A dream come true

MALAYSIAN director Rizal Halim has just directed his first feature film, an Australian suspense thriller movie titled Lurking Woods.
Opening in cinemas here on April 6, the RM1.2 million movie follows a group of six university students who are seeing each other again after a year apart. They then decide to spend a weekend in a cabin in the woods.
Unknown to them, a masked man has been spying on them from the moment they arrive. One by one, the friends are slowly killed off.
The movie stars Daniel Berenger, Hope Devaney, Troy Coward, Dominique Shenton, Kyle James Sargon, Chloe Brown and Michael Rainone.
Rizal promises plenty of twists and turns in the movie to keep the audience in suspense.
“I use the rustic landscape of Australia to add an air of eeriness to the scene,” says this actor-turned-director. “The landscape is one of the attractions in the film.”
He also believes that since the movie is in English, he has an easier access to worldwide distribution.
Rizal, who was born in Batu Gajah in Perak, attributed his interests in the arts to his parents.
“My mother was a teacher and she started a theatre club in the school where she was teaching and I was a student there,” he recalls.
The theatre club went on to compete in several performing arts competitions and he believes that was where he caught the acting bug.
His late father, who was also a teacher, loved photography.
“I remembered he had many cameras,” says Rizal, adding that his father’s interest sparked a similar passion in him for photography as well as using the camera to tell stories.
Rizal went on to act in several Malaysian films and television productions. He even had a chance to appear in Hollywood movies such as Beyond Rangoon and Anna & the King.
Over the years, he started writing film scripts and taking short courses in film directing.
In the meantime, to support his passion, he took on other jobs such as a temporary teacher, a bank employee, a deejay in shopping malls and even as a manager of two cinemas.
“I was watching a lot of movies when I was managing the cinemas,” he recalls with a laugh. “I remember watching Jurassic Park 76 times!
“As time passed, I realised that I did not want to just watch movies, I wanted to make them.”
In 2014, he co-directed with M. Jamil on the Malaysian cult movie, Dia. Then, he worked as director of photography for the short film, Still Life, about a forced marriage.
The short was shown at the Cannes Film Festival the same year.
His friend, Malaysian-born Rod Manikam who has a production house in Australia, heard of his small success at Cannes and wanted to watch the short.
“I met Rod for the first time 10 years ago when we were acting in a Malaysian Chinese-language film called Hired Killers,” says Rizal. “We both played policemen and became friends after that.”
Rod was impressed with Still Life and the next thing Rizal knew, the two of them were in discussion to make a film together, which led to Lurking Woods.
Rizal is already working on his second film, again set in Australia, called Tainted Getaway. It also has an Australian cast.
This romantic action film centres on a Russian girl who comes to the Australian city of Perth to suprise her boyfriend working there.
She gets a rude shock when she learns that her boyfriend has been cheating on her.
At the same time, a prison convict who is on the run after escaping from the police, takes the girl as a hostage. Slowly, a romance develops between the hostage and e kidnapper.
Things seem to be going well for Rizal but he admits: “My road to success has not been an easy one. There were a lot of disappointments, failures and obstacles.
“But you can’t let them break you. They are supposed to make you strong.”