American director ventures into Philippine cinema
DIRECTOR Phil Giordano’s “Lawa” is his third full length film for Vivamax. He himself writes his own screenplays.
“I write them in English and then I get a writer who translates it for me in Filipino,” he says. “On the set, we have an acting coach who also helps me explain to the actors what exactly I want for them to do and accomplish in each scene that we shoot. It works quite well for all of us.”
He says he is very pleased with the Pinoy actors he worked with in “Lawa”.
“They are all good, no one gave a bad performance, so I have no complaints. Everyone brought their A-game into the movie and did a really good job, specially Sean, Josef and Cara as the leads.”
He says Sean as the sociopathic lead is consistently good. “He is lonely, desensitized, he spies on the lovers and he uploads what he records and sells them online, infringing on other people’s privacy. But he changes over the course of the film because he falls in love with someone.”
He says he has difficulty finding the right location for “Lawa”.
“I went to 15 different locations but I wasn’t happy. Everywhere we went there were other structures on the site. I want a place that looks untouched. I felt it has to be pristine and isolated. And we found it in a beautiful place in San Marcelino, Zambales. We shot the movie there lock in for one week.”
All his films are sexy. “But I would also like to do wholesome films for Viva Prime and also for Netflix and Amazon, and even for theatrical release. I have a bittersweet romance and a horror film in the works. For the horror film, I’d like to work with Cristine Reyes. I think she’d be very good in it.”
We tell him we find his past two films very dark, “Pusoy” and “Pabuya”, with the lead characters all dying. “Well, this one is even darker,” he says. “But there’s a redeeming quality into it which we cannot divulge here. In the end, it becomes a revenge story. You have to see the movie in full to find out what fully transpired in it.”
