“You have to be more vigorous!”
To understand Chew Tze Chuan’s unlikely collaboration with Pierre Rissient, you must first know of Toh Hai Leong, the fiercely outspoken film critic, writer, archivist and ubiquitous figure at film screenings and festivals in Singapore throughout the 90s and into the early 2000s. Always armed with bags full of paperbacks, VHS tapes, newspaper cuttings and other cultural ephemera, Toh was Singapore’s most relentless and passionate cinephile and had over the years crossed paths with Rissient, introduced by film programmer Philip Cheah (who can take the credit/blame for many such introductions). In 2004, Chew, then a fledgling filmmaker collaborated (as editor and co-producer) with veteran Singaporean director Eric Khoo on Zombie Dogs, featuring Toh playing himself, a scabrous, hilarious fake-documentary that celebrated Toh’s wildly funny monologues on women, sex, violence, porn and life in Singapore. Not long after that, Toh was diagnosed with diabetes, and was trying to manage his failing health while living a life close to poverty. Chew himself had his own struggles, and this is where the story begins.
Chew Tze Chuan: I was at the bottom of a pit and felt very depressed and Mrs Chew was freaking out and she called Eric and said, “Please save my husband.” This is 2005. So, Eric brought me the clipping of Toh Hai Leong in The Straits Times, with sunken cheeks and depressed, and we were equally depressed, and Eric said, “Chew, why don’t we do something for Hai Leong?”
Ben Slater: You’d already done one film about Hai Leong.
CTC: Yes, Zombie Dogs. So now we were going to do a documentary “to encourage him”, quoting Pierre Rissient, “to live life again.” That was the mission. Some time in the latter part of 2005 we started to shoot for 40 days, and then Eric showed it to Pierre.
BS: Did you know about Pierre before?
CTC: He had seen Zombie Dogs and gave Eric advice to restructure the whole thing (which they didn’t take), but I didn’t really know who he was. The first time I met him I was still shooting (the documentary). There was one scene at the Goodwood Park Hotel, they were sitting down together beside the pool (Pierre talks with Hai Leong about Korean cinema).
BS: And Pierre set up the phone call between Kang Soo-youn (the iconic star of Im Kwon-taek films) and Hai Leong, that’s in the film.
CTC: So generous of him. He called me and said, “Chew, I’ll call you in two hours and please be there.” And was really intense as usual. I had my old Nokia with the speaker and there we were, talking with Kang Soo-youn. Pierre really appreciated what we were doing… So he watched the documentary, and Eric says, “Pierre loves it.” Eventually, he told me to visit him in France, because Pierre couldn’t make it to Singapore, and we could edit together.
BS: So you went to Paris.
CTC: With the hard-discs and my laptop. We went to Benjamin Illos’s place (Pierre’s long-standing assistant). Benjamin was there, which is why he’s in the credits as one of the editors (Benjamin is credited as providing “friendly special assistance”, Pierre does not take a credit). The first cut was two hours, and then it went to 90 minutes, and the one that Pierre saw was about 67 minutes. I was quite happy with it.
BS: How was it working with Pierre?
CTC: Benjamin was beside me, Pierre sat behind. Half the time he was yelling, or talking with a very stern voice. I wouldn’t call him a dictator but he was very concerned, and one of the main motives there was – “If you do it like this the Parisian audience will never get it!” I realized why he related to Hai Leong’s journey. He himself was taking insulin jabs, and by 4pm, despite the coffee he’d be dozing off, and then he’d get up and say “Chew, where are we?” He was maxing himself out.
BS: What did he yell at you about?
CTC: Anything that was too technical, like I would manipulate the frame-rate, using slow-motion to emphasise a gesture, he thought it was fake, contrived. He could see it was a bag of tricks. There are scenes he took out, like when my son had a fever and we were giving him paracetamol by syringe, and he refused, and I parallel cut with Hai Leong refusing the medication and bitching about it. I could see Pierre smiling, but he wanted me to cut it. It’s in the Singapore cut, but not in the Locarno (film festival) version, A Friend Like None (the Singapore title for the film was simply F), which was 45 minutes. On the last day of editing he was quite happy and we had wine and he said “What shall we call this?” Pierre was a gentleman for coming up with that name.
BS: He didn’t like F as a title?
