Peque is back

We were in a dark, packed theater and Peque Gallaga was near tears. He had a quiver in his voice; his huge, imposing figure backlit by a set of harsh floodlights. “This film is a record of a generation gone by,” he said, addressing a movie theater packed with filmmakers, film buffs, old friends, and fans.

This was on Wednesday, at the opening of the Cinema One Originals film festival, and Peque was unveiling the digitally remastered version of his 1982 classic Oro Plata Mata. The painstaking restoration took 1,700 working hours — from scanning the film’s original 35 mm celluloid film print, to adjusting the colors on individual frames, to exporting the movie into a Digital Cinema Package, the high-tech file format used in cinemas today.

The restoration is a project of ABS-CBN and Central Digital Lab, who together plan to restore 2,000 Filipino movies — a huge backlog caused by decades upon decades of negligence by the film industry and the government.

“We didn’t take care of our films,” Peque lamented. “I never show Filipino movies in my classes (because) you’re talking about the genius of Philippine cinema and all the reproductions of our Filipino movies look like shit. Seriously.”

But the tide is changing. Just this year, Oro Plata Mata, Manuel Conde’s 1950 epic Genghis Khan, and Ishmael Bernal’s 1982 masterpiece Himala were brought back to life via digital remastering — bringing these precious records of our cultural memory into the consciousness of future generations of Filipinos.

I spoke to Peque after the screening, to look back at Oro Plata Mata, discuss the present state of cinema, and take a peek at Peque’s exciting new projects.

How happy are you with the restoration?

I am so pleased, and people are raving about it. In many ways, some of the parts are better than the original. Before at LVN, as they ran the film negatives for printing, the chemicals have a certain shelf-life — for example, you could allow only 1,000 feet and then change chemicals. LVN would run 500,000 feet, so the chemicals were really mapusyaw (dull), so a lot of the scenes in the original came out dark and in the digital version, you can see details. It’s an amazing job.

Why is it important to preserve old films?

Films are our memories as a collective people. It’s like literature, like what Noli Me Tangere does to us is that it reminds us that we’re no different then than we are now. You could see, for example, exactly what the cancer of the Catholic Church was, and what Rizal was fighting against — and that it’s happening again — my god, the arrogance and the entitlement that these people have. All of a sudden, we see ourselves as a nation and as a collective people.

And more than literature now, the movies are a reflection of what we think, where we are, our taste. You know, the government keeps telling us to respect ourselves as a nation. “Let’s fight China,” etcetera, etcetera. But we don’t know who we are. We have no concept of who we are. How can we love ourselves if we don’t know who we are? And the things that tell us who we are are culture and art and history. And nobody pays attention to that.

Now, if you see a Botong Francisco, the colors have faded to a certain extent, but you can still get a super good idea of what Botong was trying to do. But  my god, whenever I turn to Philippine cinema, everybody thinks that our cinema masters were masters of magenta ‘cause the films are all magenta. To show these copies is a disservice.

What's it like to watch your film with an audience today?

I’m sorry, I like to blow my own horn, but it’s a mark of a masterpiece that the more you see it, the more you understand it, and the deeper you appreciate it. And apparently last night, a lot of people told me, “I saw more. I understand more. There’s so much. There are so many layers,” etcetera. So for me, I’m realizing that I really own a masterpiece. My god, I’m in awe. I’m awestruck at myself. (Laughs.)

And of course, for myself, what a great thing it was to be sitting down while people are watching, and there’s this rapt attention. People are responding. It’s an amazing thing. When people are responding to your film, it’s a dialogue. It’s sex. You can quote me on that. It’s sex.

I hear you’re in the middle of shooting a film?

It’s a romance-sex drama for Regal Films, and I accepted it very cynically as a romance-sex drama. But one or two shooting days after, it just grew. I’m very inspired. I’m inspired by my actors, Richard Gutierrez, Solenn Heussaff, and Sarah Labhati. They’re responding to me, I think I’m getting fantastic performances from them, and they know it. We’re all very stoked about it. I don’t know, I’ve been rejuvenated. Now, I feel young again. I’m finding inspiration. We were doing a love scene in a bathroom, and the production designer put some capiz shells, and from that I got inspiration completely out of the script; all of a sudden the shells became a character in the scene. In other words, things are very alive.

Oro was restored on digital. You’re shooting on digital. What do you think about old 35mm film being phased out?

All cinema is technology and art, and I was always a poor technician. But now, a lot of my colleagues were my students, who have developed their own level of expertise, and are artists in their own right. I can actually lean on them to make suggestions when I have absolutely no idea what’s happening.

See, I am totally for the indie movement. I’m really all for the young to take over. Old people should be revered, remembered, and respected, but everybody should make room for young people. However, I demote the fact that a lot of people become directors just because of their handle of the technology, but they don’t know how to handle actors, or have absolutely no organizational skills, or don’t know how to produce something. They have people waiting for 12 hours on set before they are called; asking actors to do difficult scenes at three in the morning. That’s not directing. That’s just being a taskmaster.

So I’m reacting against that. Right now, I’m almost anti-technology. I don’t give a shit what camera you’re using— like Lars von Trier’s Dogme 95, I don’t believe in that at all. It’s a lot of bullshit. I’m ready for an anti-technology movement for a while here. Sometimes, directors come together, and they say, “Oh I’m using the Red CC4-5-CC-Y camera” — all this shit they throw at each other. I get so bored and I fall asleep.

What else do you have in the pipeline?

We’re doing this really huge — unimaginably huge — project for Star Cinema, so I can’t tell you anything about it. But it’s going to involve a lot of things and a lot of years. At the same time, I’m doing two indie films already. And Regal Films is barking up for our second movie. I went back out of retirement because I needed a lot of money. I needed to pay debts, and let’s just say, I’m going to be able to pay my debts. (Laughs).

People have been good, people have been kind, and I’d really like to thank Mother Lily (Monteverde, of Regal), because she opened the door.

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