This is Dain Said, director of the new movie, Dukun. I got to know him, sometime in '74 in London. I used to work for his late father, Dato Said Zain in the late Tun Mustapha's London office which was situated near Euston Station. The company was called Kudat Properties and Tun Mustapha was Sabah's Chief Minister. But if I remember he had already resigned or was forced out of the position soon after.Dain was about 17 then and I, 20. He was a little aloof at first. I remember his late mother, Auntie Esah telling me that he did not have many Malay friends. We're somehow related too through Auntie Esah's mother, Mak Timah Manan. But probably, distant relations because I don't remember them when I was growing up in KL.But later, he was OK and I used to visit his house quite often even after I had stopped working for Uncle Said and introduced him to some of my friends then, Salim Yatim, Hashim Natt, Ana & Ani Rahman...
He was an intense teenager a bit of a rebel without a cause and that intensity hasn’t shown any signs of calming down when I met him 4 months or so ago on a Sunday having teh tarek at a stall near Jalan Chan Chin Mooi, Setapak.
I remember that he was a big reader; jacket pocket was never without a book, purchased in second book shops or at any one of the flea markets he frequented. He introduced me to Portobello which also became a favourite weekend jaunt of mine.
His bedroom walls were lined with bookshelves, filled top to bottom, left to right and if you had picked up any of his books, you'll find them all dog-eared and scribbled with notes, marks and what have you in his distinctive handwriting -- high upper zone, and low lower zones. There were no clean, unadulterated books and I didn't remember a plain wall...
He read the books and he read the authors, I believing studying the authors’ thought processes, circumstances and experiences from one book to the next.
In many ways, I was quite influenced by him and for awhile also ‘followed’ the authors as I read their books. It wasn’t an ad hoc picking up a book in a store and another one after finishing that … I would read and search out other books by an author and maybe would read 3 or books from the same writer. But I couldn’t follow the regime, because I could not read deeper into what the author ‘was on about’. I was and still am a superficial reader, taking pleasure in the story-telling, the beauty of the words and phrases and that’s about all. Nothing beyond this, so it’s been haphazard, ad hoc reading then and now.
(to be continued...I'm zonked)
After flirting with the idea of marine architecture, he landed up studying photography and film, and really this was and is his forte – what he was made for. But I hadn’t thought for a minute he would be working in the world of advertising. I thought he would be a renowned writer because he had shown me a school essay or something that he wrote and it was brilliant.
But directing commercials was what he did soon after returning from England. None of us thought he and his three sisters would ever come back – they were so English. But come back they did, after the death of Uncle Said, except for the youngest one. She did try living here, but her husband could not get a decent job. So she’s back in England.
But now Dain is directing a full-feature movie and fitting his character, it’s an occult movie based, on the infamous Mona Fandey case -- the 'bomoh' that murdered an UMNO state assemblyman Dato Mazlan Idris sometime in July 1993. CONGRATULATIONS DAIN! I am so incredibly elated for you!
You can read an interview by Philip Golingai in The Star here: http://www.star-ecentral.com/news/story.asp?file=/2006/7/23/movies/14888038&sec=movies
