| Shane OSullivan: Talking about our Generation |
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| Culture | |
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21 February 2001
Guest-starring Japanese pop singer Hanayo as the colourful runaway bride from Hong Kong, and featuring legendary Indian actor Saeed Jaffrey, the cast also includes a melange of emerging and non-professional Asian actors (Shigetomo Yutani, Nitin Ganatra, Adrian Pang, Kriss Dosanjh) who together give an interesting blend of performances and improvisation. The pseudo-soap-opera intrigue pretexts their respective encounters in the multi-ethnic East End streets famous for Bengali curry houses and a 24-hour bagel shop. Meanwhile "Second Generation's" musical rhythm, punctuated by voiceover and fast-forward/slow-motion, neon lights and star-crossed paths of isolated eccentrics, recall the themes and audio-visual style of Wong Kar-Wai. Not surprisingly, the thirty-year-old Irish writer and director cites him among the first of his filmmaker inspirations. Shane agreed to meet me on a Sunday morning at the Cafe 10001 just off Brick Lane where he talked about social context, the making-of, and the soon-to-come. Second Generation? The title comes from the general idea of people leaving their homeland to live in another place, and it's also the name of an Indian Asian magazine. Not only the second generation of immigrant families, but more the 'new' generation of young people who do things differently from their parents who either came here in the 70s or still live in their home country. This is the case with Lili, who ran away from an arranged marriage in Hong Kong, while Jamal lives on the other side of the generation gap from his parents in Little India. International House cast?
So Shige's just a friend, but he has a brillant face, and he's actually quite talented. His looks and his timing have a kind of dopey charm to them. He lived in London for a few years, but he now lives in Kyoto where his dad owns a furniture shop. I tried to find a Japanese actor here, but i kept telling myself, "Shige's the best person," until I finally called him up and asked him if he would fly all the way back from Japan, which he did. Actually he was quite happy to do it, since he was working in his dad's furniture shop at the time, and now his name is in all the English papers! Otherwise the Black guy Jude [who plays the struggling artist] and Dexter (in the art gallery) are just locals who run Railway Arch selling clothes and furniture and stuff at the top of Brick Lane. It's a risky scenario, as people who see no charm in it think it's just dodgy acting, but it's certainly a lot fresher for me. Who's that girl? Hanayo was recommended to me when I was looking for someone to play the role of Lili. She is a star for people of her generation. Four or five years ago she was at the peak of her fame in Japan, so Japanese people today in their late twenties might know her. Five years ago she also made the cover of FACE dressed as a geisha blowing a huge bubble gum. The story is she trained to be a junior geisha, then became a pop star, made her own manga, joined a punk band in London, and then married a German man and moved to Berlin. So she flew over from Berlin while we arranged a house for her to live in with Shige for the month of August. It was crazy! I was originally looking for a Chinese actress, ideally from Hong Kong, but on this kind of budget you can't be too picky. I also wanted to avoid the linguistic complications of my previous film which was subtitled in Japanese, English, and Russian! For "Second Generation" I felt Hanayo's personality and the story itself were more important... After reading the script Hanayo thought the girl was a bit weird, so she played Lili extra-dumb. Sometimes I think it's a bit goofy, but it's her charm, especially the night-time stuff - twirling the umbrella, dancing around upstairs, kicking graffiti - you couldn't possibly fake that. My favourite part is when the filming is totally loose, she's dressed a certain way, and it's magical just watching her. East End soundtrack? The original cut was done over a year ago with all pre-recorded music from a major Asian label who produced ambient, drum n' bass style music with its own DJs, but once the film was made, at the last minute the label refused to let me use the commercial tracks. So only the love theme, which links the two characters together, is left from the very beginning, otherwise for the practicality of getting ready for the film's release, I tried working with a composer for the first time. [He] was a maniac on a PC with a keyboard and a guitar who worked twenty-four hours a day for two weeks - feeding off the original score, keeping the same tone, adding his own version, so that the result was music very much geared for cinema. I was quite specific and hands-on in terms of what kind of sounds I wanted in certain keys, pitches and keyboard notes, and he worked on