It is easy to
get caught up with Bradley Liew’s enthusiasm. When he talks, you listen. He has
this schoolboy excitement that sucks you in and gets you smiling without
noticing—whether it is analyzing the result of some incidental people-watching
or talking the pitfalls of screenwriting, it is relentlessly fascinating processing
the ways he processes the world.
It is even easier
to not realize just how young he is: at age 27, Bradley’s has had been through
the film festival grinder, and came out all the brighter for it. With his
stunning debut, Singing in Graveyards,
premiering in the Venice International Film Critics’ Week to rave reviews, it
is clear that here is a young director on his way to finding a voice that will
be remembered.
Ahead of
the Singapore premiere of Singing in
Graveyards, Alfonse Chiu talks to Bradley about personal histories, and
giving a film about identities its own inimitable flair.
What was your family like as you were growing
up?
My father
was a seaman—which meant he would be away for months on end—while my mother was
a housewife, so I grew up in a kitchen of women. My entire childhood as I
remembered was in the kitchen, with my mother, my aunts, and the other women of
the family. Art was never something pushed: my mother would ask me whether I
wanted to take up painting, and I would say ‘Yes’ and do some painting, but the
whole family was never really artistic per
se. I do recall, however, that my father had a collection of about a thousand films
on VHS, Laser Discs, VCDs and DVDs. Every time he returned from the ship, we
would go to this DVD place and pick around ten films to watch for the period he
was back. This was in the days when DVD was insanely popular. In a way, I guess
it was my father that cultivated my interest in film.
Have you always felt that you have a propensity for making art?
Painting
was never an obsession to me; it was just something I did on the weekend to
pass the time. It was not until high school that, for some reason, I found
myself in theatre, directing plays. That was actually very strange looking back,
because in a Malaysian secondary school, it was not what one would normally do
outside of curriculum—one was expected to do athletics or music or more
studies, not drama. Our school was fortunate enough to have a group of English
teachers that did theatre, who got us young ones all curious and excited over
it. The pieces we did were written by us ourselves and we’d stay back after
school to practice for competition events. Through the year, there would be something
like a football league, but for theater, if you may; it was all very strange but
wonderful. I directed around two to three plays in high school, and then I
started making really bad short films.
In your high school years, or?
Yes, I
actually started then. A while back, I met some friends from high school and we
talked about the first film we ever made. It was a class project that we shot
on a Betacam. We had to do a storytelling project and we made a horror film in
my house. That was the first short film I ever did, and it was hilarious! We
got the whole class together, and we casted the shyest guy in class as the
killer. We had good fun, but…..the footage was lost!
I started
making short films more seriously when I went to college. What really drove me
was that I could not relate to Malaysian independent films at the time. Back
then for me, going to the cinema meant you would see either mainstream
Malaysian cinema, or Hollywood, or independent new wave cinema that I couldn't
relate to because it was in Mandarin. Maybe it was due to my background growing
up: I am ethnically Chinese but I could not speak Mandarin. At that time, I
knew more Malay than I know Mandarin. Now, I know more Tagalog than I know
Mandarin. Looking back now, I know that you don’t need to master a language to
relate to films. But that is because I was very lucky to have been able to be exposed
to different kinds of cinema world cinema. Now I can really appreciate those
films. Back then, I had a terrible attention span.
I guess making
films for me at that time was a search for identity. Trail and error. More
error than success.
How would you describe film culture in Malaysia and
how it has changed?
I am not
sure if it has changed so much. I just saw the latest box office takings and it
proves that we still go to the cinemas. Back then, it was more hit-and-miss
than anything. One would just go to the cinema and watch a Malaysian film and
hope for the best. I think the first independent Malaysian film I watched was Yeo
Joon Han’s Sell Out, which was a
musical that also went to Venice Critics Week. It was intentionally badly sung,
a what-if of if everyday people decide to make a musical. It was hilarious.
