Yeo Siew Hua Interview | Looking Beyond Surveillance As An All-encroaching Demon

Firstly, I wanted to make a film watching people. I can’t ever get away from the fact that every time I watch someone, it’s from a certain perspective. There’s never a god’s eye view. I’m a firm believer that every certain fact—taken from a standpoint of where you see it and who you are watching—it colors the event quite differently. The film is definitely about perspectives. But I don’t need to look too far because it’s everyday life now. We are given so many perspectives. We can’t differentiate truth from lies. I think my audiences are used to flipping around perspectives. They are used to having different kinds of media thrown at them. Staying put in one medium seems difficult these days.

Absolutely. Structurally, while writing the film, I always imagined two blocks of flats looking at each other as a certain metaphysical mirror. It’s a slow realization in the film. As for the osmosis, the question is whether they were always the same person or there’s a certain transformation happening. I wanted to explore how, if you spend a lot of time intently watching someone or something, a transformation does come about. The act of watching is an active one. When I see strangers on the street playing with their fingers or tapping something, I realize I’m doing the same thing. As human beings, we are mimicking animals. We take on the form of the other we see. There’s a lot of self-discovery through the other. I don’t believe in self-discovery enacted merely through introspection.

That was the toughest part. Looking at the film, it almost seems too easy as two residential buildings looking at each other. Like you pointed out, these two units had to be at the same height to afford the exact angle. They were lived-in apartments, not sets we created. We needed to find two appropriately sized apartments and both families willing to vacate at the same time. I have an amazing production team that knocked on half the doors in Singapore. It was almost a month before shoot that one of the pair dropped out. We were left to scramble. Thankfully, we eventually found an even better pairing.

Fran from Akanga and the other producer, Dan Koh, have been behind me from the start. They have worked with me from A Land Imagined (2018), which was another six to eight years. For a director, filmmaking is a lonely journey. Fran has not just believed in my vision and stuck to it, but has been doing so for many other filmmakers. That’s why he’s become an important figure in Southeast Asian cinema. He’s a passionate cinema lover overall, beyond being a producer.

You’re right. There’s so much hidden within Chien-ho’s Junyang but he doesn’t have that many lines. I was trying to push him with this challenge and he took it on beautifully. We’ve seen cynical, older characters that have a burden of history, but we have young people too—equally troubled and unable to express themselves, even more so in this new world. Wu Chien-ho did an amazing job translating this element on the page with his body.

There’s no magic bullet in how to direct this, but it’s about tweaking as we go along. We were also working with each other for the first time and there was a factor of establishing trust. By the second day of shoot, he was fully immersed in the character. It was almost hard to get him out of it (laughs).

It’s hard to say. They come from different acting backgrounds, be it television or film. It’s fun, though; I like bringing in different actors to jam together. There’s also an actor from Malaysia, Pete Teo. Some are better being spontaneous, others methodical about interpreting the script.

I didn’t want to get involved in earlier stages. I wanted him to bring in his own element, instead of me imposing from the start. This film is about gazing and watching. Of course, there’s a textual element but there are so many subtleties which transcend and cross boundaries. It wasn’t even about the language anymore. It was my first time working with a French editor and a true collaboration.

Of course, people from varied contexts react differently. In Asia, surveillance is heavy. Singapore is a deeply surveilled country. That’s a fact. Meanwhile, in Europe, there’s greater concern about it but they aren’t having surveillance in the same way as a part of their natural environment. They have a different relationship to it. I’ve shown this film in places where people have told me it strikes fear and at the same time, there have been many who said I’m not being critical enough about surveillance.

Maybe I didn’t set out to make a film to purely demonize surveillance. Of course, I don’t like being surveilled constantly. At the same time, a couple who has lost their baby do pray a camera somewhere has caught something. We live in a far more complicated time than surveillance being a demon that encroaches on everything. Yet, we also have a social contract with big corporates who are watching us through marketing materials, by the promise of more precise advertising.

Daniel Hui, who edited A Land Imagined, has made some amazing films. K. Rajagopal, who made A Yellow Bird (2016), is terrific. I want to give a shout out to 13 Little Pictures, a collective of filmmakers I work with. They have been making strong independent films for a while.