Original subtitles

[film roll clicks]

[Sandi Tan] When I was 18, a long time ago now,

I had the idea that you found freedom by building worlds inside your head.

That you had to go backwards in order to go forwards.

That little kids had the answers to everything.

[insects chirping]

[Sandi] When I was 18, I had so many ideas,

I hardly slept at all.

In the summer of 1992,

my friends and I shot a road movie on the streets of Singapore...

that was to become a kind of urban legend.

That movie was called Shirkers,

a word which means "running away,

avoiding responsibility,

escape."

I wrote the script and played the heroine,

a 16-year-old killer named S.

[owl hooting]

[Sandi] Nobody was making movies like that in Singapore.

So, we were pioneers.

[dog barking, panting]

The film was a time capsule of a Singapore

that was both real and imaginary.

Back then, the thing I wanted more than anything was to make a movie.

But I never imagined it would end this way.

[eerie song playing]

[music stops]

Twenty-five years later, I find myself on a strange backward journey,

replaying the past for clues.

[man] Okay, I listened to your tape that you did in your room.

I loved it. I like being your best friend.

You're my best friend.

I like knowing that you're around.

I like knowing that we're connected,

that we're partners in crime.

Make me another tape, please.

I miss you.

[Sandi] I learned to stop thinking about that time...

to pretend it never happened...

which was, of course, impossible.

Shirkers became a secret history,

shared by a small group of us.

And it would haunt us

and bond us

and tear us apart.

- [Sandi] Whenever you're ready. - Now.

[Sandi] Jasmine and I were enemies before we were friends.

You thought I was an enemy, but I don't know if I thought you were an enemy.

Uh, yeah.

We stayed enemies until we were 14.

When we were growing up in the 1980s...

the state and the family were constantly in your face.

[cheering]

[typewriter keys clacking, ding]

Singapore was so uptight, its government even banned chewing gum.

If Americans believe they are exceptional,

let me tell you,

Singaporeans know we are exceptional.

A sweaty little island in 1965,

Singapore became one of the richest countries in the world by the year 2000.

[fireworks whistle, pop]

When Jasmine and I were 14,

we discovered unusual movies and unpopular music.

[playing off-key]

[Sandi] And as weirdos, we became best friends.

We came from very different backgrounds...

but we were thick as thieves.

My family was intense.

My parents' marriage was collapsing even before I was born,

and so I was raised by my grandparents.

When it rained, our front lawn looked like chocolate milk.

In 1981, my grandfather insisted on having these pictures taken...

because his beloved house was about to be torn down.

In 1985, the house was replaced by this condo.

It still flooded, but it was no longer chocolate milk.

I was always expected to shine.

Which was exhausting.

I needed a way out.

So, of course, I liked Jasmine's family.

They were warm and undemanding

and didn't care if we built crazy shrines in Jasmine's room.

We had the God of Theater...

and the Goddess of Scriptwriting.

[typewriter clacking]

[plane whooshing by sound]

We showed up at school dressed up as nurses.

[school bell ringing]

And I challenged the authorities at the Film Society.

[man] Dear Sandi: We will certainly try to acquire the films you've requested.

[Sandi] I desperately wanted to make movies.

I gave imaginary interviews as imaginary filmmakers.

Hi, I would like to share with you my movie

Magic Fire Brain, which, uh, is completely original.

There were lots of crowd scenes.

I read American Film and Film Comment religiously.

But it was impossible to see these movies unless I got very creative.

I established a clandestine videotaping syndicate

with my cousin Vicki in Florida...

just so I could watch Blue Velvet.

Jasmine and I devoured what people around us ignored.

We started writing for BigO,

Singapore's underground rock zine, when we were 14.

BigO was run by Philip Cheah, in all his poker-faced glory,

and he would make us tapes of Patti Smith and The Velvet Underground

and quiz us on them before he would let us join their club.

In Singapore, you had very strict censorship across music and film.

A lot of the great classic albums were still banned.

We saw the revolution that took place in the UK and in the US,

and we wondered whether that could actually happen here.

[Sandi] We created elaborate collages for BigO,

which they all hated.

I think we were way too punk for them.

They were a lame boy's club anyway.

So it was always us...

against the world.

Our greatest achievement was publishing our own zine, The Exploding Cat...

on the photocopier at the National Library.

Exploding Cat was our attempt to catalog everything that angered us,

that made us laugh.

The Cat became its own thing.

We received letters from New York, London...

Paris, Jerusalem,

even prisons in three different states.

Above all...

it was a catalog of us.

Me,

my friends,

our tiny island in the center of the world,

charting our own destiny...

in 1989.

[girl] The next story is chapter 39.

[Sandi] Hang on, just one more thing.

Back in those days, I was obsessed with The Catcher in the Rye...

and Salinger's idea of saving children.

So I trained my baby cousins to never grow up.

[boy speaking gibberish]

...people talk. [laughs]

- [Sandi] Wen... - Yes.

Say something.

[girl] I'm going to color.

[girl humming]

[Sandi] Or if they had to grow up, to grow up different.

[girl laughing]

[Sandi] "Hysterical" was superior to "ordinary."

[girl] I hate you.

[Sandi] Even "depressed" was superior to "ordinary."

[boy hums fanfare] You no good mangy mutt!

You're stupid.

A long time ago, in early '91, we took the filmmaking class,

probably the first filmmaking class available here.

In this classroom and the adjoining classroom as well.

So there was a whole bunch of us, you, me,

a whole strange assortment of persons.

[Sandi] Our teacher was Georges Cardona, a man of unplaceable age and origin.

[Georges Cardona] I think we ought to make a film about the guy

who measures the visibility in Singapore.

[woman laughs]

He projected himself to be an American filmmaker,

and was there to teach us, impressionable 18, 19 year-olds,

about film production in Singapore.

