My Leap Into Movies1 min read
Reading Time: 2 minutesMY FIRST film, Forever Fever, was born out of a situation of sheer desperation. It was 1995, and I’d been living in the United Kingdom for nearly 15 years.
I was a 32-year-old West End actor, had won a couple of awards as theatre director on the London stage and had been running an Asian theatre company called Mu-Lan Arts for close to five years. It was after our fourth production – the staging of Three Japanese Women at London’s Soho Theatre – that reality sunk in: The audience numbers were not increasing and the company’s finances were dwindling.
I grew despondent. Despite receiving awards and great reviews from the British media, there just wasn’t sufficient demand for theatre with actors of Asian descent (or Orientals, as less-informed Brits are wont to say).
Artistically frustrated, I left for New York to do a short course in film at New York University (NYU), where, not unexpectedly, I was forced to think about possible story lines for films. On returning to London, I set out to produce a film based on Ming Cher’s Spider Boys, a gritty novel about youth gangs in 1950s Singapore. Unfortunately, before filming could take place in 1997, the project fell through due to casting problems. Dejected but not defeated, I became more determined to make a film – no matter what the odds were.
Read the full article here via The Straits Times>>
Image credit 13 Little Pictures
This article originally appeared in BiblioAsia Vol 11 Iss 1, the flagship magazine of the National Library Board. www.nlb.gov.sg/Browse/BiblioAsia.aspx
