Year-starter edit with Mark Meily

As the starting credits of 2009 roll on, the first week of the year is about starting anew and closing old plot points from the past. To understand this period of a new reel, I unstuck myself in time to have coffee with director Mark Meily who recently won Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF) Best Director for Baler and whose personality shines beneath his long hair and gruff beard. It is because who better to learn from than a guy who makes a living playing with “reel-ality” as he splices, edits and rearranges the historical time frame of his characters to tell a coherent story with the end in mind. As I sat down with him, I realized that Mark was perfectly cast to tell this story because the narrative of his career is currently merging together and heading towards its climax. As you will read, his life is a good script to live on.

His Story

In 1989, Mark became fascinated by the story of Baler church, which he would like to point out is not in Quezon but in Aurora, located in the northeast of Luzon, after shooting a tourism documentary there. According to the historical marker that he read, the Spanish soldiers were under siege for a year inside the church because they refused to believe that Spain had been ceded to the Americans in 1898. Later, he began researching more about the historical facts of Baler and conceived it as an historical film, with the twist of the Spaniards being underdogs in the story.

Fast-forward 19 years later to February 2008. Meily, serendipitously as he would like to describe it, met with Viva Films producer Vincent del Rosario to pitch films that they could collaborate on. And with a plot twist snap, Vincent mentioned that Senator Angara wanted to make a film on Baler written by Roy Iglesias. When he heard that, Meily immediately shared with Vincent all he knew about the story of Baler and sought to make the project his story.

Three months later, Meily started preproduction and research to get the story right, all the way down to the Kapituneros’ buttons. His principal historical basis for the film was hinged on the memoir of Lt. Don Saturnino Martin Cerezo, played by Ryan Eigenmann, who led his men to seek salvation in the church during the siege. The film was a real battle because he draw out all the facts between conflicting stories — from the memoir itself, historians and the locals of Baler. He discovered historical inaccuracies such as the fact that the Filipino army wasn’t as large as the Spanish would like to believe (they actually burned wood to fake the sounds of artillery). Also, fiestas intended outside the church to woo the soldiers to surrender were not as lewd as imagined, as well as some time discrepancies. Yet, together with other troubles such as the rainy season shooting, he never surrendered his goal of making the movie come to life.

Christmas Present

At the moment, Baler is playing in theaters as an official entry to Metro Film Festival. It’s the rogue period piece amid raunchy entries and unflattering sequels out to make a quick buck. Yet direk Mark isn’t worried about Baler’s success because he was simply excited to work with everyone and the film got off a good start with an A rating from the Cinema Evaluation Board. Also, he says Baler was a personal film that he thought needed to be made and came out the way he wanted.

 Baler carries Meily’s mark: it is an unconventional historical piece with fast cuts and glossy shots that were probably influenced by his work as an advertising director. Yet, in typical Meily fashion, the characters are very much human and naturally unpolished in their reactions. They don’t come out as caricatures but as people with whom we can sympathize with even if they lived 100 years before. Thus the film bridges the time gap between the characters and today’s audiences.

The Mark Of Meily

You could say Meily made his true mark in comedy, with previous films like Crying Ladies and La Visa Loca. His surprised friends said they “never knew he had a serious side.” This is why his current GMA show is the five-minute cup of laughter called Camera Cafe, an office satire during coffee breaks. The show was again a piece of serendipity because he wanted to put some of his two-year Mowelfund film scholarship in Paris to good use. He adds that he wasn’t able to until he met producer Henry Delore who was looking for a director to translate the French show Camera Cafe to Filipino audiences a year ago. The show, he says, continues to hone his comedy craft; he is always amazed when the scripts become even funnier with the talented cast. This could be why the show recently won the “Best Comedy” award at the 13th Asian TV Awards held in Singapore.

 Behind the camera, Mark is a riot himself as he describes his short stint directing the upcoming ABS-CBN telesyere Humingi ng Himala shot in San Francisco and starring Judy Ann Santos. It was his virgin experience with telesyeres, and he shared how he had to learn the absurd rules of Filipino primetime drama — summarized best in a deep, serious voice: “If all these rules were real, we would all be brothers and sisters, and all our dads would be jailed for a crimes they didn’t commit because they were desperate for money and all our hospitals were burned so all our birth certificates were messed up.” He wasn’t really joking; the first draft of Himala starts with a quantum event in which a pregnant woman falls off a cliff and barely survives. Reel-ality does bite.

Imperial Future

After visiting the past, Mark Meily has grand schemes for the present with a documentary about Imelda Marcos (working title: “Barefoot”). So far, he says, Imelda has been very consistently in character as “The True, the Good and the Beautiful.” Aside from that, he is working on a new five-minute QTV show called U Women starring industry comediennes such as Tuesday Vargas, Candy Pangilinan and Assunta de Rossi. He says he’s very excited about the show because it is so funny that the cameramen sometimes can’t keep the cameras still.

Regarding the future of the local film industry, Mark says it will only grow if there are more producers like Viva Films willing to take risks and think about the international market. He adds that producers should see films can be successful abroad and not just locally through working with other media. This is why even film fest judges should be more discriminating in their choices rather than relying on box office hits.

As we finish I ask him what his next film should be Mark Meily’s eyes brighten beneath the facial shag and he says he wants do a horror film next. He jokes that the lack of lighting will lower his film budget. With such passion behind his good humor, you know that his future will keep on rolling because he will never compromise in telling stories that he believes are worth telling. It is just up to audiences to keep on watching.

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Director Mark Meily is also teaching at Marilou Diaz Abaya Film Institute. His foreign influence are directors Jim Jarmusch, Pedro Almodóvar and Zhang Yimou. New local favorites are Foster Child Director Dante Mendoza, Chris Martinez who won Cinemalaya audience choice for 100, and Francis Pasion received Best Cinemalay film for Jay.

Read his bio at http://www.mdafilm.com.

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Watch movies with me at readnow@supreme.ph.