Touchblue

I recently had the chance to interview the talented and prolific Romeo Candido, director of the cross-continent horror film Ang Pamana: The Inheritance and co-founder of The Digital Sweatshop, an independent production company based in Canada. Through the power of instant messaging and a world clock we discuss spitting game with sausage and the fragmented state of Filipino cinema. Read on!!

Words by Abraham Cajudo.
Images by The Digital Sweatshop.

Abe Cajudo [Touchblue]: How’s your day so far? Where in the world is Romeo Candido?

Romeo Candido: In Starbucks in Makati.  It is the morning and I am eating a cornbeef pandasal.

Abe Cajudo [Touchblue]: Tasty. Filipino breakfasts are the best.

Romeo Candido: I know right?  Fuck cornflakes.

AC: Silog beats the ‘flakes any day. Makati is a part of Manila?

RC: Makati is the business district of Manila.

AC: and the business you do in Makati is of the moving picture variety, no?

RC: The money gig is directing commercials.  The soul gig is making movies.  The passion gig is making music.  Commercials keep the boat financially afloat while me and my writers grind out our next scripts.

AC: So there’s a day gig, a night gig, and about a million meryenda gigs.

RC: Ha. Yeah man.  I’ll do whatever.

AC: Is it a harsh switch transitioning between all your different sorts of projects?

RC: Na. Commercials are great because there’s always a budget to use all the toys. I just have to remember that it’s not about the ‘art’ with commercials… it’s called commercials cuz it’s all about the commerce, and the more I do stuff, the more I realize that they flow into each other.

AC: Yeah but you managed to make some fun pieces, like what’s on your commercial reel.

RC: Yeah. Well. All those experiences are surreal actually, because I am Bill Murray in Lost in Translation. Just a fish out of water learning to swim. Dilis in Suka.

AC: so you’re not originally from the P.I.?

RC: I am from Canada. Grew up in a small town. I did a short film, Rolling Longaniza, and people liked it. I was always the only brown kid in my social groups…many times in my class, so I think it forced me to be the ‘funny guy’ cuz I didn’t want to be known as the ‘brown guy’ who comes to school smelling like fried fish…

AC: It’s a pungent, but gangster aroma. Tell us a little about your short film, Rolling Longaniza.

RC: Gangster aroma. Rolling Longaniza came from a conversation me and comedian Ron Josol were having about his childhood. I just thought the whole idea of sausage making grotesque and comic, and the fact that it intersected with other cultures was really interesting for me. Ron told me about making a huge Longaniza that was too much and gave people stomach aches and it gave me an idea of having a guy making a big sausage to impress a girl.

AC: hahahaha

RC: I think it’s me trying to fight the emasculation of the Filipino male.

AC: So there’s symbolism all over that mug…did he win her over?

RC: Oh yes. They shared the sausage by the end.

AC: Excellent. How old were you when you did this film?

RC: It was done in 2004.  Still in my twenties…

AC: Do you have a formal education in filmmaking?

RC: Not really. I was a theatre school dropout. Took a 3 month course at NYU school of continuing education. Most of my learning came from editing on Final Cut Pro and for camera [work], I feel my school was commercials. Ang Pamana was my school for Dolby Digital 5.1 sound.

RC: I was never good at formal education. I’m probably ADD. And I was always too busy trying to play footsies with girls.

AC: They are MAD tricky these days…I think there’s a female footsie guidebook circulating on Bittorrent or something…

RC: Yeah…the key is to not play it with cowboy boots. Tsinelas is the best.

AC: True call my friend! So young Canadian Pinoy dabbles in editing and directing, has a hit with a short film in his hometown. How did you get your start in directing commercials in the Philippines?!

RC: Well, after making Lolo’s Child, Rolling Longaniza, and countless digital shorts, I was ready to call it a day.  I went to the Philippines for vacation and ended up showing some of my work to a cousin’s boyfriend who was an art director at an ad agency.  I had a meeting with them, showed them the breadth of my work, and landed one of the biggest ad campaigns that year for GLOBE Telecom.  It was a 4 commercial, 8 day shoot.  I had left the Philippines, got a call 3 days later from a production company saying I was awarded the ‘boards’, and was on a plane the next day.

RC: A week later I was in a crowded arena with 600 extras. The project I did before those ads was Rolling Longaniza…with a crew of 7 on a mini DV camera. Next thing you know I have about 800 people on set with Rivermaya…the Philippines version of U2. Cranes, steady cams, concert lighting…it was crazy.

