Summer Wars is the story is about a young high school student, Kenji Koiso, a math genius who has just started his summer break and is asked by his secret crush, and older student, Natsuki Shinohara, to go with her to her family home for a summer job, he agrees to it immediately, only finding out later that his “summer job” requires him to pretend to be Natsuki’s fiancée. As Kenji tried his best to keep up with Natsuki’s back stories of himself, he receives a strange message on his “keitai” (which are mobile phones of Japan) asking him to solve a ridiculously long mathematical problem and of course, being a math genius, he cannot resist solving it. In doing so, he unleashes something terrible in the Internet world of OZ.

Mamoru Hosoda’s latest original comes out in theaters on February 25 2010. And on the weekend of the 21st and 22nd of November, I was lucky enough to catch Mr. Sevakis of Anime News Network with Mr. Hosoda live on stage at the Anime Festival Asia (AFA) for a discussion panel about this new movie!

Mr. Sevakis started by asking about the basis of Summer Wars, which used the world of OZ to mock the Internet and social networking sites of the digital society. Mr. Hosoda tells us that this is not a ploy to tell everyone that the new form of media is evil, however, he enjoys using the Internet and thought that an action movie about the Internet world would be fun.
Sevakis goes on to ask about inspirations for OZ, where avatars are made to represent real people, suggesting popular names like, Facebook, Second Life and Gaia, but Hosoda tells us that a Japanese site called, Mixi which is only available in Japan, or by invitation, Twitter would give you an idea of a similar network.

Another important motif in the movie was that of large families. In our modern-day world, not many people from many different countries live in large extended families anymore, including us here in Singapore, and people living in Tokyo. Families tend to be smaller. (Sevakis did a quick poll to ask all of us whether we lived in big or small families, the number of hands showed that most of us lived in small family units.) Apparently, Hosoda felt that the feeling of a large family all living under one roof was “more lively and nostalgic”
We also found out that many of the same people who worked on, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, would be working on Summer Wars as well. But, Hosoda made clear that this was a completely different movie, just so we all knew we wouldn’t be getting a Girl Who Leapt Through Time 2. Some of the more important staff that was mentioned was, Satoko Okudera, who wrote the screenplay, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, character designer, who also did character design for Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Sevakis continued to ask about the art direction of Summer Wars, and the simplistic feel of it, similar to The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Hosoda wanted to make it “simple and sharp” instead of using lots of CG effects. Why? “It’s more cool that way,” Hosoda replies.
When asked what other anime inspired Summer Wars, Hosoda said, “My Neighbor Totoro, Ghost in the Shell, too many things.”
After a few more joking comments from the host and Mr. Hosoda himself, we went on to questions from the audience.

One asked about Mr. Hosoda’s next project, after Summer Wars.
Mr. Hosoda replied that he was still thinking about it, however, the contents of a “next movie” would be very simple, like The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. It was a simple movie, with a simple plot and a few main characters, whereas Summer Wars was far more complex, with the story revolving around many more characters. That’s why his next movie is going to revert back to being simple.
Another person asked if Mr. Hosoda would rather work on TV anime series rather than anime movies. Mr. Hosoda replied that he used to work on TV anime series, but he preferred movies, since they call to a larger audience are easier to distribute. However he does not mean that movies are a piece of cake. “Each movie takes three years to complete! One year for planning, second year for scripts and the final year for the film-making.” He also mentioned that the hardest part of the production is usually the planning part, since they have to “try to think about what can make people happy, and what people enjoy.”

The final question asked if there was a difference between the Japanese perspectives of the Internet compared to the rest of the world. Mr. Hosoda says, “I guess it’s a little different, probably.” He used Facebook in America as an example, where people used their real names and information, while on Mixi in Japan, people used online handles, preferring not to reveal their true identities, especially when a situation can lead to trouble. Mr. Hosoda said, “Personally, I feel it would be more fun if people use your real names.”
Mr. Sevakis said, “Unless you get into trouble.”
To this Mr. Hosoda replied with a big smile, “That’s part of the fun.”
As a result of Hosoda’s ethics, the characters in Summer Wars all use avatars that look nothing like themselves, but their real names in the world of OZ.
“If you use your real name,” he said, “people trust you more.”
A last comment from Mr. Hosoda before the panel was closed was, “When you go to watch Summer Wars, bring someone else to watch it with you. It’s a movie about love and family, so don’t watch it alone.”

I recommend that any anime fan, or fan of Mr. Hosoda’s work go to watch this when it’s out in theaters. Some people may not like it, but just like the different perspectives of people who use the Internet, we all have different perspectives of movies as well.

- Winona

Question: Hi I’m Farhan from 3rd year FSV, what are the toughest challenges you faced directing in a language that you weren’t entirely fluent in?

Eric Khoo(director):To be honest it is pretty easy because the great thing was that Francis is fluent in English so he knew exactly  what the character was all about and you know he was more of a friend for me than a guy who discussed about the character. (Writer’s name) wrote the dialogue and he has translate the dialogue into Tamil and it was done with one of the actresses in the film Grace so he says okay, I don’t want to translate it this way let’s go for this other way so I know exactly what they’re basically saying and on location with Grace  I would have the headphones on her ears so that she would listen to the way both Francis and (the kid) would pronounce the words and I said if ever there’s any sort of fault in it, just say cut because I wouldn’t know but I watch it for the performance and how they would act it out so you know I was saying, by the grace of god I found grace and she became my ears and she…

Kim Hoh Wong (writer) :And it was actually quite challenging. In a way, you know, it was just that we were very lucky to have Grace who happened to be an actress. I mean she was very experienced, she had done theatre she had done TV, she was very sensitive to, lets say, the nuances of both English and Tamil, she understood exactly what I meant when I said “ you know, okay this has got to sound like this, it can’t sound too stilted, too formal” she’s a trained actress and a trained director, she knows exactly what we were trying to achieve and then sometimes she gives rather good suggestions, I think Eric gave her cart blanch in the sense that okay grace listen you know I mean we are just the two of us are just looking out for the expressions and how they are acting (interruption)

Eric Khoo :For me I was more concerned in the terms of the level which Francis was drunk, because you know massive drunk, not so drunk,  you know and it had to be realistic and Francis actually did a great job and he was not drinking whisky at all, it was just Chinese tea, I mean how drunk you want this that was important.

Kim Hoh Wong (writer) :The thing is we didn’t know that Tamil is quite a tonal language  so it like you could be mispronouncing words  despite what Francis told us he’s not exactly 100% fluent in the language so often time he is pronouncing it wrong  if we didn’t have her around we would be in deep trouble

Question: You were saying that sometimes that you have only 4 hours to scout place on the spot what are the challenges you faced in getting location for such a short notice?