When I was
starting out, it was hard to find support because there’s no overflowing film community
as we have a small number of independent filmmakers. Now I think the numbers
are increasing and the old guard of the Malaysian New Wave have been opening
up, starting incubator programs for the next generation which is fantastic. I
guess the issue now is really the exposure of the young filmmakers. They need
to be exposed to world cinema. To see the other kinds of styles and films and
realize that the possibilities are vast. Not to copy but to be inspired.
It is
really interesting that you asked me earlier about style, visual style and
direction; I think the fact that I found it difficult to connect to local films—visually
or otherwise—influenced my making of Singing
in Graveyards, because now that I know what I can’t do, it helps refining
what it is that I want do, which is to show human nature that is above the
boundary of location. People are saying that Singing in Graveyards does not look Malaysian or Filipino at all,
and it has its own unique and distinct voice, for which I am very grateful.
How do you feel that themes and focuses have
changed throughout the years in Malaysian cinema and in your own works?
What I
really liked about the Malaysian new wave cinema was that they are very
personal and character driven—there are always feelings that they want to
convey. It is not so much about the plot, but intense sense of nostalgia that
they want to bring across that makes one feel something. That is how we express
our culture—feelings are the flesh of culture, and the bones are human
connections.
What has
changed in my work I feel is the shift of focus from visual style to more on
the honesty of what I want to say. Back then, I was so concerned with how to
mount the shot. How to shoot it? What camera movement? Today, these questions
are still important but it takes a back seat to- what is the intention of this
scene? What do we want to say by moving the camera? What are we trying to
convey to the audience?
How have short films evolved these past few
years in both Malaysia and the Philippines?
I don’t
know much about the history of Filipino short films. But the shorts I’ve seen are
quite amazing with huge amounts being made every year. There is this sense of
freedom and artistic expression that is not present in Malaysia, probably due
to the fact that they have no censorship in the Philippines. The same artistic
expressions and scope of things is not present here in Malaysia maybe because
of the self-censorship of the filmmakers themselves. They assume that they
shouldn’t or can’t talk about “sensitive issues” so they don’t even bother even
at script stage.
Perhaps
another factor is the rise of YouTube and YouTube shorts in Malaysia. Sometimes
these films all feel similar, carbon copies in terms of subject matter and
visual style. But this could be because they’re doing it are doing it as a
career, creating online content, making money from YouTube subscriptions and
views. So these guys know what works and what the audience want. There’s no
problem with that but there’s a pressure to churn out films every week to
please your subscribers. I personally believe that we need to take our time, to
really think about what we want to make and say with our films.
Maybe a
solution could be an established Malaysian international film festival that is
free of censorship. I think that's the key; you need to show and expose the
people to world cinema.
Having won the SEA film lab in 2014 with Singing in Graveyards, was it something
that you have incubated since long before the film lab, or an idea that happened
to gain substance during it?
The idea
occurred to me a year and a half before the lab. When I first went to Manila,
the first film set I worked on was Pepe Diokno's Above the Clouds, which played at SGIFF in 2014, and starred Pepe
Smith. He was the first Filipino actor I met, except he wasn't really an actor.
He was a singer who acted.
I
originally knew him as just an old man on set, and as I got to know him, one
day he told me: "Brad, I have never written a love song." I asked him
what he meant by that, and he just said that as long as his music makes people
happy, he does not need to write a love song. This got me thinking about his
life, and whether he has ever really fallen in love.
That turned
out to be the seed of the film, the idea of this rock star that never wrote a
love song. And it progressed many, many different drafts from there; but the
lab was especially important as we really hit a dead end with the story,
because it was so incredibly clichéd at that time. Talk about a rock star
trying to make a comeback, and you would immediately think Aronofsky's The Wrestler. We could not find a good
resolution or even a unique angle, because we were so fixated on this idea of a
rock star that has never written a love song.
I would not
say that the lab opened up a million ideas, but what it really did was to get
us to start talking about the film. Lab mentors Fran Borgia and Tan Chui Mui
were great at that. By winning, it reassured us that we had something really
special, not something to throw away, and acknowledgment that now we needed to
push on and find the key to unlock the door to next part of the script.