AC: Holy crap that’s awesome! Besides the bigger scale of these new projects, what are some of the challenges working in Manila? I’m a damn fluent Tagalog understander, but I can’t really carry a conversation. Do you speak Tagalog?

RC: My Tagalog is terrible.  I speak like a three year old caveman. Main words, no glue words to string them into a sentence.

RC: Food good on plate table over there.

AC: hahaha

RC: When I try to practice people look at me with pity.

AC: It doesn’t sound like the language "barrier" has stopped you in your tracks one bit though. Tell us a little about your current film, Ang Pamana: The Inheritance. From the clips I’ve seen, the movie looks EPIC.

RC: Well, it’s as epic as we could have made it with a 14 day shoot. This is me and my crew’s stab at ‘supernatural thriller’.  I grew up fascinated about the stories that my tito’s and tita’s would tell me about aswang (witch), kapre (giants), duendes (Filipino leprechauns), and when I came to the Philippines, I found out that these stories were REAL for people.  It’s funny, because the movie is about a balikbayan (returning Filipino) who doesn’t really believe in those stories finding out that they might be real.  I went through that same type of transformation.  Life imitates art for sure.  Filming the movie is a movie itself.  We saw things during the shoot.

AC: What kind of things? Did you incorporate any of them into the story? Or was it tough to improvise because it was only a 14 day shoot?

RC: I was trying to find ways but they didn’t fit. The whole shoot was a 14 day exercise of improvisation.

AC: that’s a good way to put it.

RC: Because it was so short there was a lot of rewriting and reworking scenes to condense them, shorten them, simplify, sometimes to complicate…but with the [lady in white] scene, it’s not that I incorporated it, but after we shot, I saw a white lady on the road at 3 a.m. with my driver who had to swerve around someone standing in the middle of the highway just standing in a white dress.

AC: CREEPY

RC: and it ended up validating the scene in our movie where we have the exact shot. Very creepy. Me and the driver were freaked out

RC: For me it’s so important to keep preserving the native stories from the Philippines. We shot the movie on 35mm. Color graded it. Dolby Digitaled it. So I got to really go through the whole filmmaking process.

RC: In terms of story, most of the scary stuff came from actual stories that we heard about, so we just had to find a narrative to string the stories together.

AC: I’m looking forward to the special features then when this thing drops on DVD.

RC: Yeah.  There’ll be a lot.  Behind the scenes clips (which are on youtube already…keyword: pamana), music videos, director commentary. Tons…just like the Lolo’s Child DVD. I love the DVD format because you can stack it with extras. I’m a sucker for extras and easter eggs.

AC: Hell yeah, it’s the ghetto man’s film school.

AC: You did three music videos and had an orchestral score for the movie. So you’re also a musician! How much a part does music play in creating your films?

RC: Music is a big part.  For me it is the ‘shapeshifter’ film device, it works as another character, atmosphere, internal dialogue, everything.  For Ang Pamana : The Inheritance, I wanted to express the inner world of the balikbayan through what he was listening to on his headphones.  For me I’m very much an ‘ipod as life soundtrack’ type of person, and since I was going through many of the things that our protagonist was going through, I thought who better to do his soundtrack?  Also…I wanted to do music and mix it in Dolby 5.1.  ooooh…sexy stuff.  It is a tradition for Filipinos to tell our stories and perpetuate our traditions through music.  I feel that I am carrying on a tradition by using music as a storytelling device. 

AC: I also started out as a musician and found that editing came naturally because the rhythm is the same.

RC: Oh yeah.  I feel like editing is an extension of music for sure.  Musicians have a different sensibility as editors because it’s not just about cutting on downbeats and stuff.

AC: Do you stand up when you edit like Walter Murch?

RC: No. I just stand up when playing back.

AC: I sometimes run to and from the screen and blink my eyes really fast too.

RC: Ha. Your Cry Me a River video was almost shot for shot, no?

AC: Yeah as much as we could to parody the original. You can’t really see it, but Chewie (the chow chow) is wearing a newsies hat like the fake britney in the real video, hahaha.

RC: Ha. So dumb. You guys are so dumb.

AC: We really do get silly…why the hell are you interviewing with us?!

RC: Because your videos remind me a lot of what I was doing when I first got a Hi-8 camera. I have some stupid shit that I haven’t been able to digitize cuz i don’t have a camera. Lots of dumb horror movies and fake Mentos commercials. Have you seen Happy Slip?

AC: Yeah I was just talking to her online yesterday!

RC: I LOVE Happy Slip.

AC: She’s good people.

RC: Fucking funny…she has to be Ilocano.

AC: She’s tearing it up right now on the Intranets.

