted to play music,” Sukie says, “and now I didn’t know what to do. I had no inspiration, no passion.” After six months of aimlessness, his friend suggested he get out of Bangkok for a while. So he bought a motorcycle and began riding around the countryside. In typical Sukie fashion, “one thing led to another,” and soon a TV show/cultural phenomenon was born.

The idea for the first season was simple: to motorcycle around Thailand, meeting interesting people who are following their dreams, such as the leader of an upcountry elephant sanctuary, or a young doctor on a small southern island who moonlights as a hipster-novelist. Maybe Sukie would stumble into his own next passion in the process. “It’s called Dreamchaser because I’m looking for my next dream,” he says.  “I hoped the audience can watch it and be inspired to follow their own dream too.”

Sukie knew nothing about executive producing and hosting a television show, but luckily he had a good friend to bring along for the ride. “Dreamchaser” director Aditya “Juke” Assarat is a childhood friend of Sukie’s—and also happens to be one of Thailand’s most promising emerging filmmakers. After a similar youth spent in both Bangkok and the States, Assarat attended USC film school, and then became the first Thai filmmaker invited to the Sundance Directors Lab. He was also hand-picked by Mira Nair for a special Rolex mentorship on the strength of his quietly luminous shorts (one is presciently titled Motorcycle) and could have easily stayed in Los Angeles to go for the indie/Hollywood gold. Instead, he returned to Bangkok to work on quirkier projects, like the experimental collaboration Three Friends, assorted shorts, and a concert documentary for Sukie’s band Pru. He also set up Pop Pictures with friends/producers Soros Sukhum and Jetnipith Teerakulchanyut, with the aim of developing and shooting his first fiction feature Wonderful Town, as well as taking on other interesting projects and some commercial work to keep the machinery going.

When Sukie came to him with “Dreamchaser,” Assarat jumped right in. “‘Dreamchaser’ was my introduction to the TV business,” Assarat says. “None of the people involved in the show had ever done anything for TV before. So the first season was sort of learn-as-you-go.”

“It’s called Dreamchaser because I’m looking for my next dream,” he says.  “I hoped the audience can watch it and be inspired to follow their own dream too.”

That first season saw Assarat and his steadfast crew of Pop Pictures collaborators trucking around the Thai countryside, following Sukie as he sped along rural routes, meeting with dreamers of all stripes, and generally enjoying life on the road.

Assarat compares the experience of directing “Dreamchaser” to a musical “jam session”—“All the previous plans go out the window and you mostly work in the moment; it’s very fresh and liberating, especially compared to making a movie, which is more constructed, story-boarded, and planned ahead of time.” The style reflects this—a breezy combination of vérité observation, interviews with featured guests, scenes of Sukie in traveler-mode, the occasional spill, and wild, unscripted moments, all guided by his casual narration and, of course, plenty of road tunes. “My background in music doesn’t really effect the TV show at all, other than making sure we have a damn good soundtrack!” Sukie laughs.

In spring of 2007, the finished program premiered on TITV, and seemed to strike a chord with the audience. Soon, on every upcountry trip he took, Sukie encountered average Thais who always asked the same question: Will there be a Season Two?

In the meantime, he released his memoir about the Bakery years (entitled Bakery & I) and waited for his director. Toward the end of 2007, Assarat’s Wonderful Town debuted on the festival circuit to acclaim, winning prizes from Pusan to Rotterdam. The spare drama follows a city architect coming to a small town hit hard by the 2004 tsunami, and the private confrontations he finds there. Wonderful Town shows a thoughtful auteur at work, with touches reminiscent of Tsai Ming-Liang and Assarat’s countryman Apichatpong Weerasethakul—seemingly lightyears away from the revved-up fun of “Dreamchaser.” Which might be one reason he went back for a second helping.

