Pinoy director at Hollywood’s door

The 2003 CineManila International Film Festival, a brainchild of director Tikoy Aguiluz, will be kicked off tonight with the screening of The Debut, a made-in-America movie which won as Best Picture in both the Hawaii International Film Festival and the San Diego Asian Film Festival (beating, among other films, Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and which is getting rave reviews. The New York Times hails it as "charming and heartwarming" while The Los Angeles Times describes it as "as illuminating as it is entertaining... a winner all around."

Directed by first-timer Gene Cajayon, half-Filipino and half-Vietnamese, and produced by his own company A5 Card Productions, The Debut tells the story of Ben Mercado (played by US-based actor Dante Basco), a talented high school senior who enrolls in a prestigious arts institute to realize his dreams of becoming an artist. However, his plans conflict with those of his strict immigrant father Roland, a postal worker intent on seeing Ben become a doctor.

Their long-simmering feud – for Ben, a struggle to be accepted by America and therefore a rejection of his Filipino heritage; for Roland, a quest to give his children a better life than he had –threatens to boil over and ruin the elaborate l8th birthday party of Ben’s sister Rose (played by US-based actress Bernadette Balagtas). However, it is at the party where everything starts to change for Ben. The celebration emerges as a cultural stew of old-world traditions and contemporary urban lifestyle, challenging Ben’s sense of misplaced identity, his choices of friends, even the way he regards his father. (Watch the movie released by Columbia Pictures and showing in Metro Manila theaters starting on Aug. 13, to find out what happens to the characters.)

In the cast of The Debut are Filipino actors "imported" from Manila, including Eddie Garcia as the grandfather, Tirso Cruz III as the father and Gina Alajar as the mother, and US-based Fe delos Reyes as the aunt.

Thirtysomething Direk Gene flew in from L.A. last Tuesday morning to grace tonight’s screening at the CineManila Filmfest. Funfare sat down with him for a brief chat. Here are excerpts:

Are you taking the same route that Ang Lee, another Asian director, took to Hollywood – you know, winning awards in international filmfests to be noticed by the right people?

"There’s no tried and true way to make it in Hollywood; it’s everybody’s struggle, you know. There are all these sellers of materials... I’m one of them... and there’s only a handful of people who buy. We’re doing maybe what Ang Lee, who’s my idol, and his group did but the main thing is for you to do a good movie. As simple as that."

How did you conceptualize The Debut?

"It started out as a half-hour short film while I was doing film school at Loyola Marymount University in L.A. which has a really, really strong film program. That was 12 years ago. That short film, which had an entirely different cast from the new one, was supposed to get me an agent in Hollywood. Everybody who saw it, including my professors and my classmates, said that it had a much bigger story than a half-hour film and they suggested that I expand it. So what I did was shoot the first 10 minutes of an early draft of the screenplay and used that as my thesis project and also used it to look for funding for the main film. While doing that, I kept rewriting and rewriting the film, and expanding and expanding it. That’s how it grew."

How did you decide on including Philippine-based actors in the film?

"They are among the best actors around. I must admit that I don’t know anything about Filipino movies but I do know that there are lots of good actors in the Philippines. During the auditions, it was obvious that all the really talented actors were younger. They could play young characters but not older ones. They couldn’t play titos or titas or lolos or lolas, so we had to look for the older actors in Manila."

The movie has a predominantly Filipino sensibility...

"I think so. There’s a lot of debate as to how Filipino it is or how Filipino-American it is. The essence of the story is like the push-and-pull conflict between what Filipino-American kids want when they grow up in America with Filipino parents and American influences versus what the Filipino parents coming from the Philippines want for their America-born children."

What’s the budget for the film?

"A little over $1 million (roughly P55 million at the current exchange rate)."

How long did it take you to finish the movie?

"Four weeks... 26 days. I made it in 1997. That was the actual shooting but the project took a long time to get off the launching pad."

It used to be called The Mercado Family Debut. Why did you drop "Mercado Family" from the title?

"We didn’t want the film to be mistaken for a Latin-American picture and not an Asian-American one."

Why The Debut?

"Well, that’s what happens to the characters in the movie. Everybody has his/her debut at the party and not only the daughter – from Ben, to his father, to his mother, to his grandfather, to his aunt. The event proves to be the ‘coming out’ of everybody. The title is a metaphor for what happens to everybody in the story."

Why did it take you so long to finish the film? What was the problem?

"Money. You have to understand that people can’t take movies like this for granted. Movies about Filipinos living in America don’t happen and don’t just pop out of nowhere. It’s not like in the Philippines where everybody is Filipino and you make Filipino movies all the time. To make a movie about people of color...our community in America...is extremely difficult. It took me eight years to finish the film, from the beginning to the end."

How did the movie get to be released by Columbia Pictures?

"Because it did very well in the US. Even though the studios didn’t believe in the film, we would have released it ourselves. When The Debut beat Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (at the San Diego Asian Film Festival), we realized that this movie has a huge audience, so we made sure that we went out there and have it seen by as many people as possible."

Could you tell me more about yourself?

"Well, I’m half-Filipino and half-Vietnamese. My father, Renato Cajayon, is Filipino; my mother, Francois Malbert, is French-Vietnamese. I was born in Saigon. During my early years, my mother kind of shuttled me back and forth between Manila and Saigon. My father was an engineer working in Vietnam. He and my my Mom met there. I have two younger sisters; one is studying to be a chef and the other, to be an optometrist."

What about your education?

"While my mom and I were going back and forth between Saigon and Manila, my dad got his US visa and went ahead of us to the US. He didn’t see me until I was a year old. Once everything was set, he sent for me and my mom. My two sisters were born in the US. After high school, I went straight to Loyola Marymount University to take up a film course."

So how much of you is Filipino, how much is Vietnamese and how much is American?

"I am a 100 percent of all three. I was brought up equally on all three cultures."

Are all three cultures reflected in the movie?

"There’s not so much Vietnamese culture in the film. What the movie does explore is what it’s like to be Filipino and American at the same time."

Is it somewhat biographical?

"Well, loosely. Pretty much. My father wanted me to do anything but film."

After The Debut, what?

"I have several projects. One of them is called Nickel n Dime which is about Asian and Latino gangs in San Francisco’s Bay Area. It’s a refrence to the east bay of San Francisco, with the area code 510. The slang term for that area is nickel n dime."

You don’t speak Tagalog, do you?

"Konti lang. My mom doesn’t speak Tagalog and my father doesn’t speak Vietnamese. The only common language in the house is English."

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