Eddie Garcia: Lessons from Mother Nature

It’s five in the morning after an all-night shooting for the upcoming Bahid (Regal Films). His co-stars are reeling from a hard day’s work on the set.

Dina Bonnevie has complained of hives.

But not Eddie Garcia. At seventy something, many years his co-stars’ senior, Eddie, or the powerful Don Lorenzo Lavares in Bahid, is far from spent. He is up and about, walking briskly around the place.

Dina is so amazed she couldn’t help but gasp. "He doesn’t get tired at all. Why, he can even work for 48 hours straight! That’s how high his adrenaline level is!" she exclaims.

The object of her admiration is nonplussed, as usual. Eddie flashes that signature grin, savoring the compliment. It’s not the first time he has heard it, that’s why.

And that cool-as-a-cucumber attitude spills over many other things as well.

"I’m a realist. When I negotiate for a movie, I don’t count my chickens until I’m already on the set, working. I don’t think of how much I will earn from it," he says.

Not wishing for the moon has given him nights of sweet slumber and has lengthened his days. Eddie knows the box-office success, the Hall of Fame honors, the acting trophies are just icings on the cake, nice to look at, but not the main entree at all.

"When I do a movie, I think of it only as a job. I don’t think of awards. In fact, I don’t subscribe to the practice of upping one’s price after winning an award," he says.

That kind of attitude, Eddie muses, has led to stars pricing themselves out of the market.

"Maybe that’s how the phrase ‘sophomore jinx’ at the FAMAS came about," says Eddie. "When an actor wins the FAMAS, he starts jacking up his price. The producer, who can’t afford the actor’s price, decides to hire someone else instead."

This detached attitude toward the perks of stardom further shows itself in the way Eddie handles the reams of publicity he gets year round. Unlike other stars with hired help to clip every single write-up about them, Eddie does not have volumes and volumes of compiled articles and releases about him to show off.

Neither does he have hang-ups about the fact that "I’ve done many forgettable films," so far removed from such prestigious projects as De Colores, Tubog sa Ginto and Deathrow, mong others.

Far from being choosy about roles, Eddie makes no bones of the fact that he can accept offers that fall short of what’s expected from an award-winning actor and director like him.

Eddie won’t spend sleepless nights worrying about people thinking less of him for that. After all, he will surely shrug, it’s just a job. He can forget all about it once the klieg lights are off. And he’ll get on with his life as if nothing happened.

The enormous patience must have come from spending an eventful happy childhood in Sorsogon, where typhoons have become a way of life.

"You know a typhoon is fast-approaching when the branches of the coconut trees start bending until they almost kiss the ground. The clouds start massing in a certain way," says this "veteran"’ of typhoons and even the wrath of fiery Mt. Mayon.

Once the typhoon vents its wrath, Eddie knows everything around him turns into an instant ghost town. Crop production dips to zero for three straight months, he recalls. And everyone–rich or poor–is at the mercy of nature.

The lesson is not lost on the discerning Eddie: "Some things you simply have no control over, no matter how hard you try."

And so he learns something today’s young sadly lack: patience. As Eddie observes, "The young are restless. They want to things in a snap of a finger, not even pausing to think of consequences."

This penchant for instant gratification has never, for a moment, occurred to Eddie, whose closeness to nature as a child has taught him the value of waiting for the right time, and place, to act.

In this day and age of fastfood, instant pictures, pop-up toasters and other such wonders, this virtue merits mulling on all over again.