Eric Khoo : We didn’t film in the MRT though…(audience laugh)

Tan Fong Cheng (producer):And knowing that we had a very low budget  for this show I think we were very realistic about lots of things so when Eric says I just need to film this boy talking so the first thing I was thinking was a public place so spaces like parks open space where you don’t have to ask for permission that would be the fastest and I found out that it would be good to be familiar actually those places where you live in there are lots of those spots just take notice of them because you never know in last minutes it will be very useful for do location like…

Eric Khoo : And find them in close proximity so that you don’t trouble the…

Tan Fong Cheng (producer):So it’s places where you’re familiar with like the place where I was looking for at 4 hours time that was like at the back of my house and it was just next to the railway track and I think ,personally, it had flavor …and that is the advice when I became a production assistant …this director told me that “what you should do is always have a notebook that as you move around Singapore or any place just take note that it could be locations that you could use on a shoot so that during times of need you could always refer to this little notebook because it will be a very good reference to you and I think it is something that I have learn.

Eric Khoo : But actually when I see a location, I went around at night to find a little cheap bar and because we didn’t have a budget so we went to Joo Chiat and Little India and finally when one of the student from Lassalle says “I think I found a place for you” and it was this transsexual bar at Orchard towers or was it call ‘Crazy Horse’ and they have all these graffiti on the wall… and it was brilliant.  And then I met the owner. The owner looks like an old auntie in her 60s and I said I love this place and ask can I film here and she said as long as you don’t depict this place as…and she was so nice and she let us film there for two days and leave by 5 and we gave her an angpao.

Question: Having won the cultural medallion, how do you see your future role in the film industry?

Eric Khoo: I won the Young Artist Award 10 years ago…I thought I was very old and you know, I’m always like looking out for signs and signals so when I thought that because of the 80 thousand dollar price, I told Francis we cannot make the film and in some ways if I hadn’t receive the Cultural Medallion, I may have made the film last year…and I don’t think I am going to change meaning I’ll still make films but I think it was a good point that I got it last year. Does that answer your question?

Question: I heard you have been traveling around…

Eric Khoo: Yeah…I just came back last week from Paris because I was doing the promotion for My Magic. It’ll be released there November 5th, the day we’ll know whether Obama gets in (laugh). And the film was also premiered in Busan and it is great because it has really strong distributor called Eureka. They’ve got the new film called “The Wrestler” with Mickey Rourke and they will try to release My Magic in February or March. Now Francis is in the Tokyo Film Festival where they’re screening it but I think in terms of territories, the one territory that I really want has always been Japan and I hope we can make a deal with them and if the distributor can believe in the film and will do some marketing, I think we can hit the box office. In Busan, it was all packed halls about 600 seats and the audience cried, they were moved by the film.

Question: Because you like to have Kim Hoh as your writer, how is your relationship with him?

Eric Khoo : Well we’re actually lovers….(audience laugh). Well, I know Kim Hoh for around twenty years or 25 years? And we would always joked about us doing a script together and I think he was working at THE NEW PAPER and he was bored there so I said to him since you are so bored, maybe its time for you to write and…okay I’ll give you an idea of BE WITH ME its quite interesting. A couple years back, my nephew who was half French, 13 years old, came to Singapore during Christmas for a visit and he was talking to me about this girl that he was so in love in and he had seen this movie together and when his arm has crossed the gates of her arm, he felt like sea wave just move through his body. And he was like “I’ve been here for 2 weeks and I just can’t get her out of my mind and then I start to think back…who was my first love? Who I was crazy about?

Well, I’m going to make something up. It’s like teenage hood, middle aged and old aged and when I was hanging up with Kim Hoh in a bar in Holland Village and I said lets do a film that would end with HOPE but I want it to be almost a silent film and I would like it to be in the form of which people communicate whether its SMS or e-mail or a letter of communication and we were working on this and our main central character was a journalist. And, in one of the earlier draft, Francis from MY MAGIC, was going to be a character in Be With Me. But, characters came and characters went but actually it was teenage, middle aged guy and old age. And then Kim Hoh was pulled to The Straits Time so he left The New Paper and I remember all these discussion because we meet a lot of interesting people.

Transcript from Muhamad Afiq B Jaafar

Special Thanks: CTV of Ngee Ann Polytechic

He begins his talk by describing the life of young scenarists, or cinematographers. For aspiring filmmakers in Poland, the fate of their development as filmmakers can be incredibly daunting as 50% of students are expelled from Polish film schools after their second year. This cruel and somewhat unjustified form of judgment against creativity is followed by the equally shocking fact that upon leaving film schools, many of Idziak’s “simply could not find a place in the existing (film industry).” The competition in the film industry is incredibly competitive, with the first production they’ve worked on being either their calling card into the industry or a signal for their unemployment. This is not an entirely new situation in the world of filmmaking as film graduates in my country, Singapore, suffer from these situations as well, though only 10% of students get kicked out of my film school and not 50%. However, this is still a very unpromising situation that film schools have created due to their obvious deficiency in supporting creativity.

Idziak has learnt that a primary problem in filmmaking is the lack of encouragement of artistic cohesion in both the film schools and the film industry. The director was, and still is, widely considered to be the primary auteur of the film. The auteur theory that governs this judgment has hurt the creative fruition of many filmmakers. Why should only one person decide the vision, shape and tone of a film? What is the definition of a filmmaker? Better yet, what is the definition of a director of photography? In Poland, not only is the director considered an auteur, but so is the director of photography. A director of photography is the artist behind the creation of the images we see on the screen, though the decisions of what is put on screen may not be entirely his. But a creative input is definitely present. Based on his experiences working in Hollywood, with work there ranging from Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca, Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down and the new Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, a director of photography is a person who lights the scene, nothing more.

Film schools, he believes, “should be a place that allows for failure and experimentation.” His experience as a teacher at a the Lodz has allowed Idziak to witness the pain and frustration of film students in their struggle to define who they are as artists because of their fear of failure and experimentation, which is, as he says, “an invitation towards disaster.” Students in film schools are trained to excel in specific production roles, not encouraging an understanding of each production role.

