So slowly I exercised and controlled my diet so I could lose weight and figured out what was the source of so much of my anger and frustration and after a while I went from being an Angry Fat Man to just a Man. I got by with a lil' help from my friends and picked myself up, bit by bit, and it felt good to be just a Man again.
Then I took a trip to Pusan with the 15Malaysia peeps and went from Man to Pimp.
The moment I got to the airport, before we'd even boarded, I already felt different. Better. Things were a little more fun. The whole time beforehand I'd been worried about whether or not I'd have any fun on the trip for some reason. There was the fear of being trapped in an unknown country feeling emo. Thankfully, that wasn't the case.
Straight away we started to naturally form our little cliques - the people that we'd most probably hang out with throughout the entire trip. It wasn't really segregation, as we all hung out with each other at some point, but for most of the trip I had a specific set of peeps:-
Jordan
One half of the Suleiman brothers (Dique couldn't make it because of health reasons), those responsible for the excellent 'Rojak' short film for 15Malaysia which I also acted in.
I'd known Jordan since we were 16 back in Concord College in England. I played in my first proper band with the dude and I've seen his company 'Voxel' grow as the years go by. The Pusan trip was the first time in a long time that I'd hung out with the dude for a long period of time. Second we met at the airport we just went back into our usual schtick.
Benji & Bahir
I'd never met these two up until the whole 15Malaysia thing got going. For some reason we always got paired for interviews n' stuff. These guys were responsible for the hillarious 'Meter' short film featuring politician KJ.
The weirdest thing is how we'd only really met each other during this whole 15Malaysia thing considering we both came out with our debut low budget features at the same time. Both 'Ciplak' and their feature debut 'Skali' came out at around the same time and there was even an article where both our films were featured side-by-side in KLue.
Namron
I'd met Namron before as an actor under the direction of Johan John for both 'Andai' and 'Cahaya'. Namron directed one of the more serious shorts of the 15Malaysia series, 'Lollipop', which dealt with paedophilia.
We both ended up being room-mates on the trip too.
Rizal
Rizal was the only non-director in our little gang. A writer from the Star and an excellent bassist, I first met him when he interviewed me for 'Ciplak' and we've been friends since, though I hadn't seen him for a long time up until this trip. Dude's hella cool and wrote a great article about the trip too which can be found here.
Together with the rest of the directors along for the ride as well as them good folk over at Ruumz, the trip was looking to be hella fun.
But nothing prepared me for the red carpet:
Words cannot describe how that felt. Seriously. The day we arrived we only had a few hours before we had to leave to the red carpet and when we arrived we thought we walked down the wrong entrance and missed the whole thing. But we didn't. That was just the red carpet for the entrance. The actual red carpet was inside and a lot longer than we thought it would be.
When we walked in I was somewhere in the middle of the line but somehow when we got to the stage area for press photos before walking onto the red carpet I ended up at the front of the pack. I remember thinking, "these people don't know who the hell we are. I'm just gonna walk humbly down this thing and enjoy the experience."
The second we walked forward onto the red carpet packs of Korean female fans were screaming their asses off.
I didn't believe it at first, thinking they must be screaming for the person before us or the person after us, but out of curiosity I raised one hand to wave... and the screams got louder. I raised my other hand to wave... and they got even louder. Finally, I raised both to see if I could coax an even bigger reaction and the crowd continued screaming and applauding even louder.
And I can honestly say I have never felt so Pimp in my entire life.
We later realized that whenever a female actress walked down the red carpet there was hardly any screaming. We then realized that the majority of the audience were young Korean girls. Perhaps they were just applauding our sweet tanned asses, God only knows, but it was an insane experience. For me, especially, it was insane because after winning the Anugerah Skrin for 'Ciplak' I never thought I'd experience a moment like that again, but walking down that red carpet topped that experience by a huge margin.
After the red carpet experience (which included Josh Hartnett walking down the red carpet and a very cute Korean girl pop group singing the theme song from 'Pearl Harbor') we went for Korean BBQ and the opening night party before calling it a night. It would later turn out that we'd be going to parties EVERY night.
The next day we had the screening of 15Malaysia at the fest as well as the 15Malaysia party.
The screening went well and the 15Malaysia party turned out to be both one of the best parties for the whole trip as well as the most emotional for a lot people as everyone paid tribute to the late, great Yasmin Ahmad by releasing hundreds of balloons of her favorite color (white) into the air. Though I'd never gotten the chance to meet her in person, I'd always admired her as a filmmaker and for a lot of the people there who had met her in person and known her, the whole scene was very touching and emotional for them.
Pusan itself is a cool place, even though there were severe communication breakdowns. Regardless, one of the cool things about the Pusan International Film Festival is the fact that the screenings are spread throughout all the cinemas in Pusan in various malls so, in effect, the entire town is a film festival.
And the food... oh, God, the food! A Korean BBQ meal that would set you back about twenty or thirty bucks a head only costs about eight bucks a head there.
One thing I especially liked was that new bonds were made between us filmmakers. It's interesting how the little cliques formed naturally. Myself and the fellow Pusan pimps I was hanging out with were pretty much on the same wavelength and conversations flowed like water, as did moments of insane silliness such as the video below:
All I was trying to do was use the moving walk-way handles as a crude dolly system to get a tracking shot of the gang as they walked so that I could cut together a 'Reservoir Dogs' style shot in the airport. Then Benji started dancing. I have no idea why. He just started dancing. So I asked him to do it again. And again and again. And he did every time. And right after that my mind started racing trying to figure out how to cut that footage together into a surreal video. Hillariously, he is being recognized more in public for the 'Wonderman' video than for his work as a director.
I don't know about the other filmmakers, but for our little clique it felt like we were rockstars, this being our first international film festival and all. So much so that leaving was a slightly sad affair:
The effects of the trip are still being felt to this day. Before the trip I had been very conflicted about this whole filmmaking thing, every day getting more and more jaded with every meeting with a film company or TV station or producer, making me wonder whether there was any point in doing the films and telling the stories that I wanted to tell since producers wanted the same derivative crap over and over again (and that's not an opinion. I was actually told that by a producer without a hint of shame in his voice).
Seeing how an audience overseas reacted to our films was one thing. To meet people from all over the world who knew and were interested in Malaysian filmmaking was nuts. At least for me, it helped me realize that there's no point pandering - there's an audience somewhere out there for anything you have in your mind to film.
On top of that, myself and the other filmmakers in our little clique have now been working together ever since that trip and the work flow's been steady and good. Though sometimes it feels a bit hectic and insane and sometimes I'd like to shoot the end clients in the head I'm always reminded of how insanely dull and boring it was during that three months prior to Pusan when I didn't have a single job at all. That whole trip wasn't just a holiday for me - it was a book mark in my life leading on to a whole new chapter and I'll never forget it.
Thank you, Pete, for this opportunity, and thank you Albert for all the insane multi-tasking leg work you had to undertake for all of us. Thank you P1 for the funding and thank you Ruumz for the sponsorship for the trip.
Most of all, thank you Pusan. You were brilliant.
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