Black and white and in color
John Sayles, the writer-director of the beloved indie movies The Return of the Secaucus Seven, Eight Men Out, Passion Fish, Lone Star and others, is in the Philippines to cast actors and scout locations for his next movie.
John Sayles’s next movie is about the Philippine-American War, and it will be shot entirely in the Philippines, probably in Bohol.
John Sayles has written a 900-page novel about the Philippine-American War called Some Time In The Sun, which will be published by Doubleday. His movie, which he also wrote, is not an adaptation of the novel.
I get a kick out of dropping the name, “John Sayles.” It’s shorthand for “Hey, I went to dinner with John Sayles.”
John Sayles, 58, looks like he could bench-press Joel Torre and Alfred “Krip” Yuson, who organized the dinner for the visiting filmmaker last Friday. Ronnie Lazaro would be the barbell. Joel and Krip have known John Sayles for years, via the film editor Mario Ontal. This is not his first time in the Philippines. He knows more about the Philippine-American War than most Pinoys, which is very cool and also embarrassing.
Friday was Independence Day, and I had just come from a screening of Raya Martin’s film Independencia. Shot in beautiful black and white, Independencia is about a Filipino mother and son who hide out in the forest when the Americans arrive at the turn of the 20th century. (It looks like a silent movie; in fact I think Raya could take out the dialogue altogether.)
The lead actors Sid Lucero and Alessandra De Rossi are mestizo (Spanish-German-Filipino, Fil-Italian) — not an issue, since many Pinoys are of mixed ancestry — but they had to darken their complexions to play their roles. Interesting how many Filipino actors are too pale to appear “authentic” in movies made for foreign audiences. In the trailer for Raya’s other Cannes movie Manila, an homage to Lino Brocka which he co-directed with Adolf Alix, actor Piolo Pascual was obviously wearing blackface. The local audience seems to prefer our actors white or whitened. Skin whitening is big business.
John Sayles noted that the newsreels about the Fil-American War were actually shot in New Jersey with black American actors playing Filipinos. Most Americans at the time thought that we were black.
So there’s always been confusion about our “real” color.
“My favorite thing that Mark Twain wrote about that war was that there were all these American missionaries who had the Philippines confused with China because the Boxer War was happening at the same time,” John Sayles says. “They thought they were going to go to the Philippines and convert people to Christianity.”
While we were on the subject of ethnicity, “We shot a movie in Alaska and there was a pretty big Filipino community there,” John Sayles recalls. “They went to Alaska because we had this Exclusion Act and all the Chinese and Japanese were kicked out. They had a machine called the Iron Chink that was used for cutting the head and tail off the fish because there used to be an actual Chinese worker with a cleaver. When the Chinese had to leave, there were all these jobs on the slime line where guys dressed the fish and put them in cans. But Filipinos were territorial Americans, so they could come in.
“The first wave of Filipinos in Alaska were guys without women,” John Sayles continues. “They all married local women, Native Americans. Five to eight years later the second wave came in but they were allowed to bring their girlfriends and wives. There was a Filipino community, but the wives hated each other and there was a real rift.
“There’s still a bar right by the dock where you can sing karaoke in Tagalog,” he added. “In Juneau, Alaska.”
John Sayles describes his Philippine project as an ambitious period movie with “lots of people firing guns, plus carabaos and chickens.”
As to the budget, “We usually can make a movie that looks like a $10 million movie for about $2 million.” Joel recommended Bohol as the location because the terrain meets the movie’s requirements (lots of caves), and there’s less traffic and noise.
John Sayles mentions the account written by an American who visited Bohol in 1901. He went to every village and said, “Oh, by the way, you lost the war.”
“To whom,” said the residents, “The Spanish?”
“No,” he said, “To us. You’re Americans now.” Then they’d invite him to their homes for a good meal.
The John Sayles movie starts filming in January next year.
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