This is a situation that I will have no problem identifying with next year as I venture into my third and final year in film school. After three years of film education, each student is expected to either participate in a short film production or gain industry experience as an intern at film companies. However, each student is allowed to choose only one aspect of film production to study during the third year before actually participating in film productions. I chose directing studies as my curriculum for next year, but I wanted to learn more about editing, cinematography and documentary production as well. Sure we learnt about these in our first two years, but hardly in a sufficient manner that would prove us to be efficient in these aspects of film production. After my three years have ended, I will be making my first foray into filmmaking. That our job on each film production is designated according our selected curriculum, as a director, I wonder how I will be able to communicate with my fellow crew members effectively?

Thus, these currently existing predicaments probably explains the lack of artistic cohesion that occurs in modern filmmaking. People with different production roles frequently overlook the responsibilities and expectations of other production personnel, creating an unnecessary chaos that hinders the production. Furthermore, many directors believe that because of their label of ‘director’, they should know what should be done in each aspect of production, which is untrue as various individuals from various creative departments would probably know how to get specific jobs done better than the director does. Their ego supports their belief that they are artists in the, as they believe, singular craft that is filmmaking. “Cinema is not a place for artists,” says Idziak, but rather for craftsmen, engineers of human emotion. It is a firm belief of Idziak’s that a resolve to these predicaments is for film schools to teach in a more well-rounded, collaborative form of education by giving students the opportunity to take on different roles in film production to create an understanding of all aspects of film production.

It is through his giving working relationship with Krzysztof Kieslowski that Idziak was able to truly understand the importance of collaboration. Idziak has often been given the opportunity by Kieslowski to collaborate on the shooting script of his films, of which allowed them to give birth to some of their most creative ideas. The process of pre-production, says Idziak, should be a sharing of a wealth of ideas coming from people working in all departments of filmmaking, preventing the ‘christmas tree’ syndrome he describes as the situation of having many crew members with the unclear motivation of even having them on set. Idziak believes that these collaborations can lead to the interesting result of creating a distinct style for each film.

This ‘christmas tree’ syndrome which Idziak has described is a very common situation in the Singaporean film industry as well, with the students from my school that later becme interns frequently experiencing working situations at the film companies they work which require them to do nothing but serve the director a cup of coffee or buying the crew lunch. If they’re lucky, they get to set up a c-stand or two. It is because of this that I initially though of Idziak’s ideas of creating an ideal collaborative platform for filmmaking to be both unrealistic and foolish. Fortunately, “filmspring” says otherwise. “filmspring” is a project developed by Idziak to get filmmakers from all over the world to get together to make films despite of their vastly different cultures and languages. A 30-minute film has already been created from this project, which Idziak is very proud of because it is a film that is, though “no masterpiece”, both emotionally successful and commercially viable. The filmmakers of this film knew each other before meeting in Poland, the meeting place for the project’s productions, through the project’s website which can be found at www.filmspring.eu

In a week’s time, I will be leaving Berlin to return to Singapore to begin work on pre-production for my short film. I believe this talk has been truly beneficial to both all the filmmakers around the world who were present and myself in learning about the ethics of filmmaking as well as the responsibilities we have as filmmakers in creating a giving working environment for each other.

Uli Hanisch has made a name for himself with his inventive production designs in the films of Tom Tykwer (not including RUN LOLA RUN). In his free time, he sometimes teaches at the International Film School of Cologne. Warm, lively and inviting, Hanisch makes it known to the audience that he would rather listen to their questions and opinions on production design rather than talk about his own work, displaying much interest in the education of the young generation of filmmakers. He believes that the story is most important and that every artistic decision made in filmmaking has to be made with patience and focus on the necessities of the script. Hanisch says that in designing a production, he is more interested with losing reality as he finds it an unnecessary aspect in fictional films. Hanisch says that he has a very good working relationship with Tom Tykwer, with both of them being able to achieve artistic fulfillment with each of their productions because of their working methods. When asked what his most valuable experience was in relation to his work as a production designer, he says that it was his working experience in graphic design prior to film work, which required him to be very precise in terms of details.

Q: You worked as a graphic artist for advertising companies for a period of. What made you decide to begin working on films as a production designer?

A: I was about twenty when I was working at a graphic design company and I was asked by German director Christoph Schlingensief to design the poster for his film as well as its titles. Then he told me that he was going to shoot a film nearby and asked if I would like to be a part of it and I said yes. It was a bit risky, but I think it would have happened sooner or later because I?ve always had a passion for cinema.

Q: You?ve worked with Tom Tykwer for four times now. What is it about him or his films that draws you back to work with him?

A: Tom Tykwer has this tendency to push the boundaries of reality and it is because of this that he allows me the opportunity to experiment with fantastical elements which I find very fascinating.

Q: Are there certain genres of film you would like to work in? Since you prefer to push the boundaries of reality, have you ever wanted to work on something that is completely out of the ordinary?

A: Yes, I would like very much to do a horror movie. I am also interested in genres such as science-fiction and children?s films, which are also interesting because you can play around with fantastical elements though still base the film in an ordinary world, a kind of fairy tale world where normality is overtaken by fantasy.

Q: You wrote the screenplay for the film TERROR 2000 in 1992. Why haven?t you written another script since then?

A: I actually didn?t really write the film with the other credited co-writers as it is stated in the credits. What I did was spend an extensive amount of time with (director Christoph) Schlingensief and the writers talking about the story, developing it with them. I suppose they credited me as a co-writer because of all the time I spent there.

Q: But have you considered writing more scripts?

A: Yes. I?ve been developing a script for an animation project with a friend over the last few years but it?s taking its time because I am only free to write at night or on weekends. We?re doing this for our own enjoyment, really. But we?ve come to the point where we?ve already found a producer.

Q: Both you and Grenouille, the lead character of PERFUME, seem to be afflicted with obsessive compulsions, such as the need to be very detailed in your work. Do you relate to this character?

A: I never really felt related to Grenouille because he is so wrong and so lonely. His decisions are so cut off from every kind of human behavior understand to man. I never really felt related to him, or rather I would not like to. I pitied him. He does not understand everything around him except for the smells he senses and either misinterprets everything that people say to him or he can?t deal with it. He is a very tragic character in that way. So my job as a production designer is actually to construct everything he does not understand, to be kind of a prison constructer. Usually your main character is familiar to his or her surroundings, but that is not the case with this character. What I had to do in the case of Grenouille is to present the environments surrounding him like an impenetrable wall, something which he cannot understand.

Q: You seem to be a very understanding production designer in that you compromise your ideas according to what the director prefers, but then giving him more as well in a different direction. But have you ever went over the line and argued with a director, trying to get your creative decisions across?