For “Dreamchaser 2”, Sukie had even bigger plans. He wanted it to be more adventurous, with a tougher riding route. He wanted to go outside the Thai borders and cover all of Indochina (Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam). The first season had the occasional celebrity guest as Sukie’s riding partner—such as the half-Laotian, half-Australian heartthrob Ananda Everingham (who has been called the hardest-working actor in Thai showbusiness). This time Sukie wanted to cast an unknown as his sidekick. And they wanted the show to raise money for charity, after the great success of raising funds through Season One for an elephant sanctuary featured on one episode. In short, they wanted “Dreamchaser” to truly be a vehicle for others’ dreams as well.

Halfway through the filming of Season Two, the “Dreamchaser” gang found themselves in Vientiane, having already weathered food poisoning in Vietnam and a police-escorted journey through the notoriously dangerous “Pink Route” between Bangkok and Mae Sot, among other surprises. There they visited Makphet, a bright and airy restaurant run by Friends International as a training kitchen for former street youth. Sukie joined in the kitchen for a bit as the kids got to work, and later sampled their curries and salads in the dining room. In other stops like Mae Jam, Hoa Binh, and Phnom Penh, they also shot innovative charity and community projects like dams and schools, balancing a social consciousness with the moments of pure adventure.

Riding alongside Sukie the whole way was Hui, the son of fruit farmers from Loei in Northern Thailand who was fresh out of his compulsory army service. He had been selected from an open call of over 200 people, just because he loved riding bikes and didn’t know what to do next with his life. Sukie sees himself as a sort of big-brother to Hui, and even expresses concern about his transition back to “real life.” “He’s loving it. I’m just a bit worried how he’ll adjust after the show, because he says ‘This is what I want to do, ride all day,’ and I think, ‘Well, you have to work, too.’”

Of course, Sukie is the enviable case who appears to have accomplished both in one stroke. Assarat feels as if he’s lucked out as well, but takes on various projects to keep Pop Pictures going and his staff in their jobs. “My life is balanced quite nicely between my films, where I am the director, and various other TV and commercial jobs, where often I am not the director. It’s the second category that keeps everyone employed.”

“Dreamchaser,” now picked up by the bigger Thai TV network Channel 3, is a perfect blend. “‘Dreamchaser’ is the project that everybody most looks forward to every year,” says Assarat. “It’s a two-month long road trip, visiting different places, doing crazy things; who wouldn’t want to be a part of it?” Indeed, for two months the Bangkok hipster kids of Pop Pictures get to transform into a scruffy but efficient unit of guerrilla creativity, bumping along the superhighways and jungle roads: three trucks, two motorcycles, two DV cameras, one mini-camera, one spy-camera, one high-megapixel digital camera, one boom and sound system (hooked up to a perpetually chain-smoking soundman in a vintage t-shirt), helmets, walkie-talkies, cellphones, and backpacks—most adorned with stickers of the retro monkey-face “Dreamchaser” logo. Then, of course, they return to the city for the hard work of editing all that footage.

“It’s a two-month long road trip, visiting different places, doing crazy things; who wouldn’t want to be a part of it?”

“Dreamchaser 2” premiered in June, but this year went beyond just the TV set. The website is expanding with nearly 600 members registered only a few weeks after its launch, and books, DVDs, and bike-rallies are in the pipeline. In August, a large charity concert featuring old Bakery bands like Modern Dog helped raise nearly $9 million Thai Baht ($260,000 USD), and of course, some discussion about Season Three has begun. “We are considering Beijing to Istanbul, but it will require a lot of planning time and financing,” Sukie says. Also, rising star Assarat needs to schedule it around his next feature, a slightly personal tale of a US-raised Bangkok boy returning home, entitled High Society and starring the tireless Ananda Everingham.

The question remains: Has Sukie found his next dream after all? “I feel very fortunate to be doing what I’m doing,” he reflects, but cites a lesson he learned from the music industry: not to compromise himself or his artistic integrity too much, and to always keep it fun. “I want to take ‘Dreamchaser’ as far as I can but not to the point where it becomes too big and I am no longer in control of it, but it’s in control of me.” If ever that is the case, Sukie will probably just speed off into the sunset, chasing the next dream, and creating something undeniably special in the process.