the melodies and cross-harmonies in order to get a very specific sound. So after two weeks of working intensively this way, while listening to sample CDs of Indian Bollywood sound orchestras, we ended up with a musical soundtrack which stayed true to the Brick Lane milieu with a Japanese music layer on top. It was totally trial and error. (I also think the simple guitar was really effective, especially the open tuning at the end, like in "Twin Peaks".) Influences and inspirations? In terms of writing, I learned from a lot to Wong Kar-Wai's style of using incredibly simple voiceovers. I wrote and directed rather wordy theatre in college, so when it came to film screenplays I learned to boil it down to sparse rhythmic essentials, just enough to punctuate and keep the rhythm moving. Wong Kar-Wai's films have a charming, moody atmosphere, a sort of deadpan non-sequitur which keeps you guessing. The dialogues and everything else are loose, yet at the same time quirky and captivating. Certainly it's the playfulness, the lightness of touch of Wong Kar-Wai that attracts me the most, in the same way that Jim Jarmusch is more formal. It's a personal thing: I can like the film but not the filmmaker, and in respect to the actual heart of the filmmaker, Wong Kar-Wai and Jim Jarmusch seem the closest. Other screenplay inspirations are films like "Last Resort", a new British film set in London, kicked off by its sociological interest. It's almost like a documentary in that it's more interested in characters and atmospheres and moods than in the story. Likewise "Second Generation's" detective story was just a means to an end, and I used the same sort of peripheral to build the framework. The locations and visual style are drawn to the dialogues and characters, while the story drives the whole thing. There was another Korean film screened at the ICA called "Lies" which was also character-based, about the relationship between a young 18-year-old girl and a 38-year-old sculptor, played by two non-professional actors representing two completely different angles in point of view. To me it was incredibly intense, funny, faithful, a playful crossover between documentary interests and certain themes, certain locations, certain types of people on the outskirts of society mixed with non-professionals. As a result this kind of structure creates different landscapes from what we're normally used to seeing. Next?
The project wants to give a comprehensive look at the area, merging the various neighborhoods of Brick Lane, the City, Chinatown, etc. All the stories are linked together by a Senegalese taxi-driver, very similar to the humanising approach of "Night on Earth". Maybe I'm just subconsciously ripping-off Jim Jarmusch, but his films often have odd structures to them as well, so I guess there are simply common ways of uniting diverse material. Did you say Chinatown? One of the stories is a 14-minute script set in Chinatown about a Chinese waiter who bumps into his high school sweetheart. (I definitely want to find a Chinese actress for this one.) He's smoking a cigarette in the alley in back of the restaurant when she comes up all dressed up and happy to go on a date with her French teacher. She comes back one hour later after being stood up by the teacher, they go to a cafe together and shout about it, then later they see the French teacher in the window of another restaurant with a Vietnamese girl... I just love the Chinatown world, so small, but so many restaurants. |
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'Japanese
detective seeks missing chinese girl in brick lane area...' So reads the
tagline for Shane O'Sullivan's 20,000 digital feature film, which enjoyed
an exclusive one-week Barco-projection at the ABC Piccadilly in London
last autumn. The classified teaser is true to the film in both synopsis
and tone, as "Second Generation" speaks to us through its quirky characters
and colourful neighborhood.
It
was a mix between the more experienced British-Asian (ie. Indian/Bengladeshi)
actors and the non-professional locals and friends. The first group all
came from the same agency via Jennifer Jaffrey, Saeed Jaffrey's wife:
Nitin (the commercials director), Kriss (Ravi in the curry house), and
the father who shouts from the alleyway. Shige, the Japanese boy, had
about five - maybe ten - minutes of experience from my previous film where
he and a Japanese flatmate played detectives...
My
next feature is a series of six short stories set around Brick Lane titled
"Songs for a Summer Night". The genesis for the script was thinking about
all the people I've seen over ther past year, people just passing through
the area: young Bengaleshi kids, a Chinese waiter, a commuter, a middle-aged
woman having an illicit fling with a middle-aged businessman near Liverpool
Street in the City... One story is theatrically set around a phone box
on Commercial Street, based on the relationship between prostitutes and
the card boys who work for them.