How did you unlock that next door and how long
did it take?
Another
year and a half! So the entire process took about three and a half years since
the initial ideas.
After the
lab, I was really excited as I was accepted to the Berlinale Talents. I thought
I would go and hear amazing talks by master directors, get inspired and immediately
finish the script. It didn’t happen. It was naïve and foolish to think that. For
one reason or another I could not get inspired. The talks did not spark
anything. I had more inspirations just being on a train in Berlin, just hanging
out with my family—I have an aunt and a cousin there—gave me a greater sense of
freedom. For some reason, nothing clicked there. I was really frustrated with
myself.
Later that
year, I got into the Locarno Filmmakers Academy, and that was a very important
workshop for me. It taught me to think more as an artist rather than a person
trying to write a film. Just to relax and start breathing. Free your mind, you
know. But it still did not help with the script but it recharged me mentally.
It was not
until one random night in Manila, when my producer Bianca and I were just discussing
the different layers of the film that we hit a goldmine of possibilities: What
if he was an impersonator? What if he was not really human? What if he was just
this creature in the forest that gave up his immortality to be a rock star in
the 70s? We were adding all these crazy elements to a script that was just
bones…then suddenly, you get this really obese script, and it is fantastic, and
you love it so so much.
Then, two
months before went into production, Pepe Smith had a stroke.
It affected
his speech and his energy. He not could shoot beyond six to eight hours a day.
He would just fall asleep from exhaustion. You could also see that he had problems
with recalling dialogue due to this fatigue. That was the biggest issue. We had
to cut and slice this obese script down to whatever Pepe could handle that day.
From there, more layers were removed until all that was left in the end was
just his soul on the pages.
Turns out, after
three and a half year writing this perfect script, the key to making it work was
just our willingness to go on set and adapt to Pepe and the environment around
us. To be organic and not try to impose our ideas on him.
What decisions went into the casting of the other
actors like Lav Diaz and Mercedes Cabral?
Everyone
casted in the film was intentional.
While
Pepe’s character spent his whole life trying to be someone else, Mercedes’s
character plays a struggling actress who physically resembles a famous R- rated
actress. To get the meaning of this particular casting, one needs to know who
Mercedes Cabral is in real life: she is a wonderful and talented actress who has
done a lot of international award winning films, but is known as the actress
who is always naked on screen. It is disheartening to know that one can appear
in so many acclaimed films, and still be recognized for something as
inconsequential as nudity. Thus, by casting her as an anti-Pepe, someone who is
trying to avoid that limelight of being infamous and to be taken seriously as
an actress, it was our way of satirizing a culture that is hypocritical in its
appraisal of actresses.
While for
Lav Diaz, we just wanted to cast him as an Anti-Lav Diaz; to get him to play
this greedy, hustling manager that he definitely is not in real life. Everyone
in this film plays his or her total opposites in reality, like Bernardo
Bernardo, who played this straight old pervert, when he is really this gay old
pervert (laughs). It was partly social commentary and partly just us having fun
with all the inside jokes.
Did you draw from any personal histories when
you made Singing in Graveyards?
Many scenes
of how Pepe tries to connect with people, or rather, is disconnected from
people, were constructed from my memories with my own grandfather.
The scene where
Pepe goes to his son’s house and his grandson does not want to talk to him, where
his son ignores him, while he is just there trying to fit into this family that
wants no part of him—that was one. I mean, you gave life to them and that is
supposed to mean something. You have this blood connection and you are supposed
to have this immediate link, but you do not, and it is all because of the attitude
of the young for the old.
In a way,
the many scenes of neglect in this film were reflections of me watching how my
own grandfather was neglected, and of me neglecting him in the same situation.
It is hard to describe, but when one spends time with one’s grandfather, one
would realize that all they talk about is the past. They do not have much of a
future, and yet they still try to progress to connect with you—it is sad how we
are often so caught up in our futures that we overlook our histories.