[Sandi] We met Sophie at the class.

She was so nice and stable and trustworthy.

I wasn't sure she would make a good friend.

Georges brought the three of us,

Sophie, Jasmine and me into his inner circle.

Cecilia runs a video bordello.

My impression of Georges, uh,

first and foremost, was his eyes, very metallic.

It was almost ice, icy blue.

He spoke in a very slow, calm, measured tones.

And I just remember, even at that point,

this kind of dissonance, you know,

the eyes seemed so cold

but his demeanor seemed so warm.

And he had this ability

that when he spoke to you,

you felt that you were his sole focus.

[Sandi] Georges was like no other adult I knew in Singapore.

He liked to just sit and watch the light change.

He took us to shoot colorful Hindu festivals

that my family would have found frightening.

[Hindu fast-paced music playing]

[Sandi] He talked about movies the way I wanted to talk about movies.

He loved the French New Wave.

[man speaking French]

And soon, so did I.

When the film class ended at nine or ten at night...

we would drive around the island with Georges.

We kept him out late, even though we knew he had a wife and a baby

waiting for him at home.

- [Georges] And I barked. - [girl laughs]

[crickets chirping]

[Georges] Can you hear the crickets?

[Sandi] We went looking for ideas.

We went looking for wild dogs.

[Sandi] Bang!

[Georges laughs] Were you rolling?

[Sandi] Yeah.

[Jasmine] Sandi, I didn't know you were into this.

Oh, stop it! I'm not in the mood tonight.

[Sandi] Nice soundtrack.

[laughing]

Hurry up.

[Georges] We're speaking loudly.

And all the lovers are sort of aggravated with us and they have cleared the area.

[Sandi] He was my first friend who was a grown man.

He picked us.

But he let us feel like we picked him.

Those night drives bled into my dreams.

Of course I wanted to make a road movie.

Instead, I went away to a strange, cold place.

England.

I thought I would find my tribe.

But I had left them.

Jasmine went to New York...

Sophie went to LA...

And Georges stayed in Singapore.

I felt so stranded.

I poured all of myself...

into letters to Georges...

[pen scratching]

And Jasmine.

Georges didn't write letters or emails.

On very rare occasions,

he sent me tape recordings of his voice.

[Georges] What are you doing now?

Um...

Thinking of going to the US in Easter.

And renting a car, then traveling through the US...

for all the way from New Orleans to Arkansas.

[Sandi] He invited Jasmine and me to join him.

There were few things that excited me more than the idea of an American road trip.

I thought, "Fuck the French New Wave, we're going to live our own movie."

[man speaking French] Sandi Tan, the only child

of a toothbrush salesman and a worker in a mortuary.

Sandi was parentless from age two.

Jasmine Ng, the eldest daughter

of a mafia kingpin in Singapore's Chinatown,

and a feeble-minded housewife.

Georges Cardona is 89 years old and mute.

No other info available.

[Sandi] Jasmine didn't see it that way.

In the end, only I went.

I flew to Los Angeles to meet Georges.

He and I drove to San Francisco, taking the slowest, most scenic roads.

Even back then I knew how it looked.

I was on the road with a married man more than twice my age.

So I didn't tell anyone.

He gave me signals,

strange signals, late night conversations

where he told me people thought we were lovers.

And then one night, he invited me to touch his belly.

I just ignored him.

It disturbed me to even think about it.

And we both pretended it never happened.

Then we drove to New Orleans where he grew up.

Georges was showing me the South, with its moss and bugs and ghost stories.

This was the place where he had transformed himself into an artist.

He told me how when he was 12,

he watched his older brother bleed to death on their mother's lap.

He told me how when Jayne Mansfield was killed in a car accident...

her decapitated head rolled over to where he was in his car.

He told me he was the inspiration for James Spader's character

in Sex, Lies, and Videotape.

[woman] Something to take my mind off this trip.

So I was just...

I just...

I just did it on the plane.

[Sandi] Whether his stories were actually true

seemed beside the point.

I loved his storytelling,

and how his stories made time and place and truth

absolutely porous.

[Georges] ...the dominant member of the party...

[Sandi] I was suddenly staring at a puddle of blood

in a living room in the '60s.

I was two degrees away from Jayne Mansfield's head,

three degrees from Steven Soderbergh.

That road trip was significant for another reason.

I chose Georges as my new best friend.

We talked about making a movie together...

a road movie.

I went back to school and immediately threw everything into a script.

[keyboard clacking]

[faxing noise]

"S tells her best friend TB she can save the world when it ends.

Her tools are games, toys, and her imagination.

She saves the world in small numbers, starting with..."

In my vision of the world, there are movers,

there are shakers,

and there are shirkers.

Georges sent me a fax.

It started out with...

the mysteriously-named lead character S.

I wonder what that stands for.

[Sandi] My idea was to do a road movie in a country

you can drive across in 40 minutes.

We follow this cryptic character, she goes around Singapore.

She might have been the Grim Reaper,

just picking off these characters and taking them on this afterlife journey.

Because Sandi had an obsession with Bergman.

[Sandi] I don't have... I hated Bergman.

But anyway, go on. Can we start and you describe the plot?

You as the screenwriter, this was not a three-act structure.

[Sandi] How could we...?

It's only something that 19-year-olds could've just said,

"Let's go do it. Why not?"

[Sandi] I finished the script in June,

and we had to start shooting in July

before the school term began for Jasmine and Sophie.

It was less than two and a half months.

[Sandi] Pre-production.

No, pre-production and shoot for a feature

while most of us were still working day jobs.

Like I said, you were the only one who was not working.

I remember, um,

that you were the sort of "chief ideologue" of the trio.

Sophie was the gopher.

Jasmine...

was the technical person,

I think, who was, you know, always fussing with this and that.

