“You’re watching the same movie as everyone else, as it’s told visually”

Presenting the Middle East and North Africa premiere of John Woo’s “Silent Night” at the Red Sea Film Festival, actor Joel Kinnaman noted the rare opportunity to allow “everyone to watch the same movie. The actor is referring to the fact that Woo’s first American film in 20 years features no language – no spoken language, of course – and therefore doesn’t need subtitles.

The characters in the revenge thriller don’t have a single line of dialogue throughout the film, with the only snippets of speech coming from diegetic music, a few brief radio broadcasts and phone messages.

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Talk with Variety In Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the Swede said he suspected early on that the film was going to be translated in a way that “no other film does.”

“I grew up watching films with subtitles but there is always a nuance in the language that gets lost. You can still have the experience, but some nuances are missing. (In “Silent Night”), this doesn’t happen. You’re watching the same movie as everyone else, just as it’s told visually.

Cinema’s ability to connect with audiences in this way is why Kinnaman left Sweden for the United States, the actor said. “I wanted to make films on a global scale and tell stories for everyone, so this was a great opportunity to do that.”

“For ‘Silent Night,’ I had to prepare emotionally much more intensely than usual, because all I had were my eyes and the micro-movements that happen in the skin when you’re deep affected by intense emotion or thoughts,” the actor explained about the experience of playing without dialogue, a new challenge for the action star. “I had to control every muscle in my face.”

Kinnaman then reflected on the unusual filming by stating how their voice is “an important tool” for actors, but went on to say it was also “a way to cheat a little bit.” “When you say a sentence, it can become a channel for your emotion, but there is also a bad version of it. We see it a lot on American television, what I like to call whispering. This is when actors modulate their voices to make it seem like they are emotional when they don’t actually have that emotion in them.

Kinnaman is in Jeddah not only to promote his latest film, but also as a member of the Red Sea Film Festival competition jury, alongside President Baz Luhrmann and fellow actors Freida Pinto, Amina Khalil and Paz Vega. “It’s been interesting,” he said of the experience. “We’ve only just started jury duty, but to be able to sit down and watch these films with so much intensity from an area where I’ve only watched a few films has been incredible.”

The actor added that he found the rapid development of the Saudi film industry exciting.

“I think this cultural mix is extremely important for the entire region and the world. There are people in the West who don’t really realize it yet and don’t want to associate themselves (with the region) until things are perfect. I think it’s such a retrospective way of looking at things and a lack of vision, a misunderstanding of the impact of the Middle East in general and what’s happening here.”

The actor was recently set to shoot his first feature film in Saudi Arabia, Neill Blomkamp’s alien abduction thriller, “They Found Us.” The film, which was in its pre-production phase, was to be set in the vast Saudi region of Neom, but was put on hold in October to rework the project’s financial structure. Hollywood productions have already started making the trip to Saudi Arabia, with Rupert Wyatt’s “Desert Warrior,” starring Anthony Mackie and Ben Kingsley, filmed in Neom, and Gerard Butler’s action vehicle “Kandahar” filmed entirely in AlUla.

“It’s clear that the efforts being made are genuine,” Kinnaman said of the country’s thriving film industry. “They have the resources to build studios and create opportunities for international projects to come here. Of course they will need local education to create a foundation for these larger productions to build on, because when you have a big project you have to bring in the whole crew from outside and it becomes more Dear.

When asked if we could expect to see him in Saudi Arabia more often in the near future, the actor was adamant: “I wouldn’t be surprised. I wouldn’t be surprised at all.

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