Role-playing games

MANILA, Philippines - When Ness Roque was cast in Now Showing in 2008, her first film with the Cannes-regular film Raya Martin, she was a 15-year-old college freshman who was spotted in a play as a six-year-old girl. Now, in her second film with the famed director, How to Disappear Completely, she is a 22-year-old high school teacher playing an 11-year-old kid. “Because I’m extremely insecure,” she says, “I just couldn’t get myself to go to auditions.” Ness Roque, however, gets cast anyway.

As a theater student back in Philippine High School for the Arts, she had already tackled great roles in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s I Only Came to Use the Phone, Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, and Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.

Ness is a playwright’s actor, so much so that when she met with Martin over dinner for their first project, he only asked her one question: “If it was okay for me to get a haircut,” she recalls. “I did get the apple cut.” When they started shooting, she didn’t even need to adjust. “Most of it was done improv(ised). The script was just a brief. Raya would just say action. He would just say, ‘I expect you to do this, this, and this by the end of the scene,’” she shares. It brought her to Cannes 2008.

Outside films, Ness is a member of the edgy theater group Sipat Lawin Ensemble, which staged the memorable Battalia Royale last year. They work quite similarly with the way Now Showing was shot. In a scene, Ness recalls, “I was just told to eat tinola, watch TV, and talk to my mother. I really thought that’s how films were shot. We didn’t have a light set-up. I’d walk, and (Raya would) follow.”

Not in How to Disappear. “Even Raya was, I think, shocked because he also wasn’t used to it,” she shares of the more elaborate production. It may just be Martin’s most commercial work yet.

In the script, Ness shares, “It goes something like, ‘A town in the Philippines. A girl disappears.’ You also grapple for what the scene is like.” Such is Ness’s ongoing battle with roles on-cam and onstage, aside from doing even secretarial and writing duties for Sipat. This November, they are organizing KARNABAL: Devised-Works Festival. For the event, she is doing the dramaturgy for Orwell’s 1984. For now, this girl appears, again, in a Raya Martin film. And although it’s intended to be a horror film, it is arrestingly beautiful.