Singapore Dreaming

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		Fun Facts about Singapore Dreaming

		Q&A with the Writers- Directors-Producers

		Q&A with the Executive Producer/Producer

中文版


Q & A WITH DIRECTORS WOO YEN YEN AND COLIN GOH

Where did the idea for the film originate?
Colin:	It all began in 2001, when we were asked to write an essay for a book markingthe Singapore International Foundation’s 10th anniversary (“Singaporeans Exposed”,2001. Publisher: Landmark Books). We were asked to write about the differences between living in Singapore and New York, where we’d relocated to pursue our postgraduate studies.

Yen:	But somehow our essay (titled “Paved With Good Intentions”) went beyond the initial brief. As we continued writing, it increasingly became a psychotherapy session! It began to be more about how we were such well-behaved Singaporeans, struggling to balance our personal aspirations against what we were being told we should do.

Colin:	Basically, we felt that the “Singapore Dream”, you know, the dream everyone shares about attaining personal fulfillment, had somehow been transformed into a “Singapore Plan”, with prescribed steps of what kind of school you should go to, what degree you should get, what career you should pursue, maybe even who you should marry.
	We got the feeling that if you got the “recommended” credentials and the so-called 5Cs that symbolize success in Singapore (cash, credit card, car, condo and country club), you should be happy, and that if you weren’t, well, you’re bloody ungrateful. But we all know that we can’t be told what should make us happy. And frankly, at that point in our lives, we weren’t.

Yen:	There was also the feeling of powerlessness. That we had to accept that “things are just like that in Singapore”, because of our size, our location, you know, all that stuff. But it really bugged us, because we felt it stifled possibilities and potential.

Colin:	Anyway, we were confident few people would ever read our essay. I mean, a therapy session transcript in a commemorative book for a Government-linked NGO?Pass the remote control, please.

Yen:	Then the emails started coming.

Colin:	Yep. Apparently, our piece had been circulating on the Internet, and soon, we were receiving scores of email from complete strangers. Most of them said we had articulated what they had been feeling for a very long time.

Yen:	And they were all very long and confessional! Many were very moving.

Colin:	What’s amazing to me is that we continue to receive these emails, even five years after we wrote it! I guess we touched a chord.

Yen:	Anyway, we were so moved that so many people could be bothered to share such personal feelings with us, that we felt we had to continue the dialogue somehow. At first, we thought we’d write another article, a sequel about how we’d decided to stop all the whingeing and actually take the plunge to explore whether we could make our passions work for us. But somehow, that seemed…

Colin:	Too Oprah! That’s when we started thinking: why not distil the essence of all the stories that were shared with us into one larger story? About a typical family and their dreams, and the price of holding onto those dreams, or letting them slip away.

Yen:	But we definitely wanted to place character at the forefront of the script, not some simplistic message. We hate films that have a simplistic “moral of the story” message. It was important for us to reflect the complexity of the real stories and real people we encountered.

Colin:	All the characters in “Singapore Dreaming” are based on people we know, or are amalgamations of people we know.

Yen:	We also worked very hard with the actors to flesh out back stories that incorporated their own experiences. We consciously tried to avoid making characters that were either completely virtuous or completely evil, or simple victims. We wanted the Lohs to be recognizable and real – they are people who love each other, but because of their individual flaws, cannot help but hurt one another.

Colin:	So it may sound corny, but you can say “Singapore Dreaming” is based on a true story! Or rather, many true stories.

You have experience in other fields and mediums, education for Yen Yen, cartooning and the law for Colin. How did these experiences influence your filmmaking?