A: No. I need to work in harmony. I like positive conflicts sometimes, but so long as they?re a bit funny as well. I?m not a very serious person. I once had the privilege of working on the set of a Peter Greenaway film. I was arguing with my fellow prop master when Greenaway came over and said, ?Don?t worry! Don?t argue! It?s only a film.? I liked that very much. If you?ve come to the point of having to have to argue with your director, then you?re already in a bad situation. You should always like your fellow crew members and argue in a positive manner.

Q: You?ve worked on the film HEAVEN, which was based on a script by Krzysztof Kieslowski. Looking at the work of Kieslowski, which was famous for its mise-en-scene, did you feel daunted by the expectations people had for the film especially since you were the production designer?

A: No, I did not. It was perfectly okay. I received the script knowing Tom (Tykwer) would do it and that was it, really. It was a much more daunting task to take on PERFUME because it was so well-known in literary circles with thousands of essays written about it. Everybody in the world knew about the bloody book!

Metrobranding is a term that describes an action taken by a city to define itself from the rest of the world. This discussion revolves around this issue and consists of 3 filmmakers – Tata Amaral, Wim Wenders and Ning Ying – as well as renowned urbanist, Deyan Sudjic. All 3 filmmakers have made films which have both defined the cities they have set them in as well as documented their urban developments.

Moderator Vincenz Hediger sets up the topic of the discussion by bringing up three moments in film history. The 1st moment is the 1954 Elia Kazan film, “On the Waterfront”, which was distinctive for its realistic on-location shooting of the New York harbor, which has since ceased to exist due to commercialism and modern developments. The 2nd moment is the 1977 Woody Allen film, “Manhattan”, of which its opening montage depicting New York City views, with Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and a voice-over track of Allen struggling to define what New York is, is a declaration of love to the city. The final moment is the 1999 Bond film, “The World is Not Enough”, with an opening chase sequence set near the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

The reason Hediger brought up these films is because of their effect on the cities they have been set in. With the demolishment of the New York Harbor, the Kazan film has preserved this lost segment of the city along with its social history (film is about dock workers dealing with labor strife not uncommon in 1950s). “Manhattan” was a successful attempt of immortalizing a city through the power of cinema. The Bond film is an example of the current form of metrobranding, a clear attempt by financiers to advertise the city of Bilbao as a tourist attraction.

Tata Amaral’s works have, since the beginning of her career, worked to represent the city of Sao Paolo, Brazil on film. Her latest film, “Antonia”, is shot in the SoHo district, which is not as developed compared to the rest of the city. Her motivation to do “Antonia” was fueled by the youths from the outskirts who were capable of finding hope within their corrupted community. This motivated her ambition to capture this urban reality.

The films of Wim Wenders have defined many cities with their distinct images and titles such as “Paris, Texas” and “Wings of Desire”, of which its German title actually translates to “The Sky Above Berlin”. Wenders’ decisions on where he shoots his films are either based on whether or not he feels a connection with the city or if he aims to capture an environment which he knew was no longer going to exist or as creative decisions rather than preconceived city branding. For example, his decision to shoot “Wings of Desire” in Berlin was through a need for a city that possessed qualities he required as the city was to be its main protagonist. Regarding preservation, Wenders feels that it is the responsibility of a filmmaker to do this. Once cannot help but agree as Ning Ying narrates to the audience the current situation in Beijing where “entire neighborhoods are demolished within a night, while our memories associated with these buildings were also stolen from us.” Ning prefers to make films that document present social changes. Her “Beijing Trilogy”, which was completed in the 90s, documented the “economic reform that was (at the time) becoming more and more visible.”

However, the branding of a city within a film, be it intentional or not, usually creates the same outcome. Recently, more producers and institutions have recognized the economical benefits of city branding of which many filmmakers give into because it is economically sensible, showing that an economic logic exists when it comes to film productions.

Besides being an economic resource, a city can also act as an aesthetic resource to filmmakers. In Europe, an institution chooses one country yearly to be the European “Capital of Culture”. Wenders was selected as part of a group of filmmakers hired to represent Lisbon, the 1995 “Capital of Culture”, in a series of films. Wenders expressed his creativity in his film, “Lisbon Story”, with a fascination towards the unique soundscape of the city, telling the story of a sound engineer’s travels through the city as he records sounds from various locations in Lisbon.

Deyan Sudjic suggests that perhaps the utilization of the history of a city could “point the way to how some movies can go beyond evocation or catching a moment in time to try to explain in a sense what it is that makes a city function and where it comes from.” Sudjic believes that “Breaking and Entering” by Anthony Minghella tries to accomplish this in its depiction of the transformation of the King’s Cross area in London where as the yuppie architect character works in his office in the day, at night, that same area reverts into a lawless environment. It shows how time and place overlap, an indication of how cities function and what it can be. This is how cinema can help us understand cities as well as document the occurrences of events and replicating images and ideas.

Hediger believes that that this is the beginning of a new genre of film – the “curator city film” whereby film artists are invited to promote the image of a city. This birth of the “curator city film” is, of course, not entirely bred from commercial logic. Artistic freedom is provided and filmmakers are not always be told where \to shoot their films and what kind of impressions to create about them. But nonetheless it follows the logic of metrobranding.

His short film, 15, which won a Special Achievement Award at the 2002 Singapore International Film Festival, was made into his first feature film. 15 has brought him international acclaim for its graphic portrayal of local gangster life.

His second feature film, 4:30, was selected to be the closing film at the 2006 Singapore International Film Festival. 4:30 is a Japan-Singapore collaboration that was shot at an estimated budget of $400,000 on 35mm film with funding and support from NHK Japan, the Singapore Film Commission and Zhao Wei Films.

The film was released theatrically in Singapore to critical acclaim. 4:30 was also warmly received at the international film festival circuit. Besides being invited to screen at numerous festivals, the film won the Grand Prize for Best Film at the 8th International Film Festival Bratislava 2006, and the NETPAC award at the Hawaii International Film Festival 2006.

Gary Goh is a frequent collaborator on Royston’s works. His first project with Royston began in 2001, when he produced Royston’s short film 15.

In 2003, Gary was the production manager of 15: The Movie, the feature film which won the NETPAC-FIPRESCI award at the 2003 Singapore International Film Festival.

In 2006, he was the producer and assistant director of Royston Tan’s second feature film 4:30.

Over the years, Gary has also produced a number of Royston’s other short films.

He is currently a producer at Zhao Wei Films, helmed by the Singapore’s most renowned director Eric Khoo, producing television commercials, films and other media content.

***

Q: How much does the film 4:30 cost?

Gary: All in all about $400,000. And that is a very tight budget.

Q: And the money comes from?