RC: I know. See, that to me is crossover. She’s the new template of success. Especially when she can quit her job and do it full time. But her visibility is crazy. Has she watched your stuff?

AC: Some of her friends referred her to our Terry Maddox videos before she started her vlog. I found out about her soon after, and just contacted her to give props. It turns out we’re connected through some family and friends on the east coast. The Filipino world is, despite the mileage, a very small world. I love it.

RC: Yeah. And Filipino artists are just nice cuz we’re all in the same struggle.

AC: Exactly. Okay, in some ways you’re still very much underground and undiscovered. To me, that’s a big problem! What has to happen to bring more Filipino artists like you and The Balikbayan Renaissance to the public eye?

RC: Well, I have changed my definition of “public eye” from being mainstream North American to a more global audience.  Growing up in Canada, it was all about Hollywood.  While I still have aspirations for that, I feel that as a Filipino artist, making Filipino content, if I can’t win over my own people, then there’s not much I can do outside of my culture without leaving cultural stuff behind.  Look at the recent “ethnic” communities that have crossed over– Korean, Mexican, Thai. They were able to establish their own industry with their own content in their own countries and eventually their aesthetic and sensibilities crossed over.  I love the Touchblue crew and have a zillion hits on your media clips.   There are a lot of Filipinos in the world.  And the Filipinos with disposable income are growing, so I am hoping that this will be my primary market with ambitions of winning over the overseas workers and second generation Filipinos.  One of the big dreams is to be able to do a movie that does well here in the Philippines, while being able to connect with Filipinos abroad.  Look at American Idol.  The Filipinos always kick ass vocally, but America is just not ready for us yet.  We have to win over our own first.  The world will follow. 

AC: So you think the reason we’re not globally available is from our lack of a rich and established entertainment history? Indians have Bollywood. Koreans have Sun and Jin on Lost. The Chinese know how to fly on-camera and shiet.

RC: Yeah, maybe.  But there shouldn’t be a reason why we’re not in the mainstream…we have lots of population…I think it’s because we haven’t made our own shit that’s on point.

AC: Amen to that. Let’s bring it up a notch, right?

RC: We just haven’t elevated our own work yet. Right now the Filipino films that are getting their shine in international film fests are the digital squatter prostitute gay films. Film fest programmers have ghettoized Filipino films. They always want the gay squatter movies…while good and important…it’s just ghettoizing us. The problem is Filipino ‘identity’ is so fragmented, so our ‘art’ is fragmented too.

AC: right.

RC: So it’s a harder sell. I think it’ll take a movement to give us that exposure. Look at the Mexicans. There were three directors, super on point, super world class, and they just hit the tipping point.

AC: great book.

RC: yeah.

AC: I agree. But do you think it’s all about "to each culture it’s own"?

RC: Kinda. I feel we have to do us first.

AC: …or can we coexist in art like we do in life?

RC: In life, we take a background to everyone else.

AC: Filipinos?

RC: That’s the survival mechanism of Filipinos. We assimilate real good. Why don’t we speak Tagalog? The Koreans speak Korean, the Mexicans speak Spanish, the Thai speak Thai. Why don’t we speak Cebuano, Ilocano, Tagalog, Pampangenian? Because we’re properly assimilated. We have no pride or roots into our culture, so it reflects in our art. We’re the best copycats, but we’re not satirists yet. We’re the best singers, but not the best songwriters yet. We’re the best DJ’s, but not the best producers yet.

AC: We have the best DJ’s

RC: But other than Chad Hugo…

AC: Chad Hugo! Yeah I was bouts to say!

RC: He’s it.

AC: That mufugga’s got aural CLASS, yo.

RC: But it’s will.i.am sampling Filipino samples, not Chad. And Chad isn’t visible. It’s all Pharrell. Background.

AC: Very sharp observation…

RC: Chad has all the skills but he’s a supporting player to all the white and black artists. We’re supporting players, much like Black people and Hispanic people from before. We haven’t come into our own as an arts culture, but it’s happening. When you come to Manila you will freak at the talent, and Touchblue and Happy Slip prove that there is an audience. That’s why we think it’s the combination of the balikbayan and the homeland artists that will break internationally, because, like with Ang Pamana, as a balikbayan, everything about this country holds fascination for me, coupled with my ‘north american’ sensibilities and attitudes… I feel that the combination will eventually lead to world-class products.

RC: Look at all our ‘cultural’ heroes: Bruce Lee, Ghandi, Malcolm X. It’s not until they went to their homeland that they hit their highest levels of cultural awareness and influence. Jose Rizal, Ninoy Aquino. We have to be unified with the motherland. I really feel that is the key.