Yen:	My approach to filmmaking is very similar to my approach to teaching and learning. I learn the best in a non-competitive environment where I am given the freedom to pursue my curiosities. As a teacher, I try to create a community where everybody learns from each other rather than an environment where individuals are constantly trying to show who’s the smartest. A kiasu environment just sucks the joyout of everything!
	That’s the same environment that we try to create in the entire filmmaking process. We try to provide our collaborators with a sense of the overall direction and really leave it up to them to create, improvise, and satisfy their curiosities. And it’s the same way we work with the actors, the director of photography, the sound design,and the entire team. I don’t believe in micromanaging because I cannot be micromanaged myself – I’d go nuts and become very rebellious!
	A strong belief that I have about teaching is that I should always begin with assuming that students have strengths and experiences that we must tap into in order to communicate with them. The student who doesn’t understand what is going on is not stupid. Rather, I, the teacher, have not found the frame of reference that the student can connect with.
	Let me explain what I mean in the context of filmmaking. We keep hearing how in Singapore, the film-going audience is “low-brow” and cannot appreciate films which require them to think, like art films. So you get reports criticising audiences for laughing at inappropriate moments during screenings, or simply shunning “deeper” films.
	Our approach towards filmmaking is to place so-called deep issues withinframes of reference that are familiar to the audience and within their realm of experience. So, while my grandmother may not call herself a feminist or be interested in feminist issues, she can appreciate and recognize the strength of the character of Ma (played by Alice Lim), who has lived her entire life for her family. Similarly, while audiences may not intellectually lament the loss of cultural memory in Singapore, using an old, familiar song in the film will naturally evoke memories of a period of time which has disappeared.
	So, familiar stories, characters and experiences provide the materials for reflection.

Colin:	Well, for me, cartooning gives you some sense of visualization and pacing. It also gives you a good sense of the ridiculous, which is very useful for the movie business. As for law, well, it was very useful in policing the substantial number of legal issues that accompany any film production. Licences, releases, contracts…sometimes it’s like I never left practice!

Yen:	Except you get to do it while wearing a t-shirt and shorts.

Colin:	And sometimes not even that.

Yen:	Eew!

How are each of the roles as Writers-Directors-Producers different for you?

Yen:	The roles are actually quite organic for us. We’ve been Writers-Directors-Producers together for two features and two short films now. It is actually difficult to imagine working any other way.
	For “Singapore Dreaming”, we wrote the script with the “producer-ly” awareness that the budget for the movie was going to be low. So, we knew what the limitations were in terms of time, locations, etc. Wearing the producer’s hat, we had a good sense of how we could be creative within the budget constraints without affecting the story-telling, and we could also make sure that everyone we hired could work well with the directors – us. And being the writers really helps us direct better because we have lived with the story and the characters for so long, and knew how each detail would fit in the whole story.
	This organic blending of roles means that we take the usual politics out of the writer-director-producer relationship and we also always finish our projects on time and within budget. The only problem with playing all three roles is we don’t get to sleep very much.

Colin:	One difference for us this time around has been working with a partner, WofflesWu, who’s our Executive Producer and also Co-Producer. If you haven’t met him, you must! Woffles is one of the most extraordinary people on the planet. He’s a real renaissance man – he’s excelled in aesthetic surgery, sports, music, and, based on our working experience with him, I think he’s going to be a real force in film too.Once he has set his mind on a project, nothing can stop him.

Yen:	It was great working with Woffles because he’s very open, which is a rarity with executive producers, and more important, he feels a deep connection to the story we want to tell. We are very fortunate to have the support of someone who has such trust in our work. He’s also full of energy and creative ideas, but he also knows when to step back and leave us to do our thing. It’s been a very rewarding partnership. If I were a budding filmmaker, I’d definitely do my best to get my script in front of him.

What’s it like working together as a couple?

Colin:	I really, really like working with Yen, and I’m not just saying that because we have to go home together. I think we really do complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses. In terms of writing, we come up with the story together, settling on characters and themes and devising individual scenes. I then sit down and knockout the first draft. After that, we both tear it apart together. Then we try to find the missing pieces and rationalize story arcs. Then once the skeleton is in place, I sit down and construct the dialogue – which of course gets changed after workshops with the actors. I’m the one stuck with script rewrites, which can go on even during the shoot.

Yen:	In terms of directing, I tend to be the more visual partner and will work more closely with the director of photography for composition, set design and movement. Colin, on the other hand, is more attuned to dialogue and pacing, things that probably stem from his theatre background, so he has quite a good sense of when something sounds real or not.