Gary: It’s a three-way. We have Zhao Wei Films, Singapore Film Commission and NHK-Japan.

Royston: So what we did to contain the budget was to be very, very careful. A lot of rehearsals, our average ratio was 1:2. For the little boy, he’s very good, so it was 1:1. And that helped us save a lot of film because you can see that everything is done in one take. If one of them makes a mistake, we have to throw the whole can away and re-shoot. And the challenging part was where you saw the Korean man vomiting, mentally he was calculating like at 2 minutes and 24 seconds sharp, he has to puke so that we fully utilise the entire can of film. That scene alone took 5 hours.

Gary: And he had to puke eight times.

Royston: The timing and the puking wasn’t right.

Q: What did you base 4:30 on? Like a personal experience or a story you wanted to tell, or just another film that you make?

Royston: (laughs) I think for everything that I do, there’s a personal aspect of me. For all of us, as a kid we always look out for a superman or a superhero or somebody to look after us or even model after. And that’s… I think it derived from loneliness and also because I’ve seen this boy on television since he was a little kid and there was something about him and I wanted to tailor a film for him. So his input into the character helped me craft up a story.

Q: So a lot of yourself is in the film?

Royston: In fact there is a lot of how I feel but because it is through his eyes I feel he intensifies the whole experience even more. When he first read the script he said he knew how to do this role and he knew exactly how it feels.

Q: Can I ask about 15?

Royston: 15 I think was actually a new point for me because it’s not really my story but it was inspired by a group of ah-bengs I hang out with because I was teaching them drama. And that sort of changed a lot of things because they, well I penetrated into their world of sparks and canto-pop and just a wonderful experience I had never experienced before, not even in Johor Bahru. I wanted to document their stuff but with 15, I took something that wasn’t mine but personified it so that it was like my own story. That was a changing point for me.

Q: Can I follow up on 15 since we’re talking about it. I read a script of 15 because I was in the funding committee and I noticed that in the original script one of them was supposed to be a male prostitute serving female clients. In the film however, there was a scene that showed the boy in the shower but the client was a male. Why did you decide to make that change?

Royston: Well again it was based on some research and when we were reaching the point of filming, I started to hear some more news. Because it brings such a film even closer to date and there are a lot of “accidental” news which they leaked out to me which they are pretty comfortable to share. So I decided, “Okay, I’ll give it another spin.” And I wanted to contrast a lack of fatherly love and that sort of intimacy which they’re chasing. Makes the film even more twisted and complicated and in a way simple because they’re just seeking attention.

Q: I see that in your films you always have fish tanks. I was wondering if it means anything.

Royston: I’ve always wanted to work in a fish tank. (laughs) I think it’s a subconscious thing. I never realised it. I might need a psychiatrist for help. I mean just last night I met a group of friends who have never seen my films. They’re another group of ah-bengs but they’re grown up and they were asking me “How come all your films have plasters? There’s always a plaster in your films.” I didn’t realise it until someone told me.

Q: What other problems have you faced besides actors and conserving film?

Royston: I think the question can be answered in two levels. I think Gary can offer a perspective on the production side.

Gary: For the production aspect we can say $400,000 and you guys can say it’s a lot.

Royston: No they say it’s very little.

Gary: Oh, I thought I heard some of you say it’s a lot. Yeah, it was very little to play with. Language is also a problem, because Royston touched on Li Yuan, the boy and the Korean, Kim Young-Jun. He is actually a comedian in his hometown of Seoul. When we put this character for him to play, it was a challenge but he wanted to take it up. Royston was taking care of Li Yuan while I had to take care of Young-Jun. And he’d speak like spatters of English and overall it was a very big language barrier. A lot of times Royston would tell me in English or Mandarin, “This is what I want, blah blah blah.” When I explain it to the Korean actor, I would literally have to act it out for him to see and then he will follow. Other than that it’s your usual production or logistic problems. There’s no production that will go 100% smoothly.

Royston: There were also problems with the location. The house that you see is actually a house which is occupied by Bangladeshi workers and there was a huge mess and we sort of dressed it up. Before the production, the most complicating thing was to get funding. That was very tough because for a script like this, it’s destined not to make money. I was very lucky to be chosen by Pusan International Film Festival and NHK-Japan when they first saw the film and read the script they said “Okay. It’s a bit crazy. But we want to work with crazy people.” That’s where they came in and said we want to work with you. With that it sparked an interest in Singapore and we started working. In terms of working with the talents, we also tried to make it like a strategy game whereby in the film they are never close but when they’re not filming they cannot talk also. They’re not allowed to interact with one another. We wanted the tension. There was one time whereby they couldn’t take it anymore and they decided to make it a joke and started talking and then the footage didn’t turn out well and we decided to cancel the whole shoot. It affected them a little bit and they started to take this kind of torture very seriously. It was all building up to the finale where there was the awkwardness and the longing to be together. We wanted to create that fusion.

Q: It has a strange style of editing.

Royston: I think this whole film is told from the perspective of a little boy’s memory. And sometimes it’s like a movie, it’s editable. You edit the people you don’t want to see. The facts are true, but you distort it and that is what I wanted to do. Many times a film can be entertaining but it can also be thought-provoking. Like the relationship being like a father and son, that is one interpretation. It started off that way in the construction of the script and when it was finished we deconstructed the script again to make the audiences decide for themselves what relationship they are actually in. It was a great experience even in the film festivals there were people trying to find out what it was.

Gary: Different people were like guessing the little mysteries which we’re not sure you can pick up.

Royston: There’s one question that the whole world cannot answer. If you can answer that question I’ll give you a million dollars. Something is wrong with the date, something is missing. You can watch it another time.

Q: It’s the school holidays?

Royston: Yes, that’s one. But there’s another one. It’s a difficult question anyway. You might not be able to answer. I don’t have the one million dollars but anyway. So he wrote his diary on the 15th, 16th, 17th and 19th of Dec. Why is 18th of Dec missing? You have a month to get back to me. These are the little things we wanted the audience to rediscover.

Gary: And the DVD is out so you can buy it. (laughs)

Q: Some of my students have bought the DVD. One question they asked me was, “It looks like a gay film”. Is it one?

Royston: Well I think that it is when you think it is. Whether or not it is a gay film, I think it is a story about human relationships; the need to be intimate with one another. I think that is what I wanted to say. What I think is that it is very subjective because it’s coming out from the perspective of the kid. If it was an 18-year old teenager, the inclination would be clearer. But in this it is a little bit more grey and we wanted the audiences to fill in the missing gap.

