Q&A with Dean Colin Marcial
With a hyper-stylized, frenetic energy, “Manila Death Squad” follows an ambitious journalist as she challenges the leader of a violent vigilante group. We asked director Dean Colin Marcial how the project began, the sensory overload style, and about representing violent figures in complicated ways…
1) To start, can you briefly talk about how you got interested in movies? And when did you begin your filmmaking pursuits?
Movies bridged the country I was born into with the country I adopted. I moved to the states in 1997, the year Star Wars was re-released in theaters, and it was as big of a phenomenon in Manila as it was in New York, and that's how I made fast friends despite the language and culture barrier. I raided Blockbuster every week with my sister and that was a big part of our assimilation.
I actually wanted to be in movies before I got into making them. I took acting classes when I was a teenager then totally bombed an audition for The Squid and the Whale (they were casting kids before they cast the adults) and I was totally oblivious to the fact that Asian people are generally invisible in western media. I really liked operating the camera and writing monologues better than I liked performing, and after that I cut deals with my English teachers to adapt what we were reading into shorts instead of doing book reports and I never looked back.
2) How about the origins of this project? What compelled you to want to create this film?
I used to own a production company in Brooklyn and after my partners & I moved on to our own directorial efforts, I bought a ticket to Manila because I knew I wanted to make movies there. I was kicking around a pilot for a TV show I was writing based on some stories my grandpa told me when I first visited him in the Philippines as an adult. The one stuck with me the most was about the death squads that ruled Davao, where he lived. So my co-writer Kenny and I zeroed in on that and wrote a "what-if" scenario set in the capital. This was in 2015, and we shot the movie in January 2016, a few months before the elections. The mayor of Davao, Rodrigo Duterte, ran for President as the underdog and won. The drug war started on a national level as we were editing the film and the dialogue spookily resembled all the rhetoric of the Duterte campaign. It was like suddenly reality caught up to this 15-minutes-into-the-future-set short.
But when I was making the movie, I was trying to escape my own techniques-- long takes, wide shots, very little dialogue was present in my last few shorts, and this was going to do all the opposite: lots of close-ups, crazy characters, Hanna-Barbera sound effects, and there's hundreds of cuts. Being able to experiment in the shooting and editing with the actors was very freeing, and I learned a lot from driving into what was uncharted territory for me.
3) Yeah, the heavily stylization of something that was based in reality was an interesting decision. Were you concerned with creating something that felt very entertaining and colorful that depicted violent figures? How would you respond to someone who felt this was glorifying violence or making light of a real situation?
The movie is about glorifying violence and the discourse around it. We were pretty conscious about not depicting the physically violent act itself, but showing everything else-- the sinister kind of violence that excuses, institutionalizes, and enforces dehumanization. I would argue that the film takes the killing very seriously-- I'm more concerned with how we romanticize these vigilantes. The bad guys can be charismatic and colorful and entertaining, and that's terrifying.
4) It feels like a mix between a movie, a video game, and a slot machine. What were some of your primary influences, in any format?
I try to make every short film their own thing, singular and standalone, and for Death Squad the most obvious western influences are Quentin Tarantino's neo-western plotting and Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim editing & VFX. But there's also a lot of Filipino cinema in there-- Lino Brocka's Oropronobis was a big influence on the look and mood, and watching Mike DeLeon's Batch '81 impacted the treatment and tone.
I also spent a lot of time editing commercials for faceless brands and I wanted to bring a lot of that flashy, maximalist cutting to the movie. I thought of this movie as a theatrical Facebook video-- pop-y eye candy with strobey ADHD visuals and sounds designed to suck you in and make you watch until the end-- some kind of Content Antichrist mixed with underground comic book aesthetics and a Hanna-Barbera soundboard. Props to Brian McOmber & Arjun Sheth for taking that concept and running with it sound.
5) What else are you working on at the moment?
I'm developing a TV series for Topic based on The Midnight Service with Brett Potter, my co-creator. I'm also finishing up a new short with a lot of the same folks in this one with Cinematografica in the based on a feature I'm working on. It's a ghost story about love & eco-terrorism and it's going to look and feel way different from this one.
Contact Info:
www.dcmarcial.com
Email: dcmarcial@gmail.com
IG: @dcmarcial
Twitter: @deanospameano