[Sandi] We eventually broke into two camps,

Jasmine and Sophie, who thought we should wait a year and do it next summer...

versus me and Georges who just wanted to get the film made.

[man singing]

[Sandi] One of Georges' favorite films was Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo...

in which the mad Klaus Kinski

commands an army of Amazonian natives

to pull a ship over a mountain for him.

This is one of Georges' guiding inspirations.

And it became mine too.

[Jasmine] You've always been a very determined and quite ambitious person.

You just wanted it done at any cost,

and you were willing to just burn things

just so that you could make your own film.

[Sandi] Well, okay,

but after years of plotting to make a film,

I couldn't just let this opportunity slip by.

It wasn't as if Jasmine was an expert.

She designed this audition flyer in her unique style.

Of course nobody could read it so nobody showed up.

She was furious when we got someone more conventional to try again.

She thought we were selling out.

[Jasmine] Don't worry about it.

It's just gonna be like informal improvisational kind of exercise.

My left side, my right side.

[Jasmine] Yeah, right.

Hold up your number.

[Sandi] The auditions were run by Sophie and Jasmine.

[Sophie] Basically, the main character of the film is 16 years old.

Hey. Wow. Let me have a closer look.

[Jasmine] Okay, can you just imagine you're in the car right now...

and you're going around, you're knocking all these old women down and... You know?

[ululates]

[Jasmine] Okay.

- Yeah. - [Jasmine] That's all right.

[Sandi] Georges was nowhere to be seen or heard.

Except here.

And so I was the screenwriter,

Sophie was the producer,

Jasmine would be the editor...

and Georges was the director.

Sophie, as our 19-year-old producer,

wrote letters in the voice of an experienced executive producer.

I secured a meeting with a high-profile person,

and it took me a lot of time and courage,

and before the person arrived, Georges said to me,

"Okay, now you go into the kitchen.

I'm gonna take the meeting."

That was a very difficult moment for me.

I didn't believe in Georges.

I did not believe in Georges, but I believed in the film.

Do I yell at Georges

or is it better for me to remain in the kitchen

and have him secure the deal so the film could move forward?

And I chose the film.

[Sandi] We were trying to mount a feature film

on the scantest of practical knowledge.

We had a production assistant who was 14 years old.

Georges talked Ronnie, a 30-year-old first time DP

into shooting the film for us.

I got involved as a sound man,

and I volunteered to do the storyboarding.

I have no clue what Shirkers is about.

- Can I say that? Would that offend you? - [Sandi] No, no, no.

My grandmother played my grandmother and my baby cousin played my baby cousin.

Her furry little arms had their own little story.

Oh, I thought, "Oh, great, they're looking for a nurse, and I'm one."

I've always wanted to see what acting is all about, you know?

[school bell rings]

[Sandi] I talked Philip into playing the crossing guard...

because that's essentially what he was to me.

When I first heard about the Shirkers project, I thought, it's about time.

The only sort of independent feature films that were shot in Singapore

were like the legendary They Call Her Cleopatra Wong.

[grunting]

[Sophie] There was very little domestic filmmaking activity, right?

And then we were going to be the next film after Medium Rare.

[Sandi] Medium Rare was a film about a Singaporean serial killer

who was played by an American TV actor.

And come on, we can do better than that.

We dispatched an army of location scouts across the island.

I made sure they found the mannequin shops...

and the old-timey bakery that I loved

because I knew they wouldn't be around for long.

Jasmine and Sophie negotiated with Kodak and the film equipment houses...

and we got all our film and camera equipment for free.

There remained one last role to be cast: the heroine S.

I even felt like I couldn't play the role, 'cause it was a non-role.

You wanted to play the role.

Whether it was a good decision to have cast you in the role,

I think the footage will speak for itself.

[Sandi] Yeah.

"Exterior: S's Street, afternoon.

A lazy suburban neighborhood with rows of one-story houses,

lawnmower sounds, cutlery clangs, whining puppies,

and faint sounds of radio fuzzying with '30s Shanghai showtunes,

track along the fronts of the houses until camera frame bumps into S.

Our 16-year-old protagonist enters the scene

with an old suitcase and an old camera."

She is coming home.

S lives with her grandmother...

and her cousin, baby Woo Woo.

They live next door to her best friend TB.

TB lives with her mother, who loves to smoke and watch TV.

And her little brother TJ,

who rides around the neighborhood looking for trouble.

One beautiful day, S gets TB to go with her to shoot her piano teacher.

[metronome ticking]

[gunshot, thump]

[metronome continues ticking]

When TB gets too busy to hang out with her,

S goes looking for a new sidekick...

and four more people she likes enough to kill.

Sleeping on her favorite spot in the grass,

she meets a visibility inspector named Rahman and goes home with him.

She abducts his little son, Haryo.

She and Haryo walk around the island looking for more people to collect.

[insects chirping]

[dog panting]

[Sandi] They spot Cecilia, the nurse, and her giant dog, Cherish,

and follow them home.

They meet Cecilia's daughter, Monster,

who is epileptic, but who loves to dance.

[dog panting]

S is a Catcher in the Rye...

and so they are three.

- Together, they meet Montana Bob. - [girl gasps]

He's a funny dude, so they follow him home.

Meanwhile, there's the mystery boy S keeps encountering.

She develops feelings for him, which means she has to kill him.

That's two down, three to go.

She meets Albert, the self-made man who built a fortune in sticky tape,

and he's eager to show off his massive new house.

S meets his wife Mimi...

their son Robert...

and their maids, Portrero and Pacifica.

Robert tells S he's an armchair hedonist.

They go driving.

His friends are all dweebs.

Time is running out.

And S has three more people to take to the other world with her.

It's not clear if this world is heaven,

hell or a supermarket.

So things happen.

Or maybe they don't.

Because maybe this whole thing was a dream after all.

Well, because, like, the plot was almost immaterial.