Q: I notice in the credits, you list yourself in the story credit. But on the screenplay credit, you list a collaborator. So can you talk about how collaboration works when you feel like the story is yours and you are also the director of the film, what role does a writing collaborator play?

Royston: This one is a little bit complicated. What happened is that I’m not very good with writing. And usually my scripts are…

Gary: Three pages.

Royston: (laughs) Yeah, for 4:30 it was three pages long. So what I need is to get somebody else to make it into a 90 pages so that the investor can see it and I don’t have to follow it. I think to be fair to the person, Leong, I mean he helped me voice out my thoughts clearer because my script will always be “Boy goes to room”, “Boy sleeps”, “Boy goes to school”, “Boy comes back from home”. And it really doesn’t make sense.

Q: Did anything from your film come from your collaborator?

Royston: Mostly it was in mind already. That was just an assurance for the investors that it was not going to be just three minutes long.

Gary: Just to add to that point, it is very important for commercial purposes to have a proper screenplay written out because that is the first thing that an investor would want to look at. No matter how brilliant a director, they would still have to look through and get a good feel of the film.

Royston: When NHK wanted to invest in the film, they translated the 90-page script into Japanese and analysed it scene-by-scene and told me how they felt and that really helped me because even when I send e-mails, they are four sentences long, I’m not a very good correspondent.

Q: What about storyboarding?

Royston: (laughs) I do very detailed storyboarding which only I can understand.

Gary: I was the Assistant Director on set and I’ve seen his storyboards. They’re very detailed. (laughs) A man will be like two strokes, a girl will be a triangle.

Royston: It’s a good thing because while they were waiting for the shots to be set up, they would play “Charades”.

Gary: Yeah we would ask each other, “What’s this?”

Royston: The figures that I draw sometimes look like dogs and they would ask me why I had not informed them that they would need a dog on set. The boy was sleeping you see, and it looked like a puppy. But to answer your question, I’m quite a control-freak so to an extent I think I’m quite disciplined. I understood the constraints of the budget and what I did was to storyboard everything very carefully and on top of that I always have that 30% leeway whereby I allow things to happen in a natural way. But I always feel that when I want to do a film and it turns out to be a totally different product, that to me, could be a failure on my side.

Q: Do you have a fetish for numbers? Do your titles mean anything?

Royston: I really dig numbers that’s for sure. But I got F9s throughout secondary school for mathematics. As much as you might hate something, you’ll still have an interest towards it. And that made me want to explore the psychological aspect of numbers. And that’s how I got started. It started first as a coincidence. 15 because of the age and I wanted to associate gang names which were always in numbers. And 4:30 is a time thing. And the new film which is a clever play of numbers. It’s the name of the two actresses we are going to have. Again it’s sub-conscious.

Gary: Just to fill you in on a little trade secret. Normally all these film festivals, wherever you go they have these catalogues. Those films with numbers always come first. So the first page that you flip to… Ahh I mean that’s a plus point.

Royston: So now you know you can call your film 1 or 7. (laughs)

Q: Why the specific time 4:30?

Royston: On different psychological aspects according to my research, 4:30 is a time where the boy reacts and literally comes alive in the film. But according to medical surveys, 4:30 is the most difficult time for insomniacs around the world. That is also the time where most people commit suicide. To be more precise, it’s 4:29.something. Physically, it’s a very good number to establish his whereabouts. Metaphorically, his sense of loss.

Q: How did you manage to elicit such acting from a boy who’s so young and at that performance level?

Royston: I slapped him everyday. (laughs) Actually the little boy tortured me more than I tortured him. I think the level of trust between a director and an actor is very important. Before I started writing the script, I met up with him already. That was when he was ten years old. I told him that I had a script for him and that I would like to get to know him more. “Tell me your story, what makes you happy, who are the teachers you hate the most, if you hate your teacher what are the things that you would do?” Things like that. It helps me understand my actors.

Q: Is it right to say that essentially he is playing himself?

Royston: Yeah, I would say that. The challenge is how you can be playing yourself and yet not be honest. The challenge was to be very honest about himself and come out naked in front of the audience. That took a lot of trust. In fact, many months and years of establishing a relationship. The last scene which you saw, of him crying, that was the most difficult one to do, he broke his own record and it took 8 or 9 takes. On a 35mm, entire cans were gone because he literally did not want to act well as that was the last scene and after that take, the movie would be finished and that would be it. When I found out his reasons, it was a very moving experience. He finally decided and reconciled with the fact that this shot would be the end, the entire crew was very moved. The tears that came out from him were derived from a very painful experience. I can’t express it. I try not to see the scene every time. But the funny thing is every time my actors will run away from home. He just ran away from home 2 weeks ago. We’ve decided to work with older people for consequent films. Above 21.

Q: You have many lingering shots. Does it affect the actors’ performances if you rehearsed it over and over again for these long moments?

Royston: Normally for these shots we do not have rehearsals. Gary would give them rough descriptions and let them prepare themselves and we will just roll. For me, sometimes the first take is the best. And especially the two actors are trained. They have to unlearn many things which are spoiled by television. We are trying to eliminate those overly dramatic reactions.

Gary: Many times I think, we used the first take, although we have a second take.

Royston: Our second takes are normally for safety. The first takes are the best. It’s not perfect but genuine.

Q: I believe you said that all things are on screen for a reason. That in 4:30 there are many symbolisms. Can you probably explain why the use of orange juice and the dolly shot where we see the Korean man looking out the window and then we realise that the boy is also looking at him?

Gary: I think for us to explain the symbolism would be spoiling it for you.

Royston: Everything was placed in there to trigger a reaction. It was to move the audience in three different directions. I’m trying to be as careful as I can to not spoil your interpretation of the movie. As you can see, from the beginning of the film till the end, I’ve tried very hard to place the audience in the shoes of the boy so you would view it as “What would you do if you were in the boy’s situation?” When it was shown in Berlin, the audiences were saying that I had given them one of the toughest things to do because I was forcing them to re-look into their own lives through the eyes of the boy. That satisfied me because it was exactly what I wanted to achieve. A lot of punk rockers came to the screening in Berlin, expecting a sequel of 15. But they had a heart attack. (laughs)
Gary: Such an extreme difference.

Q: There is a scene in both 15 and 4:30 that reminds us of 12 Storeys and Mee Pok Man respectively. In 15, the part where there is this girl who jumps and the boys look at her, it repeats the scene in 12 Storeys where the female character sees the man jump. In 4:30, the last scene has the boy blackening the windows like the last scene of Mee Pok Man where Jon Ng covers the windows with bed sheets.

