LD: It is happening now. A lot of young filmmakers here are doing it. They buy a camera and they shoot, and you can see it on YouTube. They’re so engaged with the new technology. It’s a new culture of doing things that’s destroying all these bad habits of the institution, the super-institution, of cinema.
THC: Can we talk about new cinema? Who’s exciting to you in cinema right now?
LD: I haven’t seen a lot because I stopped going to festivals now, and I’m just reading things.
THC: What are you reading?
LD: I’m more into reading novels now. Virginia Woolf, Nabokov, Platonov, George Saunders, going back to the late Benedict Anderson which is history. I’m writing a lot also. But it’s all helping me with my cinema. It gives me that impetus, that energy, when I read all these works. I was reading “The Waves” by Virginia Woolf last night. It’s beautiful the way she works with discourse and words. Platonov, in “The Foundation Pit,” has a way of saying things that’s different from all the other works in Russia. It gives you that … I don’t want to use the word, but we have to use it, hope. Just like with your question a while ago, can we survive all this madness? I think we just keep moving, pushing things. The real problem is ignorance. So it’s all about re-educating people. We have to go back to the truth, to really understanding the facts. That’s why we’re losing. It’s happening because we don’t want to see the truth. That’s a big problem. A very, very intelligent person can slide back because of that.
It’s very energizing to read novels now, because you lay low, you have to rest, and then you start thinking, and you can see the spaces. There are still spaces in life. It’s not just ISIS, not just the Middle East. There’s still the sea, there’s still the mountains. You can still see the trees. I was walking in Queens yesterday, just walking and walking, and I passed a Best Buy. I went in, and there’s a new camera, there’s a new tripod, and it just engaged me again. You discover the little things and it gives you hope. And then you hold the work of this writer, and you read him, you read her, and they give you something. It’s like being transported to other times when you discover the spaces in Tolstoy, in Dostoevsky, or in Hemingway. You think of Paris now, which is very dark. Everything is uncertain and any time it could just explode. But when you read “A Moveable Feast,” when Hemingway was struggling in Paris, it was beautiful. There’s hope.
THC: Can you talk about the film you’re making now?
LD: It’s called “When the Wives Are Gone.” It’s a film noir. So it’s a gangster movie set on this island, but it will reflect the whole power thing in the country. When I came here in September, I was reading all these news in the Philippines and here, and I was so isolated in my room and I had a guitar there, so I started writing a lot of songs. I was able to write 20 to 25 songs from September to December. So I said to my funder that I was not going to do the noir, that let’s shoot a musical. The film is about what’s happening in the Philippines, the political condition, so we cannot get the permit to shoot in the Philippines. We go to Malaysia, because Malaysia is very similar to the Philippines. We Filipinos are still racially Malay. So it’s a musical, set in the late ’70s. It’s a love story set in the very darkest moments of martial law. That’s the film.
—Staff writer Tianxing V. Lan can be reached at tianxing.lan@thecrimson.com