Colin:	Yen likes to be in the thick of things, beside the actors. I prefer to be stationed at the monitor checking the overall situation. It’s the heat! I’m insisting our next movie be shot in winter!
	I don’t think it’s easy to work as a couple, actually. Not all couples can do it – you really have to separate the work from the personal. I think Yen’s academic training, where she has to take loads of peer review, has made her very receptiveto criticism. She absolutely has no ego about the work, which I admire and envy deeply.

How do you write dialogue in all these different languages?

Colin:	It is actually pretty difficult – especially for an ACS (Anglo-Chinese School) boy like me. But we have no choice. This is something Singapore’s censorship authorities and language police completely don’t understand. It’s a LOT easier to write in a singlelanguage. But the fact is, Singaporeans DON’T speak like that. We mix languages, even several times in a single sentence, and code switch constantly. If you want to write Singaporean dialogue that reflects the way Singaporeans actually speak, and want to have a film that the Singaporeans respond to, you have no choice.

Yen:	I actually think the mix of languages is magical. A phrase like, ‘Mana ooh pian?” which means ‘Who has a choice?’ is a mix of Malay and Hokkien, and is 100% Singaporean.

Colin:	What we do is write it up in English, in as naturalistic a way as possible. Then we workshop the dialogue with the actors, to see what sounds most natural, and whether there are stumbling blocks. Then we transcribe the dialogue in whatever ways we can – for example, all the Hokkien bits are actually written phonetically.

Yen:	We also wanted to show how over the years, families can get divided by language – an unintended consequence of our language policies.

Colin:	So for instance, in the film, we have a typical situation for many families: Paand Ma (played by Richard Low and Alice Lim) speak predominantly Hokkien to each other. However, Pa is able to speak some English due to his education and profession. Meanwhile, the younger generation, such as Mei (played by Yeo Yann Yann) and Seng (played by Dick Su), speak primarily Mandarin to each other, but English to others like Irene (played by Serene Chen) and C.K. (played by Lim Yu-Beng). Finally, C.K.can barely speak Mandarin at all, like many Singaporeans we know.

Yen:	This can lead to strange situations where, depending on what language predominates, certain family members can be shut out, even at family gatherings, as we see in the film. We lose a lot of our personal and cultural memories when certain languages disappear in families and our society.

Yen Yen, can you talk about the women characters in the film?

Yen:	Yes! I absolutely love the women characters and the way the three actresses have played them. They are real women – so neurotic and beautiful! I have not seen a Singaporean film with women characters that are so real, nuanced, and complex.
	Ma (played by Alice Lim) is very much like the older women in my life who have cared for and inspired me but who often lead invisible lives. She has basically devoted her entire life to her family, cooking and cleaning for them. But she is not asaint – she’s also inherited the ways that her grandparents, parents and husband value the male child over the female child, which makes her continually blind to her daughter’s feelings. In an unspoken way, she also devalues her own existence.
	Ma is lost in her own family when they speak in English at the dinner table,as she belongs to the older generation of women who understand mainly Hokkien and Mandarin. Because of this, she retreats even more into her world of the kitchen. She constantly makes “liang teh” (herbal tea) for her family, as that is one of the few ways left that she knows how to be “useful” to her children. But Ma has many stories and types of intelligence which are not valued by society, and which she also undervalues initially. By the end of the film, she begins to remember these stories, and uses her intelligence in a surprising way.
	It’s tough to talk about Mei (played by Yeo Yann Yann), because some parts of her echo the deepest, darkest parts of myself that I don’t dare to tell anyone about. She is a very capable woman but really nasty. She has spent her entire life trying to be the strong and able woman that she despises Ma for not being. Yet, everything that she does is also controlled by her desire to gain her parents’ approval, as they’ve always favoured her brother over her. She despises everyone around her, including her husband, as she’s come to see him through the eyes of her father – as a loser, merely because he hasn’t been able to fulfill the stereotypical male role of the solebreadwinner. So somehow, even though she vows she will never be like her parents, she winds up being exactly like them.
	And yet, there are moments in the film when we completely understand why Mei is the way she is. She has had to shoulder a tremendous amount of responsibility in her own family and in the new family that she has started with C.K. (played by LimYu-Beng). While C.K. fantasizes about being a rock musician, Mei is the one who has to stomach the indignities of her job in order to put food on the table.
	Yann Yann also manages to bring out that special combination of strength and vulnerability in Mei. Yann Yann herself has those soulful eyes that speak of painful experiences, and the deep capacity to hurt and also love. There were times on the set when Yann’s portrayal of Mei moved me to tears.
	“Sweet” is the word that immediately comes to mind when I think about Irene (played by Serene Chen). At the beginning of the film, she seems to be the typical girl-next-door. Her parents have passed on, and she has basically taken on her boyfriend Seng’s family as her own. She is utterly devoted to him and his family.
	Irene, is however, not as angelic as she seems, as her dream of the perfect family imposes an unconscious pressure on Seng. In the film, you see how Irene constantly places her hand on Seng, as if to keep him within her world. And the way she obsessively takes pictures with her handphone of her dream notions of bliss –the family together, Ma chopping vegetables, Seng sleeping next to her – shows how desperately she wants reality to fit her dreams. Ultimately, Ma helps her wake up from her delusions, and to see reality.
	Irene is like the many women that I know (and I’ve been there too!), who believe that they can change their men so that they become better people. Based on experience, you can’t!!! Some men cannot be helped!