CTC: It was a bit ambiguous for him. He also said to me, “Chew, you have to be more vigorous!”
BS: Make it faster and shorter?
CTC: Exactly. One scene was really zestful. Kang Soo-youn was talking about seeing Hai Leong in Busan, and then there’s a straight cut, and we hear a screech and we see Hai Leong walking very briskly to the screening of a film. I thank Benjamin and Pierre for that.
BS: Did my scene make the Locarno cut? (In the film I tell a story about the reception to Zombie Dogs when I showed it in a festival)
CTC: Yes, I can’t thank you enough. You chose the place, the kopitiam (coffeeshop) opposite The Substation (an indie Arts Centre). Pierre said, “Who was this guy?” He hadn’t met you yet. After that he got very intrigued. He wanted to know who you were, actually he wanted to validate everyone in the film.
BS: So the cut that you showed at the Goethe Institute during SIFF (the Singapore International Film Festival, which later became SGIFF) was the longer ‘local cut’?
CTC: The version you saw was based on A Friend Like None. I came back from Paris with 45 minutes and Philip (Cheah) was the one who said, “Actually Chew you don’t have to do everything he says.” Because Philip had watched the Director’s cut and it had been accepted by SIFF. So I scratched my head and took a look at the cuts and chose the best moments, so I kept it at 60 minutes. I was satisfied. It was the best of the best.
BS: What happened in Locarno?
CTC: Pierre had helped it not only get into Locarno but in a very good slot, during the first three days. (Before the festival) Pierre told me to get the French subtitles ready or at least the transcript. I thought that Benjamin would get back to me, and I let it pass. Then, the doctor seriously discouraged me from bringing Hai Leong to the festival and I thought it wasn’t fair. I was down because after shooting Hai Leong got much worse. I felt I was profiting from his disaster. So it got re-slotted from the first three nights to the last three nights. And there were no French subtitles, so Pierre was furious; fuming. In the end Eric kicked my ass, and said "You better go." So, I went. Pierre was there for the first week and by the time I got there he was gone. I came back with the programme as a souvenir, and Hai Leong was smiling at first and then he was angry, “Why did you go without me?”
BS: But you saw Pierre again.
CTC: Whenever he was here. I saw him in 2014 during SGIFF.
BS: That’s the last time I saw him.
CTC: I met him for lunch and he was asking about my adventures in Manila and when I mentioned (director’s name redacted) he flipped, “Stupid, stupid, stupid!”. (Zhang) Wenjie (then director of programming for SGIFF) was trying to calm him nicely, and Pierre said, “No, don’t talk about this.” I thought maybe he had a certain Euro-centric mindset about art-house or so-called “Good Cinema”, but then I heard him rail against the label “Art House”. I saw that this man has real integrity. He has an ideal about a certain purity in cinema.
BS: He respected ambition, but if you’re just trying out a style he would see through it very quickly.
CTC: At the end of the day Pierre will know if this person is doing it with his heart, if he sees sincerity in the film-making.
BS: Once he believed in a film-maker he would stick with them. I would sometimes say of a director, “There’s this one work that I don’t like”, and he’d say, “No, I don’t agree.” But if he thought a director was getting bad advice from someone else who Pierre didn’t like, then he would be very angry…. Did Abdul Nizam meet Pierre in 2014?
CTC: Yes! The night when they showed Breaking the Ice (Nizam's last film) in SGIFF. There were two students (assisting Pierre in Singapore), and Pierre was watching the film and Wenjie said afterwards “Pierre wants to go for prata.” Nizam was busy doing his stuff, so it was Uncle Pierre me, Wenjie, and the students, and they were asking Wenjie, “Why did you programme this?” They felt it was not good enough. Then Rissient said, “It was a promising film, it was just that there were too many elements, and it would have been stronger if he’d just focused on one or two.” In the film there are underwater sequences shot on this cheap Kodak underwater camera, and it was after Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life (2011) with its underwater sequences, and I said that if Nizam had a million dollars to shoot those sequences in the neighbourhood swimming pool they would have looked a lot better than Malick’s, and Uncle Pierre laughed, but they didn’t. Nizam had made the film for nothing, just because people believed in him. That was the last time I saw Pierre; a wonderful night.
Note: Toh Hai Leong died in 2015, age 58 and Abdul Nizam died in 2016, age 50.
(For Part Two of the conversations go here)
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