- You know, it was a mood piece. It was... - Yeah.

I don't know.

[Sandi] My script called for the largest dog in the country,

and Sophie got hold of this giant wolfhound named Mega.

Then Sophie and Jasmine sneaked him into the supermarket...

when the manager's back was turned.

[Sophie] I faked a seizure...

in order to draw crowds.

So I was the crowd wrangler as well.

[Sandi] Sophie and Jasmine stole these seniors out of an old folks home.

And returned them before they even knew what happened.

And we made all the grown up women smoke.

And smoke.

And smoke.

We captured some startling performances from friends and strangers.

You were really great as the Detergent Lady.

I was not really great. I think you love laughing at your friends.

[Sandi] There was Freda as my best friend TB.

Kaylene as my disabled sidekick, Monster.

And Pohshon as Monster's mom.

You were supposed to take my child away from me and I was like...

crying because you're gonna take her away from me for good

and, see, you're making me cry now. [laughs]

Our passion and our earnestness...

came through.

At that time, I thought that Shirkers...

as it was proposed,

was incredible, it was way ahead of its time.

This was a period when America was making some of these movies

with Winona Ryder, I believe.

And I think that to have a Singapore side of things

and especially when it's fronted by Sandi,

absolutely astounds me.

[Sandi] Did you ever read the script? Like, did you feel it was childish?

Yeah, but that was the beauty of it, right? You know that.

You know that. It was so personal, wasn't it?

[Sandi] Georges came up with an idea for a set piece.

And it was only much later that I realized the idea wasn't even his.

My friend Leon was so full of himself,

claiming that every girl was in love with him.

And so I gave him the kind of fate I thought he deserved.

[brakes screeching, thump]

In my world of Shirkers, there were different categories of boys:

the boys I thought delectable,

the boys I liked as good friends,

and as in life,

I made friends with strange men

because I was bold in that way.

One of the most visceral memories I have of Shirkers

was the scene in the bowling alley.

We spent a whole day shooting.

It involved a lot of emotional energy.

Remember, you know, you're 18, 19.

In the end, I remember asking Georges,

"How was it? You know, how were the takes?"

And he looked at me and he's like, "The camera jammed on the first take."

So... we'd shot nothing.

And this was, I don't even know how many hours in that day,

and I lost it with him.

[Sandi] We had to go back to the bowling alley the next day

and do it all over again.

- You're going too fast, man. Pull out! - I can't! I can't!

Why are you chasing him? You know you're off the case.

The boss is gonna have your ass!

[Sandi] While we were shooting, our friend Ben was busy

working on the soundtrack for Shirkers.

I knew you from Exploding Cat and BigO magazine.

At the time, I guess my resources meant that I would have just had one tape.

A lot of little doodles...

on guitar...

electric, a lot of backwards stuff, I think.

The first time, I remember my skin crawling.

It was like I was ushered away from you guys at Newton Circus.

What I wasn't expecting is Georges to take me aside,

escort me to his car,

like some gangster meeting or a policeman meeting an informer

or something like that, straight out of the movies.

I thought, "Okay, he's going to listen to the cassette of the stuff I have,"

which I thought was odd because it was for you guys, but I didn't get that.

He was just threatening me,

sussing me out to see if I had an agenda and, you know, telling me off that...

"Don't take advantage of these guys" or something like that.

I was like, "What? Sorry?"

He also tells me that a far more professional

and established musician was working on the soundtrack,

which was news to me.

[Sandi] But you left the tape with him.

- Yeah. I thought they were going to you. - [Sandi] Why?

[Sandi] I didn't know it then, but Georges took Ben's only tape...

and banned him from visiting us on the set.

I don't remember exactly the chain of events,

but things just got worse and worse.

[Sandi] Jasmine started keeping notes about what was actually going on.

Just read it. You wrote this.

"Everything is bloody uncertain.

Mr. C. has no idea what he's doing,

he has no idea how he's gonna get the money.

He claims he has a production manager who worked on Apocalypse Now."

Who was that?

I don't know.

You were there. You were at the meeting...

Obviously that person didn't show up.

How can we continue with this when I was pointing all these things out?

So it was true.

It was just really you and Georges who wanted this to happen.

You weren't paying attention to any of these progress reports.

I was paying attention, but I just thought we're just gonna wing it.

Like I do.

Because we were doing the work... doing the legwork,

and you thought you were just gonna wing it.

You were obviously being an asshole. You've always been an asshole.

Just as much as you have the capacity to be really wonderful,

you have as much capacity of being an asshole.

[Sandi] So maybe I was an asshole,

but I just wanted us to keep going, no matter what.

There was no time to think.

Georges was shooting us from a bridge overlooking the track.

[Georges] Train.

[Sandi] I heard the train even before I heard his warning.

[Georges laughing]

Do you think it was fun for him to dick us around like that?

Of course. What do you think?

With two weeks left to go, we ran out of money.

Georges said he needed just $10,000...

or the production would have to be shut down.

Sophie and I felt we'd come too far to let this happen.

So Georges drove us from ATM to ATM.

And over the next few nights...

Sophie and I withdrew all of our savings.

We never told a soul.

After shooting wrapped,

Sophie, Jasmine and I were completely spent.

But we had pulled off the impossible,

we made a movie!

[upbeat music playing]

Sophie went back to LA.

Jasmine went back to New York.

I went back to England.

Leaving Georges in Singapore to process the 70 cans of film

and to tell us what the footage looked like.

None of us had seen a single frame of what we had shot.

And so...

I waited.

And I waited.

And I waited.

Christmas went by.

New Years went by.

Finally, a package arrived...

from Georges Cardona.

[Georges] I hope you're fine.

I hope you managed to open your bottle of wine.

Don't drink it all at one time.

Listen to classical music. Piano, Chopin,

Beethoven.