Colin, can you talk about the male characters in the film?

Colin:	As a guy who’s left behind a lucrative corporate career to toil at home on projects that may never see a cent, I’ve had to go to some pretty painful places personally in writing the male characters. I think that’s why many of our male test audiences responded very strongly to the character of C.K. (played by Lim Yu-Beng),who’s an army officer-turned-insurance salesman, forced to call up his old friends to peddle policies. One even said C.K.’s story was “every man’s nightmare.” But he’s real – the guy who keeps changing jobs on the hazy promise of perhaps more money, only to find his life utterly rudderless and worse, to feel that his wife does not respect him anymore. Then the dilemma becomes whether to just give up and accept your lot, or to retreat into some imaginary past, or to fight… but for what?
	There’s also a lot of pride and ego amongst the male characters. We wanted to show that the inflated and ultimately meaningless expectations placed on the“provider” can lead to lots of pain. Pa (played by Richard Low), a struggling working class man whose job is carrying out the work of the wealthy classes, finds himsel fat the end of his career a bundle of self-disappointment and envy. He naturally takes it out on the family. He isn’t overtly abusive, but in burdening the younger generationwith his own inadequacies, which aren’t entirely his own fault either, leads to very warped priorities for his kids, Seng and Mei (played by Dick Su and Yeo Yann Yann).
	Seng, for instance, at first seems like the obvious villain of the movie. But really, he’s probably the most tragic character. He wants so badly for things to be perfect that he paradoxically fails again and again.

Can you talk about working with a mix of New Yorkers and Singaporeans?

Yen:	I feel really blessed as a director, as we have the good fortune of working with people who are very accomplished at their craft and whose commitment to the project raised our game at every level of this project. We have the top actors in Singapore, the top film sound recordist, some of the most experienced crew, the most accomplishedmusic director in Singapore, and the best of New York talents on this project. Not to forget the top post-production facilities in Singapore and in New York. Which Singaporean filmmaker gets such amazing collaborators on such a small budget? Any film is only as good as the people you work with and we feel like we have been very fortunate.

Colin:	For me, I was very nervous. Martina Radwan worked on “Personal Velocity” which was a big inspiration for us personally. She’s filmed for Jonathan Demme (“Silence of the Lambs”) and Wim Wenders (“Buena Vista Social Club”). We hadn’t intended on shooting this film in 2005 at all. But we’d circulated our script amongst fellow New York film industry acquaintances for feedback, when Martina called up to say she’d seen it, loved it, and wanted to be involved.

Yen:	But our first response was, “We’re very honoured, but can’t afford you.” But she said, “Try me.” We hurried and did up a budget, and amazingly, she said yes. And her schedule also fit our summer holidays. It was destiny calling! The way things were falling into place was spooky. We just had to jump and do it.