Royston: Definitely not. I hate Eric Khoo. (laughs) To tell you the truth I have not seen Mee Pok Man. I failed to be able to pass off as a 21-year old when I was 17 to get into a screening of Mee Pok Man. It’s traumatising to be stopped by the usher even when you have on a drawn-on moustache. Eric told me we have a synergy and share a certain kind of sensibility that’s why he was drawn to all my short films because of the themes that we were always trying to explore. The jumping from the building is the ultimate way of portraying suicide that is uniquely Singaporean. Just last year, someone jumped down from my block. During my youth, I had many peers who jumped. That is in my experience, something we see everyday. Out of ten suicides a day, the papers just cover one.

Q: Do you guys have a festival strategy for the film?

Gary: Our films are quite lucky in a sense. Even before our films are done, we get enquiries from various festivals. Royston’s first film premiered in Venice so once it starts travelling the film festival circuit, a lot of these festival programmers will be on the lookout for subsequent projects. It helps that every year you go to film markets and you meet these film programmers and they ask about any new projects and you really get bookings from various festivals. And it helps when a distributor from overseas, a world sales agent has decided to pre-sale your films. They have automatic connections to all the film festivals. They already have planned which festival should premiere your film. 4:30, the company picked Berlin and Cannes because of the sensibility of the film. Berlin, there is the appreciation for these types of art house films. Whereas for Venice they like films with a good sense of colour, pace, so even for festivals there are different sensibilities.

Q: Where have your films been shown commercially?

Gary: Locally, 15 and 4:30 are under Shaw. Overseas, 15 has been shown in UK, US, Australia and Canada. 4:30 has gone to as far as Israel, Norway, Korea (TV), France and UK.

Royston: For the DVDs, we suspect that all the buyers are Singaporean. (laughs) The distributor was quite surprised that 15 had gone into its third reprint already. So right now the cover for 15 is a brand new one that we have never seen before. So whoever who bought 15 on the Net, thank you.

Gary: Through Amazon.com it would get through. Others sources it wouldn’t. We went to Shanghai last year. And they did a pirated version of 15 with their own CD layout and booklet. (laughs) It’s quite impressive that people in China would know of this film.

Royston: Actually their stuff is quite good. (laughs) They have a special 4-page booklet which I don’t know where they found from. They did their own work.

Q: As an artist, what do you think of piracy?

Royston: Well it very complicating for me.

Gary: There are two ways of looking at it.

Royston: There are two ways. Especially for a place like Singapore, without piracy, I wouldn’t be able to watch those art house films with censorship and a lot of stuff. Honestly, I’m not rich enough to buy these art house films or go to film festivals. So the best thing would be to go to JB and buy. If our censorship is more lax, which it is now, we’ll be exposed to more films and that would help us a lot. For example it is so difficult to get Kieslowski’s films in Singapore. Or look for more obscure Icelandic filmmakers. When I first saw Y Tu Mama Tambien, I was very surprised when I saw the film. They cut one of the most important scenes away which actually changed the whole meaning of the film. It was the threesome and I didn’t know. I thought they suddenly just got bored of one another. I am an unofficial supporter of pirated films.

Q: Speaking of censorship, did you have any problems with the censors for 4:30?

Royston: Not so much, in fact I think the Board of Censors were quite happy. They weren’t expecting such a gentle film.

Q: I’m surprised they did not cut the portion of the snipping of the pubic hair.

Royston: Trust me, we had our fair share of the issue, we just don’t want to bring it up anymore. They let it go a little bit.

Gary: That’s why it’s M18 instead of a PG.

Royston: They were very kind to me on this film.

Q: What are your plans? Are you thinking of making a commercial film?

Royston: Should we tell them of our new project?

Gary: Yeah, sure. Why not?

Royston: To tell you the truth, I’m shooting my new film in March. It’s going to be a getai musical. So this time we’re going to try elevate something different. We’re using all the classic Hokkien songs and giving it a fresh new spin on it. Again, it’s a total departure from 4:30 and 15. I wanted to surprise the audiences. I think I’m a chameleonic director and I always want to give my audiences something new. It’s an all-female cast except for one male.

Gary: But he cannot talk.

Royston: So it’s female-powered and the tables are turned this time.

Q: So what number this time?

Gary: (laughs) It’s called 881.

Royston: We’re playing with this number because the main characters are called the “Papaya Sisters”. 881 – Pa-pa-ya, Ba ba yao (Mandarin). It’s a story of the “Papaya Sisters”. They wanted not to be superstars but superstars in the getai environment.

Q: I realised that when the National Museum was opening you did something for them. Do you have like a love-hate relationship with the government now or are you back in their good graces so now you’re the “Bad boy of cinema” outside of Singapore?

Gary: Somehow I think the media played it up.

Royston: I’m trying to blame the media but the government body is made up of different bodies. There are some bodies which are more biased against me, there are some which really love me and there are some which can’t wait to get rid of me and some which spend a lot of money to get ISD to investigate into my entire life. I’m glad there’s this sort of friction actually, it helps. I really ask myself what I want to do before acting on anything. I think some of my best works are done in the most painful period of my life. 4:30 came from that kind of isolation when I first encountered a lot of issues. I even had to leave the country for a short while. Actually it’s quite a nice experience. I am running a fever now but seeing the audience here, the turn-out, I feel very happy.

Q: Which directors influenced you the most? I can see a little of Tsai Ming-Liang and Wong Kar-Wai. Are there any particular movies which inspired you?

Royston: I think Wong Kar-Wai played a very big role. When I was in a polytechnic, he was like a God whom film students would worship. That set the foundation for me. The director I really like is actually Ed Wood which is so different from what I have done.

Gary: But there’s a similar spirit.

Royston: Determination, I guess. That helped me a lot to know that he had a limited budget and yet he’s been labelled as one of the world’s most prominent directors and yet he’s still making films and that really drove me to continue making films.

Q: How long did it take you to film the movie?

Royston: The production took 15 days. The actors were kept in separate rooms. Even when they’re eating they’re kept apart. We even created a human barrier so they wouldn’t have the chance to interact with one another. It was a little bit of a psychological torture for them.

Q: How did NHK come in on this?

Royston: Japan has the NHK fund whereby they will go all over the world looking for projects to finance. What they did was to go to all the major film festivals. I presume that everyone here is a film student right? No engineers? (laughs) So what you do is write a script, like Rotterdam has the Hubert Bals, Pusan has the PPP, Hong Kong has the HAF where all the major film investors will come and evaluate your projects. Every festival would take about 20 projects and from that, they will pick one. The best way is to secure an overseas funding which would help create a local interest because they’re more assured. 4:30 was a tough fight. It was against two other directors and then they narrowed it down to a Malaysian director, I can’t remember his name. In the end they went with 4:30 which we were very happy about.

