Metro Manila in the eyes of Sean Ellis

MANILA, Philippines - It’s very different from everything I’ve done.” British filmmaker Sean Ellis is talking about Metro Manila, his third film, and the first film he’s shot entirely in another country and entirely in another language.  But he might as well be talking about his last feature, the understated and underrated doppelganger horror The Broken, and how divergent to the point of being diametrically opposed it was to his first, Cashback, which, if you boil it down, is ostensibly a cheeky working class bit of mischief.  Not exactly connected at the hip, these two films, and certainly a universe apart from Metro Manila. Which is to say that his curiosities tend to not only be insatiable but eclectic and far-ranging as well, making it tricky to second-guess the tracks his eventual filmography will take in turn making it less prone to the diminishing returns of comfort zone filmmaking.

The Broken, which was actually written before Cashback,  draws from Nicholas Roeg, particularly Roeg’s haunted, haunting ghost story of insinuation and despair, Don’t Look Now,  and mostly in terms of its approach to atmosphere as a trope of dread. Ellis even tried roping Roeg in for a cameo but Roeg was busy. Cashback, on the other hand, which started life as a short, and one that eventually gained  serious Oscar traction and  much residual affection, seems drawn from real life, and in a way, it sort of was, albeit not verbatim. Ellis never worked the night shift at a grocery , where the whole of the short was set in, but he put in some time as a lifeguard, a job that entails making sure you don’t have to do your job, and one assumes,  even more tedium and drudgery. “I’m familiar with the clock-watching” How he got from bored grocery clerks fantasizing about freezing time to Lena Headey tussling with mirror selves as they invade and infringe on our world to Metro Manila remains furtive.

Boracay was to blame

Turns out Boracay was to blame. Like many foreigners, he was drawn to the Philippines by the lure of white sand and ocean. His Boracay holiday was his first time in the Philippines. But it was an almost random, utterly innocuous sighting of two armored car guards arguing in the street that became the germ, the spark, for the film. He flew back to the UK and spent a year and a half drafting the script that would become Metro Manila, retroactively tweaking it  later with the proper nuance and temperament and detail, including  an immersion in Philippine cinema. You look at Metro Manila and Brocka is the first thing that comes to mind, specifically the Brocka of Maynila Sa Mga Kuko Ng Liwanag: a man painted into a desperate corner by the demands of survival, the massive and unforgiving city that dwarfs him, and the daily combats they wage with each other. But it was another, and unlikely, Brocka he went to for a sense of how our cinema behaves, Bona. He took a look at Gerry de Leon’s Banaue, if only because he was shooting there.  He saw Raymond Red’s Manila Skies, too, with which Metro Manila, and indeed Maynila Sa Mga Kuko Ng Liwanag, shares certain dynamics and verisimilitudes. And lastly, Brillante Mendoza’s Foster Child because Jake Macapagal, the actor who plays his main character Oscar, was in it. Ironically, Macapagal signed on not to act in Metro Manila but to help with the casting, and it took a while for Ellis to, as he says, “put two and two together” but he eventually decided to cast Macapagal in the lead.  “Jake’s performance (in Metro Manila) is stellar.” Ellis beams about his leading man, “You rarely get that combination of performance and image but when you do, it’s magic.”

Ellis plans to see more local films,  but this time not merely as part of research. The four he’s seen impressed him enough to note that “something is happening here.”  Something is definitely happening with Metro Manila. Ellis is still acclimating to its latest exaltation, as the UK pick for the Oscars. He has other things on his mind, like the rest of the film’s festival itinerary and some badly-needed downtime with his family. He’s in no hurry to move on to his next film, confident that it will come to him when the time is right.  And when it does, it will consume him, as his three previous films did. Which is only right, given the life and time he’s bound to pour into it. “You have to really love it. Otherwise, it’s a bad relationship.”

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