Colin	As with all productions, the budget was tight, the hours long and we were all utterly drained by the end of it. But I think overall we had a wonderful shoot, and post-production experience. We completed on time, which is always an achievement.

Yen:	And within budget! And Martina, her assistant camera, Wylda and gaffer, Luis formed some real friendships with our crew, especially Beng Huat, our Best Boy. And I think they’re impressed by how hard we Singaporeans work. In fact, Martina and Joel San Juan (her 2nd Assistant Camera) got on so well, they did another project together.

Colin:	I was also impressed by how eager they were to learn about us and Singapore. They would write down Singlish phrases on gaffer tape and paste them on the camera housing so they could learn them! By the end of the shoot, they were saying, “Can-can, lah” to each other all the time.

Yen:	Working on post-production in New York is pretty wild. Editing with our editor, Rachel Kittner in the studio next door to where Wayne Wang and Sam Mendes were also editing their films was very thrilling. Not to mention doing the sound mix next to Joan Jett!

Colin:	For me, stepping out of the edit suite to see one of my heroes, Ethan Coen, asleep on the couch was totally surreal!

Can you talk about the music in the film?

Colin:	The Hokkien song, “Bong Chun Hong” (Pining for the Spring Breeze) is a recurring motif in “Singapore Dreaming”. It’s a very old song, written by Deng Yuxian nearly a century ago. It’s about a naïve girl who has a crush on a young man living nearby, on whom she projects her dreams. However, she soon realizes her feelings are based entirely on an illusion. The song is very popular in Taiwan, where it’s almost their unofficial second national anthem, like “Waltzing Matilda” is to Australia. I guess it’s because the lyrics could easily carry a second layer of meaning about their complex relationship with China. Anyway, how we came to choose the song for our film is a pretty interesting story…

Yen:	When we were writing the script in New York, we wanted some music to evoke the past, and also illuminate the characters of Ma and Pa (played by Alice Lim andRichard Low). So I called my mom in Singapore to ask for songs from the days when she was dating my dad.
	The first song she came up with was “Bong Chun Hong”, which we’d always thought of as just another hoary old Hokkien karaoke favourite.
	But somehow it unlocked a flood of memories in Mom, about “Gor Chang Chew Kah” (Elizabeth Walk, literally: “under the five trees”), “Ong Keh Swah Kah” (“the foot of the King’s hill”, i.e., Fort Canning Hill) and other places that have either disappeared or have changed beyond recognition. I was very moved. I really couldn’t remember when Mom and I had such a meaningful conversation, when she told me so much about herself.

Colin:	And then, really weird things started to happen during the auditions…

Yen:	Yah! We were very surprised to find many of the actresses breaking down in tears whenever we asked them to sing or listen to “Bong Chun Hong”. They said it stirred memories of people and places. This was especially the case with older actresses or those like Yeo Yann Yann, who had worked with legendary theatre director Kuo Pao Kun. It was apparently his favourite song. We knew then that we had to incorporate the song into the film.

Colin:	I think it’s a great, and deceptively simple song. In some ways, it captures the way in which many Singaporeans are haunted by how we’ve had to lose parts of ourselves during our rush to modernity. Sydney (Tan) has done a powerful new arrangement which we think will blow people away.

Yen:	We were also very thrilled to have two of Singapore’s most popular rock bands help us on the soundtrack. Ronin contributed ‘Black Maria’, their #1 hit. It was a sign we would get along when we learned that Bang, their drummer, had a copy of “Bong Chun Hong” in his car. And the Suns – who’d helped us with the last film and are now building a real following in Australia – graciously helped us put together special background music for use in the sound design. We’re touched by all the generous support we’ve received from so many people.

Colin:	And of course, there’s Sydney’s score, which to me is the finest score ever in the history of Singapore cinema. Bring lots of tissue. You have been warned.

So… what are you dreaming of?

Yen:	I dream of finally being able to get enough sleep.

Colin:	To sleep, perchance to dream… I’m dreaming of this film making enough money so I can finally walk into a Japanese restaurant and order sushi a la carte, instead of having to settle for ‘nigiri set A’.

Yen:	Hmm … that’s very ambitious!