AC: You’re on to something…past strategies have not been working for the Filipino community so far.

RC: Look…there are lots of Filipinos making it in Hollywood…but no one knows that they are Filipino.

AC: Going back to your background player observation…

RC: Matty Libatique…Vanessa Minnillo…Tia Carrere… no one knows they’re Pinoy. Rob Schneider is the only one who represents… his humor is sooo Pinoy.

AC: He’s thrown some bibingka jokes up in his material as well.

RC: I know. He’s nice, but he hasn’t played Filipino in any of his movies.

AC: So we need to represent?

RC: I guess. But I also think we can’t look at white people and black people to accept us [in entertainment]. They’re not our primary market. They’re too busy doing them.

AC: But isn’t the whole world our end game, eventually?

RC: Yeah of course, but we have to look at the other cultures who crossed over. They crossed over within themselves. Stephen Chow made it with Chinese people before Disney asked for him to do a movie with them. Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, all of them. Who are we to think that we can cross to the world when Bruce Lee couldn’t even do so without winning over Hong Kong?

RC: I used to think like that, I used to want everyone else to pay attention. But it’s futile unless we have Filipinos pay attention first, or, we forget the Filipino thing and just try to penetrate the market without bigging up our culture.

AC: Like some of our friends in Hollywood.

RC: That’s cool too. If people can make a living, then why not coconut? But for now, at this stage of my career, I want to do my best to big up Filipinoness.

AC: gotcha.

RC: We also can’t get Hollywood to call until they see that we can generate revenue. We can’t get urban record labels to sign us until they see that there’s a market for our product. It’s all commerce.

AC: As has been the case with many a fallen RnB group…

RC: Or…we do stuff on youtube that gets a million hits…but we all have to keep a day job. That’s why we have to strengthen our networks and keep cross-pollinating.

AC: word life son.

RC: For me, you Touchblue guys have the audience…that can be parlayed into so many opportunities…that’s why we reached out to you guys. I feel we have experience that you guys can benefit from, so it’s win-win for us to be aligned.

AC: I think we got that audience by focusing on content specifically. Our technique is pretty hack-and-slash otherwise.

RC: Yeah, but the tone is all there. The humor is spot on.

AC: We spend hours thinking about the joke and focusing that into comedic lightsabers, hahaha.

RC: Yeah. I love working on comedy.  People don’t know how hard it is.

AC: Sometimes it hits, sometimes it don’t.

RC: Yeah, but when it hits…a million viewers. Imagine…I heard about you guys here in the Philippines. Then again in Toronto. Your reach is wide!!!!

AC: Damn man, that’s a trip…

RC: Yeah man.  It’s awesome that you guys are so well known and it proves that there is an audience. Now we have to figure out how to capitalize.

AC: I’m sure the fans would appreciate a new wave of high-caliber Filipino-brewed art.

RC: I think they would too.  They just don’t know it exists.

AC: I’m really excited for our generation and the next.

RC: Yeah, but if we don’t do it now I think our culture won’t make it. We don’t even speak Tagalog.  What more with the next generation?

AC: In live performance, you’re lucky to get immediate feedback from an audience, but with filmmaking, you might have to wait months and sometimes years to see if what you did “works”. Have you sat in on any Ang Pamana screenings and if so, what was that like?

RC: I was able to anonymously sit in the back of a theatre for a screening in the Philippines. It was real interesting, because Filipinos are LOUD in a theatre. I’m finding that the second generation Filipinos really get the humor, but the Filipinos from the Philippines really get scared. I’m excited for San Fran because ultimately, they’re the type of people that are my primary target audience…Filipinos from abroad that need that connection to the homeland.

AC: Manila, Vancouver, Hawaii and now San Francisco (March 2007) for Ang Pamana: The Inheritance. Where can we expect to see the film next?

RC: Your guess is as good as mine.  There are more festivals to come and some local releases but everything is in the works.  I guess this is where I invite people to the website www.angpamana-theinheritance-movie.com or www.thedigitalsweatshop.com to see what’s up.  I’m just waiting to see the Touchblue spoof of the film.  I want to play the duende…

AC: We will spread the word like Country Crock.

RC: Ha. Or country crack.

Links:
Ang Pamana: The Inheritance official website: www.angpamana-theinheritance-movie.com
The Digital Sweatshop: www.thedigitalsweatshop.com
The Balikbayan Renaissance: www.balikbayan-renaissance.com
Romeo’s Youtube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=romeocandido

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