It's very soothing.

Okay, that's it for now.

I'll be sending you some stuff.

[click]

[Sandi] And so I waited some more.

Summer was approaching again.

And that was when Jasmine thought she might have to go back to Singapore,

to edit the film.

Just read it...

"He thinks that both Sophie and I are overreacting...

and falling into unnecessary fits of paranoia."

[phone ringing]

Because of where I was working at, it would have been possible for me

to edit the film, finish the film, do everything.

[phone is put down]

[Sandi] I finally received another tape.

[Georges] Hi.

First of all, the telephone rang...

and it was, well, it's New York calling.

Your very best friend called today.

At three o'clock in the morning she was watching TV and she was...

"Can you hear me?

We were wondering how the film is doing?"

So I said, "Who is we?"

She said, "Oh, come on, we, the people in this part of the world."

So she's truly American, she speaks like, "We, the people of the United States."

Um, anyway...

So I decided I better make this recording

before any more strange calls come through.

[click]

[Sandi] That was the last we heard from him.

He was gone.

And so was Shirkers.

It really hit me like a ten-ton truck.

That really exhausted...

I think I just, like all that energy just zapped out of me in that one instant.

There was a piece of my spirit that died.

[Sandi] All I was left with...

were these fuzzy memories...

of being on the set...

and just waiting.

[Georges] Is Sandi in the picture?

Camera ready.

[Sandi] Georges took everything.

From deep in the fuzz,

I remembered one final incident.

On the last day of the shoot,

only Georges, Ronnie and I were left.

We drove out to a patch of land by the airport...

and built a very strange contraption.

It was to make our young actor Romaino fly.

But there was no such flying scene in my script.

"How are we gonna get rid of the harness and the rope?" I asked Georges.

"Don't worry," he said, "There's computers."

After the long hours spent trying to film that completely made up scene,

he popped open the camera by mistake.

Or maybe it wasn't by mistake.

And there was no film in it.

Twenty-five years later...

I'm now wondering if he was sending me a secret message only I would understand.

There's a scene in my script where Haryo discovers

there's no film in S's camera.

She tells him, "It doesn't matter, because when you look through the hole

and go 'click' it catches something

or at least your mind catches something."

You don't need film. Just the action of doing that helps you remember.

What was he trying to tell me?

"Film or no film,

you must remember this."

[Sophie] Was he role-playing as a director?

Did he just view this entire filmmaking venture

as this psychological exercise?

[Sandi] We were no longer magical kids who made a movie.

We were just kids.

Shirkers is such a free film because you were very free yourself.

It was such a joy that you were willing to experiment

and express anything on your mind.

[Sandi] But when I lost Shirkers,

I lost that too.

Don't get me in it. I refuse to be part of this thing.

I became a terrible 22-year-old film critic

at the largest newspaper in Singapore.

And I made them let me interview my heroes.

A publisher approached me to write a fictionalized memoir of Shirkers...

but I said I wasn't ready.

In the years that followed, I said no to interviewers

asking me to talk about Shirkers.

It was something I just wanted to forget.

Exactly five years after Shirkers wrapped...

a mysterious package arrived at Jasmine's office.

They were videotapes from Georges Cardona,

which had to mean they contained Shirkers.

I remember, maybe incorrectly,

that it was a very kind of joyous occasion.

[Sandi] Sophie, me and you were going to come...

It was at my workplace, yeah.

[Sandi] And we were gonna watch these tapes.

Then they all turned out to be...

[click]

[static noise]

Was it all just snow?

Like there was really nothing.

And I thought, "How cruel."

I mean, what stakes did he still have in this mind game?

Give us the material so we can finish the film.

[Jasmine] We couldn't believe how ridiculous the situation was.

So surreal, so unimaginable.

[pen scratching furiously]

[Sandi] I was beyond furious with Georges,

but there was nowhere for me to direct my rage.

So I wrote it all down.

"I envisage some measure of a showdown...

[tires screech]

...with pyrotechnics and slick editing."

As far as I'm concerned,

he should disappear deep and far into the Amazon jungle, where he belongs,

amongst his distinct relation, the buck-toothed boa.

Lowlife."

[grunting]

[Sandi] We forced ourselves to move on.

My baby cousin Yao...

gave me this book of mosquitoes.

But my baby cousins were no longer babies.

You can't see anything.

I made my peace that a chunk of my life would forever be lost.

And I moved to New York...

to attend film school at Columbia University.

I know I was doing things backwards.

First I made a movie,

then I became a film critic,

then I went to film school.

But that's what happens when you no longer have a map.

I spent ten years in the wilderness.

I tried to write that book...

about the making of Shirkers.

But I just couldn't do it.

Instead, I wrote screenplays for films that would never be made.

Shirkers was now a distant memory.

Then it began sending me distress signals.

I heard these pings when I saw Rushmore.

And I heard them again...

during Ghost World.

Then silence once more.

[crickets chirping]

But I knew now that it was alive.

And I knew we had to meet again.

Suddenly, I found myself in my mid-30s,

in Los Angeles, of all places.

I decided to turn to fiction.

Because to write a novel, I didn't have to wait for anyone.

It's just me...

and my ghosts.

My novel, The Black Isle, was the story

of a young woman with extraordinary powers

who falls under the influence of a charismatic, but sinister man.

Writing it felt like an exorcism.

But I would be wrong about that.

On September 11, 2011,

I received an email from a familiar name.

It was Georges's wife.

She said Georges was dead.

She also told me she had found 70 cans of film

labeled Shirkers, and that they were all in perfect condition.

I felt as if a curse, which lasted 20 years, had finally been lifted.

His widow sent me box after box of things I hadn't seen in years.

Georges had kept everything.

I pulled out some of the slides that were taken in his studio.

And there was Kaylene,

the girl who played Monster,

surrounded by my stuff.