Q: Royston, you get a lot of media coverage. How do you feel about the writers who do write about you who are in a way, using you over the cause of anti-censorship?

Royston: I think only as you get older, you start to realise it. All that censorship issue was too much for me then, when I was only 24. I was really lost to the point that I asked the reporter to tell me what to say. Now I’m really careful. I try to be truthful and a little bit more tactful especially recently there was a surprise attack from Australia. They claimed they interviewed me, but it didn’t happen at all. They wrote an entire article on anti-censorship and sent it to MDA, stating that I had things I didn’t actually say and that created a big issue. In moments like these, it taught me to be very careful. I think now, being a grown-up, I’ve learnt to protect myself. What they’re very good in is to lift phrases from entire segments like “I hate censorship” and that’s it.

Q: In your films, there is a great sense of realism. Did the boy really take the cough syrup and in 15, were they taking real drugs and did they really cut themselves?

Royston: No, the cough syrup was actually prune juice. We thought that he was too young to really take the real thing. For 15, what happened was that they were each given a handicam to film whatever they wanted. At first they gave me footages of themselves, they wanted to impress and shock me. But after 2 months of doing the same thing, they got tired and that was where they got real to themselves and that was the moment we were waiting for. We saw them cutting themselves for maybe one and a half minutes but they do this everyday. What wasn’t revealed to the audience was the new trend of cutting their abdomens. In the past when I used to cut my wrists, people could see it. It’s like a pity vote. But now, if I were to cut my abdomen, there’s a greater thrill because it’s all fats and the blood will just flow profusely. For the swallowing of the condom with drugs, it was substituted with sweets. It actually happened to one of the boys but we swapped the boys to protect his identity. We could get help to get real drugs but we didn’t want to because we were worried about safety issues. In the actual swallowing, the condom actually burst. This is something I had to be really careful about. I know it’s in my social responsibility so I actually finished the whole thing myself to demonstrate that it was okay before he did it. When you saw the boy do it in 15, it was done solely on the observation of me doing it. He copied me, the tears, the swallowing. He immersed himself entirely in the role. As a director, I need to be responsible. I would not get my actors to do something I would not do. It didn’t take much to get him to do it because I just demonstrated it in front of him.

Q: Why did you feel you had to prolong that shot for so long? It seemed like exploitation to me.

Royston: I think progression is very important to me. It was needed to show that kind of pain that they had to go through. I think everything is exploitation. Be it a love story, a charity programme, you’re manipulating the audience’s sympathy. In everything you do, there’s exploitation. What is your objective of exploitation? Is it a positive objective? It’s something I always ask myself. To do 15 was painful. It doesn’t feel good to see the actors cutting or piercing themselves. 5 scenes were deleted from the film. I thought that would be too much.

Q: I’m really glad that you showed what you did but I felt it was a lack of discipline to keep it at that long.

Royston: Perhaps it was the intensity that I wanted to make you feel. If I shortened it by half, it would have been a more pleasurable experience for you but I wanted the audience to feel “super” uneasy with it. The fact that for $200 to smuggle the drugs, the kind of pain you have to go through, that is something which is prevalent in the youth culture now. That kind of risk you go through for a few hundred dollars was something I wanted to show, the sort of process they go through. I mean it’s an instant death sentence to be caught.

Q: As a director, what kind of homework do you do in terms of visualising your scenes to create what we eventually see on screen?

Royston: For me, I have a very different way of working. If I’m doing a film about classical music, I would go to Zouk to look for inspiration. I need stimulants basically, things that are completely opposite to stimulate me to think in a different way. For 4:30, I basically went to clubs to look for that sense of peace and quickly start writing what I feel. When you go to clubs there’s this unified loneliness coming together, that made me take the lateral way of thinking and plot the graph down into a simple story.

Q: There’s a lot of networking you have to do in terms of meeting influential people to get money for your films, or marketed and distributed. So how much of that do you do or do you leave it to Gary or Eric?

Royston: I think Gary has a more approachable face. People see me and they get frightened so…

Gary: We sort of split the work load. For festivals and film markets, I would go. But those aren’t the fun ones. Royston goes to the fun ones.

Royston: I’m mostly there to interact with the audience, for the Q & A. After that you get drunk in the party, I’m quite famous for that.

Gary: With regards to your question, it’s also a build up of his track record. It’s not overnight that he got all the funds. If you’ve watched Royston’s shorts, he’s done many short films. I think 22. And now these films we send it for festivals, so it didn’t come as an overnight success. Even 15 was made from a short film. Also his stories, the kind of things that it taps into, and his visual style, Eric from Zhao Wei Films picked it up and wanted to develop 15. After 15, he had something to show to investors that he had short films and a feature film and it helps that it won awards as well.

Royston: I always like to suggest to aspiring filmmakers, don’t make your first feature immediately after you graduate. It would be very tough to get funding and also, you can never make your first feature film again. Gain more experience first with shorts and gain more credibility. I’m not saying that you should use it as a marketing tool, but it is a marketing tool and it can be very helpful.

Gary: It helps to train you as a director.

Royston: Had I not had my short films I think I would have a harder time getting funding. Before doing 15, the first thing the investors wanted to know was how many short films has he done.

Gary: It helps to provide a visual reference, style.

Moderator: Any last words you would like to say before we end this conversation?

Gary: I would like to thank all of you for coming. I hope you liked the film and that you will support our next film. If you didn’t understand the film, buy the DVD (laughs). And not many people know this but Zhao Wei Films has an open dialogue with new filmmakers. We receive scripts all the time and I spend a lot of time reading through each of them. If we see anything good, we’d like to help the filmmakers. So if you have any scripts, do send it to us, we’ll read it and if we’re interested in it, maybe we could help you out.

Royston: It’s very wonderful to see such a great turnout. As I’ve said before, 4:30 is a very personal film for me and it’s nice to see all of you here experiencing the journey with me. It makes the world a less lonely place, you know, I made this film for the kid in all of us. And I dedicate it to the kid in all of us. Before making the film I told Eric that if I cannot complete the film within the allotted time I would quit filmmaking because it’s so personal. By the way I have a blog, but it isn’t written by me. I don’t know this person but he goes by the alias, the Bodyguard. Do comment on it, it’s roystone-tan.blogspot.com. Thank you everyone.

Transcript by Athalia Ho Mei Xi and Lim Lung Chieh. Both missing in action.