Sandi Tan is a Singaporean-born, California-based novelist and filmmaker. Her short films have played at over 100 film festivals including the New York Film Festival, Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, and at MoMA. Tan was a 2016 Sundance Documentary Film Program Fellow, a 2017 IFP Documentary Lab Fellow and a 2017 Sundance Creative Producing Fellow.
“Shirkers” will premiere at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival on January 21.
W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.
ST: In the early 1990s, when I was a teenage VHS bootlegger-extraordinaire in Singapore, I talked my fellow film geek friends into making a surreal indie road movie which I wrote and in which I played the lead — a 16-year-old killer named S. This movie was called “Shirkers.”
We shot it in 16mm film and the director was my mentor, a 40-year-old film teacher named Georges who told us he was American. After the film was shot, he vanished with all 70 cans of the footage — 700 minutes worth — leaving our dreams in tatters. My friendships took a big hit.
Twenty years later, the footage was miraculously recovered, sending me — now a novelist in Los Angeles — on a personal odyssey across two continents in search of Georges’ vanishing footprints — and in so doing, I rediscovered my own.
W&H: What drew you to this story?
ST: I lived it. And it continued to haunt me for 25 years.
W&H: What do you want people to think about when they are leaving the theater?
ST: I hope they get a real jolt! I want them to rediscover their lost frenzies and forgotten appetites, to want to just go out and make stuff — totally DIY, fearless, free — without worrying about success or failure or if people think you’re uncool or weird. Try! Live! Love!
I also hope they’ll recognize the unique pleasure that is fighting with your oldest frenemy. Maybe they’ll want to call up their old bestie from high school and pick a fight. It’s so easy to forget that the power to do stuff, to make change in this world, is really in your own hands.
W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?
ST: Doing pretty much everything on my own because I did not have a producer during most of the production. I also did not have what people in the biz regarded as a “real” editor. I hired Lucas Celler, a 27-year-old Photoshop whiz whose only previous feature credit was as Assistant Editor on “Author: the JT LeRoy Story.”
But I knew the movie I wanted to make, and Lucas and I sat together every day for almost a year puzzling it out together. All the while, seasoned voices I respect were whispering: ‘You’re not an editor! He’s not an editor! You need a real editor!’
It has been an enormous amount of work but the learning curve has been amazing — and I now wouldn’t trade that experience for anything. It may have been unorthodox, but I believe this unusual film could only have been made in this unusual way.
W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made.
ST: The film is mostly self-funded, something that’s not ideal. But I had no choice. If I hadn’t invested my savings into scanning the 700 minutes of the recovered 16mm footage into 2K, there would be no footage to show, no project to pitch.
The turning point was getting a development grant from the Sundance Documentary Fund and being invited to Sundance 2016 as a Documentary Film Program Fellow where I got to meet and pitch the project to decision makers in the doc world. It wasn’t easy and it did take two years, but that got the ball rolling and I eventually found 20 percent of my budget via grants.
Because it was an oddball “stranger than fiction” project, I was not eligible for the vast majority of doc grants out there, which are reserved for social justice topics. However I did get the ones I could, and Cinereach has been a dreamy supporter ever since.
W&H: What does it mean for you to have your film play at Sundance?
ST: What a beautiful cap to a 25-year journey! And what an opportunity to meld time and space! Our world premiere at the Egyptian will be the first time I get to unite my Singapore friends and collaborators from the original “Shirkers” in 1992 with everyone who worked on the present-day “Shirkers,” many of whom have never met.
My wonderful composer, Ishai Adar, with whom I worked closely via Skype, WhatsApp, and Dropbox, will be flying in from Israel and he will finally be in the same room as me! I’ll have a team of about twenty flying in from LA, New York, Singapore, Toronto, Boston, Israel. It’ll be like a really fun quinceañera!
W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received?
ST: I really don’t know. You make the best of everything people tell you — what may seem like bad advice early on may work later on, and vice versa. It’s great that people are taking time to talk to you at all.
W&H: What advice do you have for other female directors?
ST: Don’t think of yourself as a female director. Think of what concerns you and what drives you and what moves you — and yes, often these things will come from you being a female human — and let these instincts and desires inform your choices. Be ambitious, be hopeful.
On a gender-specific note, I think we have a bad habit of apologizing too much. I know I do for the simplest things — saying things like, ‘I’m sorry this may be a dumb question, but…”
I have been told to quit doing that, and I’m now telling others to stop too. If your aim is to be unobtrusive, know that by saying “I’m sorry, but …” you’ve already said three extraneous words!
W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.
ST: “An Angel at My Table” by Jane Campion. As a teenage cinephile, I’d read so much about Campion’s breakout feature “Sweetie” but I didn’t love it as much as I felt I should. Then came her 158-minute epic biography of misfit New Zealand writer Janet Frame, starring the great Kerry Fox, and it blew my mind — I’d never seen a coming-of-age portrait quite like it.
It and “Holy Smoke” remain my favorite Jane Campion films because they take female desire and female unruliness to whole new levels, and “Angel”’s 158-minute running time gave Campion time for character development and atmosphere, which we now take for granted in this golden age of long-form storytelling but which were uncommon in 1990.
Campion’s heroines aren’t perfect. They often aren’t even nice; they make horrible choices and pay for them. As she has reminded us with her recent work on “Top of the Lake: China Girl,” nobody gets inside the heads of complicated, conflicted women as brutally as Jane Campion.
W&H: Hollywood is in the midst of undergoing a major transformation. Many women and some men in the industry are speaking publicly about their experiences being assaulted and harassed. What do you think of the recently announced anti-sexual harassment Commission made up of industry leaders? Do you believe that it will help make systemic change? What do you think needs to be done to address this issue?
ST: It’s a good thing that this long-overdue dialogue has begun. As to systemic change, I am hopeful because the millennial generation — both female and male — are much more sensitive to these issues.
Just this generational renewal alone after 2017’s cataclysmic revelations will create new discourse and new styles of leadership — so long as people don’t slide back into apathy and use social media for the sole purpose of posting pics of avocado toast.