[camera shutter clicking]

Now why would Georges keep everything...

from Shirkers?

He even wrote this letter on behalf of the crew.

"At the moment, the film is in the editing suite.

But we are almost there.

Shirkers will be completed by October,

hopefully in time for Cannes Festival.

Have a nice day."

Georges and his stories were so exotic that he was very hard to place.

Um...

I remember first he started describing movies from start to finish.

And then he started telling stories about his own life.

His family wanted to demolish a dam,

I guess, on their property

and make the river flow again.

So Georges built a three-stage rocket.

And his hand got exploded.

He told me about his brother in Colombia

running into the house with a knife in his femoral artery

and bleeding to death on the kitchen floor.

He got arrested, uh...

by the police, who thought he was a Cuban burglar.

From jail, he called an uncle in New Orleans

and that uncle said, "Come to New Orleans. I'll take care of you."

And at one point my foot felt wet,

and I realized he was in tears at his own stories

and his tears were dropping on my foot.

[Sandi] These were all stories Georges told Grace

on the very first day they met

in the swimming pool of the Raffles Hotel in 1985.

And then I thought, "Good God, he doesn't even know my name."

[man speaking French] No longer a child,

Sandi Tan has turned into a detective

who must travel across two continents to solve this 25-year mystery.

[Sandi] Long ago, I went on the road with Georges.

Now I was on the road again without him,

but not really.

It was so like Georges that he would want me to chase him down this way.

- [woman] Hey. How are you? - Hi.

- Oh, it's been a long time. - It's been a long time.

[woman] But you haven't changed.

Oh, Sandi, I have been dreading today. I'm glad to see you.

- [Sandi] Yeah. - And I want to help you out.

Whatever happened, I have no clue. I have no clue.

[Sandi] The widow remains so horrified

by her 25 years with Georges that she didn't want to be named.

I don't even know how he died.

[woman] He had a girlfriend who was, like, 21.

Um, not only was she young, but she was from Belgium...

and a chemist.

And he went to go to bed.

His arteries closed up and he passed out...

and died.

[laughs]

- He died like that, yeah. - 'Cause the funny thing...

- [woman] He was too young, wasn't he? - Yeah.

[woman] He was actually four years older than what we thought.

[Sandi] When did you find out he was four years older?

[woman] When we got divorced.

He always told me that his passport had the wrong date

and the wrong day.

[Sandi] So even his birthday wasn't his birthday.

[woman] It was two days before.

But by making it two days later, he got to be a different horoscope.

[laughs]

He was really a Cancer.

[Sandi] The poetry of that was just pure Georges Cardona.

[woman] Whatever Georges told me, I believed.

I am a completely trusting person, you know, gullible, whatever.

That's why this is all so hard for me.

Every time he got involved with filmmaking it was a horrible experience for me.

- You know, this is expensive. - [Sandi] You paid for everything, right?

- I mean... - [woman] No, not everything. But a lot.

Wherever he was, as long as we were together, which was until 1998,

he carried that film with him and he always made sure it was air-conditioned

and it was like, "Oh, my God."

It was like a cross around my neck.

I think though, in Singapore, he kept it at the studio that he had.

[Sandi] She and Georges left Singapore for Perth, Australia,

where he had her sink her savings into buying him a vineyard.

Which he said he would learn to run by reading books on the subject.

[woman] We had a little room, and it was in there.

That's when I wanted to get rid of it, because it was taking up a whole room.

[Sandi] When they got divorced two years after that, he moved to Seattle...

and then to Houston, where he died...

always carrying with him

the 70 cans of film

and boxes and boxes of scripts and storyboards.

[woman] I thought, who does that?

My wife reminded me this morning, my wife met Georges in 1985.

And her thought was, "I think he must be in the Witness Protection Program."

[laughing]

I think former students and protégés of Georges, like you and me,

remain obsessed with him, first of all, because we're storytellers,

and he's a great story.

I met Georges Cardona sometime in the late '70s.

I learned through the local media

that Georges had opened the legendary Lighthouse Media Center.

So I would have been 21.

And we instantly bonded,

instantly there was chemistry there.

I thought, "My God, I've died and gone to heaven,"

because here he had these cameras and tape recorders that I'd only read about.

I mean, nobody south of the Mason-Dixon Line, probably,

had professional Super 8 equipment.

And Georges had that kind of charisma.

I mean, he had this uncanny way of making adventure happen in your life,

or at least the anticipation of adventure.

[Sandi] I asked the widow...

for a Georges Cardona tour of New Orleans.

Oh, this is where Georges lived, he lived on the left,

in that little garage apartment.

You see it?

When we first got married, we both worked for the same company.

I did renderings of mausoleums.

I was a horrible renderer of mausoleums. [laughter]

And the place where we had our shop, it was called the University Section.

[Sandi] What was the name of the shop?

[woman] Lighthouse Media Center.

And, um...

now I'm looking for Maple Street.

I think it was where this gray house is.

Maybe it was where this yellow house is. It just looks totally different now.

It was somewhere around here, I can't believe I can't remember where it was.

How could it have disappeared? Right here...

[Sandi] We spent hours looking for the film center

that Georges had set up with her money.

[woman] We lost $36,000, but...

I must have been totally... Maybe I was brainwashed. Who knows?

[woman] Georges wrote to me.

We were staying in Cambridge, England at that point and said,

"I'm going to send somebody to you. She's a genius.

She's mostly self-taught.

She needs you."

[Sandi] He thought she might encourage me to write a screenplay,

just as he had once talked her into writing a screenplay for him.

Just before I met him I had started writing my first novel,

and he asked me if I would collaborate

on a movie project with him.

He wanted to make a noir set in New Orleans,

and he was calling it Night Decoy.

What he proposed was for me to come to New Orleans...

and he would talk to me. I would record it,

and then I would go home and make a film script out of it.

