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 heprocesses 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 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 it 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 want 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 three thousand pirated films. Every time he returns from the ship, we would go to this pirated DVD place and pick around ten films to watch later. This was back in the days when DVD was still popular, and a lot of films were hard to get—the pirates supplied a demand that wasn’t being satisfied by legitimate sources. In a way, I guess it was my father that cultivated this interest in film in me.
Have you always felt that you have a propensity for making art?
Art was never an obsession to me; it was just something you do regularly 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 for its time, because in a Malaysian secondary school, that 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 was doing theatre, who got us young ones all curious and excited over it. The pieces we did were less established plays and more pieces that we wrote with our friends out of interests or boredom. Then, we go to school and practice and at the end of the year, there would be an inter-state drama competition. Something like a football league, but for theater, if you may; it was all very strange and 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 of my friends from high school, and we were talking about the first film we ever done. It was a class project that we shot on a Betacam. We had to do this storytelling thing, and we made a horror film in my house. That was the first short film I ever did, and it was so funny! We got the whole class together, and we casted this really shy guy with no friends because we wanted to involve everyone. He ended up playing the killer. We had good fun, but the footage was lost.
After that, I started making short films more seriously when I went to college. What really drove me was that I could not relate to any form of Malaysian independent films of the time at all. That was when the new wave of Malaysian cinema came out, and I simply could not relate to the tempo, the pace, the subject matter, or even the language. Maybe it was due to my background growing up: I am ethnically Chinese but I do not speak Mandarin at all. At that time, I knew more Malay than I know Mandarin. Now, I know more Tagalog than I know Mandarin. When one does not speak the language, it is hard to relate. The sensibilities, the feels, the atmosphere…everything was alien.
Back in the days, if you look at the films we had in Malaysia, they were either mainstream Malaysian cinema, or Hollywood, or this independent new wave cinema that I couldn't relate to because it was in Mandarin. I am actually OK with these films now, but that is because I have been exposed to different kinds of cinema today; as a teenager growing up, if you could not speak the language, you just could not connect.
How would you describe film culture in Malaysia and how it has changed?
I am not sure if it has changed so much. I knew that when I tried to find different forms of cinema back then, it was more hit-and-miss than anything. One would just go to the cinema and watch a Malaysian film that you know have gone to a big festival 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 went to Venice Critic Week. It was intentionally badly sung, a what-if of if everyday people decide to make a musical. It was hilarious.
Unlike in the Philippines, where there are so many kinds of films that you can watch that are independent, Malaysia does not have an industry of independent cinema. In Malaysia, there is literally just this group of filmmaker. While they all have their own styles, the fact that there is only this one group of them means that the audiences' options are limited. If one is to watch independent Malaysian art house films, from like five years ago, one is bound to realize that they all look a little similar.
However, one must understand: these filmmakers are all friends and they all speak Mandarin, apart from maybe Amir Muhammad. They all grew up in the same sphere, and they are all from this one generation, making films that were influenced by a particular period. As such, this makes it very difficult to participate because they are such a close group.
As a young filmmaker starting out, it is hard to get support because there is no real community where new generations can join and everyone is welcome. There is only this old guard trying to make its own films. Now I think they are opening up, trying to be more inclusive—just around the time when I left for Philippines. This is why I always felt like I am this missing generation of Malaysian independent filmmakers.
I do not know anyone my age doing independent films in Malaysia—there is Malaysian new wave, and then there is me. It is really interesting that you talked about style and visual style and direction before; I think the fact that I found it difficult to connect to all these films—visually or otherwise—influenced my making of Singing in Graveyards, because now that I know what I do not want 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 because 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?
I feel that they have not really changed. What I really liked about 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 there is just this sense of nostalgia that they want to bring across that makes one feel something.
I guess if you are talking thematically, then it would be unlikely to see changes in Malaysia, because all these elements that were done to death are still relevant ultimately. The feelings of the films, however, they are pretty much still there; that is how we express our culture—feelings are the flesh of culture, and the bones are human connections.
What of short films? How have they evolved these past few years in both Malaysia and the Philippines?
Short films in Philippines are incredible; there is a huge amount being churned out every year. There is this sense of freedom and artistic expression that is not present in Malaysia. The same amount of artistic expressions and the scope of things they want to say that could be found in Filipino short films could not be found in Malaysia.
Partly, it could be due to this: the rise of YouTube and YouTube shorts in Malaysia. Nowadays, the kind of short films being made in Malaysia is entirely homogeneous—English or Mandarin based stories about unrequited love. This is not the biggest issue, unrequited love is a very universal and relatable theme, but when it is all the same everywhere, it is terrible no matter the directions or visuals or storylines.
Then, you realize that all these people doing it are doing it as a career, making money from YouTube subscriptions and views. So, when all these YouTube videos come out, they are what the new generations see, and then they start making the exact same kind of films, because no outside influences are coming in. We all talk about how feature films do not progress when there is no influence from beyond what is already there—this is same with short films. The films coming out in Malaysia over the past six years have all been stagnant.
The fact that Malaysia has no big film festival is part of the problem, because the filmmakers do not know that they can make other kinds of film. I think that's the key; you need to tell them that there are other kinds of film you can make, and you need to show them things beyond love stories.
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 on 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 that: "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 make 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 feature, 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. By winning, it reassured us that we have something really special that we can work on, not something throwaway, and was acknowledgment that now you need to push on and find that new key to unlock the door to next part of the film.
How did you unlock that next door and how long did it take?
The entire process took about three and a half years since the initial ideas.
After the lab, I went to the directing segment of Berlinale Talents next year and learnt absolutely nothing. It was incredibly frustrating. I thought I would go and hear amazing talks by master directors and I will get inspired and find the key, but I found nothing. 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 than actually sitting in on a talk by a master filmmaker. For some reason, nothing clicked there, and it was horrible.
Later that year, I got into the Locarno Filmmakers Academy, and that was a very important workshop for me to get into. 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 did not help with the script at all, apart from maybe loosening up some mental muscles.
It was not until one night, when we were just discussing the different layers of the film that we hit a goldmine of possibilities: What if he is an impersonator? What if he is not really human? What if he is just this creature in the forest that gave up his immortality to be a rock star in the 70s? We were adding all these elements to a script that was just bones…until suddenly, you get this really obese script, and it is fantastic, and you love it so so much.
Then, two months before we go into production, Pepe Smith had a stroke.
It affected his speech and his energy. He could not go beyond six to eight hours a day. He would just fall asleep. You could see that he literally could not remember anything. That was the biggest issue. We have to pare this obese script down to whatever Pepe can handle that day. From there, the layers were removed until all that was left at the end was just his soul in the script.
Turns out, after three and a half year writing this perfect script, it was just our willingness to go on set and decide that it was whatever he did that was key, and not what we try to impose on him, that worked.
What decisions went into the casting of the other actors like Lav Diaz and Mercedes Cabral?
Everything in the film is intentional.
Mercedes played someone trying to get away from being recognized as someone else, while Pepe was trying to be recognized as someone else. To get the meaning of this particular casting, one needs to know who Mercedes Cabral is in real life: she is an actress who did a lot of 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 award winners, and still be recognize 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 their total opposites in reality, like Bernardo Bernardo, who played this straight old pervert, when he is really this gay old pervert. 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?
What leaked into the film was my relationship with my grandfather.
Many scenes of how Pepe tries to connect with people, or rather, disconnect from people, were constructed from my own sense of disconnectedness from my own grandfather.
The scene where he goes to his house, and his grandson does not want to talk to him, and 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 was 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.