There was a man and two women, uh,

a tough, hard-boiled woman named Audrey...

and a sweet Asian named Chelly.

And this man obsesses about Audrey

and is...

videotaping her without her knowing in her apartment.

There was a constant feeling of Peeping Tom -ism to Georges.

He never came on to me, personally.

I think Georges was good with women in another way.

I think he could get from them what he wanted,

and what he wanted wasn't always sex.

He got me to work on his dreams

for probably four or five years

instead of writing my own stuff.

It's always been a mystery.

Good Lord. How...

Uh, how did I become an intern?

He had this really uncanny way of helping you

feel like you could achieve your dream project,

but then when you got closer to achieving your dream project,

he felt the need to sabotage it.

So I wrote this slasher film called The Last Slumber Party.

And it was meant to be kind of the culmination,

the graduate school of the Lighthouse Media Center group.

Georges was the director of photography, but also...

the guru.

So years later, I had some discretionary income

that I could put back into my filmmaking.

So I ordered all the film negative from Motion Picture Labs in Memphis,

which is where Georges had sent the film,

and Georges had an ongoing relationship for years with these people.

Except that some of the negative was missing.

I have a feeling that Georges did something with it.

I can't prove it, but it certainly would not be inconsistent

with other things that he had done.

[Sandi] I know it's terrible to feel a twinge of joy

at someone else's misfortune,

but hearing this made me feel less alone.

The widow and I continue to search for remnants of her life with Georges.

It's a nightmare driving.

Been this way already and I can't find it.

You all might not realize how happy

this makes me that I can't even remember where it was.

[Sandi] I hoped that by driving around with her I'd get closer to him.

But all she had were dead ends.

He had this perverse need to create a mythology.

To speculate as to why Georges would go around

claiming that he was the inspiration

for the protagonist in Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies, and Videotape...

I worked on the crew of Sex, Lies, and Videotape,

with my dear, beloved best friend Larry Blake,

also part of the original Georges Cardona mafia.

And Georges felt jealous,

threatened, left out, entitled,

that two of his protégés

had this association with this film

that had become a cause célèbre.

We all worked on this film that won the Palme d'Or.

And it's entirely in keeping with Georges's personality and character,

as I understand it, that he would concoct such a story.

[birds chirping]

[Sandi] When we were trying to get hold of him over the years,

like, there would be no trace.

The only thing that's on there is this missing persons...

[woman] That was, to me, the most bizarre thing,

to see him smoking, 'cause I never saw him smoke.

And he never smelled like smoke.

- [Sandi] Yeah. - That's so weird, he smoked. [chuckles]

[Sandi] I think it's funny that she was struck by the sight of him smoking,

and not by the fact that someone went online

and put up a Missing Persons page for him.

[woman] You know, what was real and what wasn't, I have no clue.

- He did say his mother was French. - [Sandi] Was she?

- I don't know. - But you met her, was she French?

[woman] Well, I couldn't speak to her, she only spoke Spanish.

He never told me he was French. I would have remembered that.

I mean, he told me that he was born on a ship

that had departed Germany en route for Colombia,

departing Germany because his father was German.

And I just accepted that as gospel for the longest time

until one day, I was having a conversation with his niece Catalina,

and she started laughing.

I said, "Why? What's so funny?"

She says, "He told you that story too?"

He was born in a little mountain village in the hills of Colombia.

There was always a sense that he was not just self-conscious

about perceptions of his class,

but also his ethnicity.

He was always very vague about his ethnicity.

[meows]

[Stephen] The last time I actually spoke with Georges...

was sometime in the early '90s

and he had already moved to Singapore and I was still here in New Orleans.

And as was invariably the case,

Georges began talking about a dream project that he was concocting.

And he wanted me to be part of it,

and it was making this movie in Singapore.

"Come to Singapore, you'll be my right-hand man.

We'll do this feature film in Singapore."

The pattern that emerges is that Georges

would feel threatened by his protégés being successful.

And the way that he dealt with that threat was to take action

by absconding with physical manifestations of these people's dreams.

You know, in your case it was film, in my case it was film and equipment.

Other people, it was also film, soundtracks, whatever.

[Sandi] Steve and I are now forever bound,

not as fellow victims, but as fellow detectives...

and therefore, friends.

I had one last shred of Georges:

an old letter from Georges's mother with a return address in Arabi,

outside New Orleans.

It's beautiful.

The widow tried to talk us out of going there.

[woman] I can tell you Arabi is not pretty.

- [Sandi] Okay. - [laughing]

[woman] Arabi is horrible.

[Sandi] So, of course, I had to go there.

It's not raining now so it's good.

Do you need this, the matte box?

[dogs barking in distance]

[thunder rumbling in distance]

[dogs continue barking]

[heavy wind blowing, leaves rustling]

And this made me think of that scene in Blow Up,

when David Hemmings returns to the scene of the crime...

only to find nothing.

After unpeeling Georges Cardona layer by layer,

I realize there's nothing there but movies.

There were characters he wanted to emulate.

And there were characters he pretended to be.

But the one who was closest to who he really was...

was Nosferatu.

Trying to become immortal...

by feeding on young people's dreams.

Georges Cardona had his own very bizarre love, right? For Shirkers.

I thought that when he absconded

with all of the reels

that it would just be strewn outside,

and the humidity would basically eat up the film,

and that would be it.

But he loved those reels.

We all fell in love with the film in different ways,

and his was like, I don't know, man,

it was like necrophiliac. [laughs]

[Sandi] He might have loved our reels,

but he threw all the sound recordings away.

Shirkers was returned to us a mute.

[no audible sound]

[film reel thrumming]

I'm seeing everything, first time.

More than 20 years later.

There you are. God, look at you.

You know, you guys were adorable.

[stuttering] Okay, I really...

[stuttering] When I saw the footage,

I just thought that, "Gee whiz, this film should've been finished."

It would have been a rallying call that it's okay to try anything.

[Sophie] You know, Shirkers is like the ghost

in between the lines of books written on Singapore film history,

and for me, Shirkers has this very palpable absence.

And I have this voice going, "No, no, no,

Shirkers needs to be there."

[Sandi] For years, I felt like a crazy person

talking about this film that didn't exist.

But I was vindicated.

Everyone I remembered being fantastic was fantastic.

And I was as rotten as I thought I was.

There were so many surprises in this time capsule.

The fashion choices of the era.

Jasmine defiantly chewing gum after gum was officially banned.

And then, there was the landscape of a Singapore

I had let myself forget.

[birds singing]

Jasmine didn't come along on that road trip

that Georges and I took before Shirkers...

but years later, we took another one.

I was taking her back to New York.

Maybe not the same New York she once knew.

But she wasn't the same person anymore either.

[Jasmine] Why do they make it look like it's cardboard?

You Americans, so wonderful.

[Sandi] I was getting married in Paris,

Paris, Las Vegas.

Hey, here we go. There they are.

[indistinct chatter]

[Jasmine] Oh, yeah.

[Sandi] The light's not on.

- Hey? - The light's not on.

[Sandi] Look at this. I step out of my own wedding...

Is the video...?

...and instantly begin yelling at Jasmine.

You are not a camel.

It's not heavy. I'm holding it.

[Sandi] She was right.

I was an asshole.

I wanna be the Elvises!

It's so good!

[Sandi] Jasmine had just made what is still

the most adventurous movie ever created in Singapore.

Let's rock!

[Sandi] Of the three of us, Jasmine is the only one who still lives in Singapore.

And she's the noblest of us by far.

And this is to raise awareness for the screenwriters, yeah!

- [boy] Like that? - Like that.

Say, "Writers unite!"

- Writers unite! - Yeah!

[Sandi] She fights Injustice wherever she sees it.

We still grab lunch whenever we're in the same city,

and we still ambush our friend Yek Keak who never leaves his home.

Yek Keak!

You guys, come on in.

Uh, and then we'll probably cut.

Because we have to clear the studio room and reset our blocking.

Whenever you're ready. Rolling?

[Sandi] But whenever Shirkers comes up, even after all these years,

we descend into the same circle of hell.

This is so typically you that you're gonna put everybody under the magnifying glass

and put everyone in a little glass tank terrarium except yourself.

That's how you always do these things, you always...

- Like what? Like when? - All the time.

Because this is like for your amusement.

How many times can I keep telling you that it was extremely annoying

and it was extremely disappointing and it was extremely draining

and that it was the relationships that drained

and not the production itself that exhausted us?

Thank you.

This 23-year battle...

um, is a double-edged sword for me,

because...

uh, you and Jasmine and I are bonded in a way

that I don't share a bond with anyone else.

I don't have to talk to you every day.

I don't have to talk to you, you know, on a regular basis,

but there is that instant sort of very visceral and emotional connection.

You gave me this notebook when you arrived.

So I have I have not seen this for 23 years.

- This is your notebook. - This is my notebook.

So I'm analyzing and breaking down the script

for, like, symbolism and metaphor and allusions.

This notebook contains the kernel for my profession,

unbeknownst to me.

"Scene seven, interior, S's house, afternoon."

Quote: "The toys would be physical manifestations of her personality.

They must reflect, HER"... in all caps.

"Is she seeking immortality through her dreams?"

[laughs]

See, even then, I was digging, right, for subtext.

I'm gonna be chair of the department actually in the fall for three years.

You? You're gonna be chair of the department? Wow.

You should've said... So you're the chair of Film?

- Yeah. - Vassar?

It's like I'm the next senior person, but anyway...

So, yeah. So what's next?

[cat purring]

[Sandi] Making this film, I've come to realize

that Georges's ghost will never truly leave me.

And I've learned to think:

"That's okay."

[Georges] Let's wait for the other side. And see what it brings.

[Sandi] For more than 20 years,

Ben talked about the soundtrack that Georges stole from him.

[humming]

[Sandi] Finally, one day I said,

why don't you just play it for me?

[guitar playing]

[Jasmine] You have this affection towards the film because of the time in your life.

You know, we laughed about it, we cried about it,

we bitched about it.

[Sophie] It's strange because it doesn't exist as a film,

and yet it does.

Right? It exists here for me and exists here.

And so what you're doing is not bringing Shirkers back to life

but giving it an afterlife...

and back to us.

[Jasmine] It's more than a physical time capsule.

It's not just scenery and disappearing buildings,

but it's also people in those places.

[Sandi] I know I'll never get all of my friends in the same place

at the same time ever again.

Let's do the F again.

[Sandi] But here they all are...

with me.

- [laughs] - [cat meows]

Oh.

[instrumental music playing]

[no audible dialogue]

[no audible dialogue]

[music resolves]

[camera shutter clicks]

[Sandi] "Exterior, highway, afternoon.

The sound of wind."

[gun cocking]

Hey, look.

[Sandi] In all golden afternoons

there are movers,

there are shakers,

and then,

there are shirkers.

[gunfire]

[laughter]

[indie synth-pop music playing]

♪ Have you ever stopped living In a photograph? ♪

♪ Will you ever stop living In a photograph? ♪

♪ You're a selfie queen ♪

♪ But that don't mean anything at all ♪

♪ Did you get enough likes To get you through your day? ♪

♪ Do you have to post more Till you get your way? ♪

♪ Have you been like this Your entire life? ♪

♪ I think I'm gonna leave my cell phone At home today ♪

♪ And I hope you call While I'm away ♪

♪ When I get home and see I'll just let it be ♪

[Ben] Let's do the F again.

[film roll ends, click]