5 Questions with Maegan Houang
The surrealist fairy tale, “In Full Bloom,” directed by Maegan Houang, shows the life of an older Vietnamese hoarder after a black hole opens up in her home. We asked Houang how the idea started, her guiding principles visually, and the biggest challenge of production…
1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?
I grew up in East Lansing, MI. My father is an applied statistician and my mother does computer science. I primarily focused on math and science and it never once occurred to me until I got to college that I could study film, let alone be a filmmaker. I had always loved watching movies and every weekend my father and I would rent five films with the five for five deal from our local video store (RIP) Video-to-go. There wasn’t much to do in Michigan and watching movies at home or going to the theater was one of our more interesting family activities.
I went to Wesleyan University with the intention of studying physics and took an intro film class for fun. Wesleyan focuses on treating films as an art form and breaking them formally to figure out how they work. I still remember Professor Dombrowski’s lecture on the use of sound in The Marriage of Maria Braun and feeling like I’d never seen anything like it before. I’d never thought about film that way before. As I continued to fall in love with film analysis, I started to become more and more interested in making my own films and testing what I learned breaking movies down into actual practice. I always assumed I would become an academic, like my father and my friends’ parents, so at first it began as an experiment to become a better film historian. I still approach everything with an academic bent. Whenever I conceive of a project, I like to identify which skill sets I haven’t used before and how the project can teach me something new to make me a more well-rounded director. With this project, I really wanted to experiment with extensive practical effects and VFX because I’d never really done either of those things in my prior shorts and music videos.
2) For this project, what was the first element that came to you, and how did you go about building up from there?
As I’ve mentioned in other interviews, the first image I thought of was a woman walking through a field of flowers and I worked backwards from there. I love the film The Hole by Tsai-Ming Liang as well as the way film can play with our sense of realism so I think at some point I wondered -- what if the hole in The Hole didn’t lead to another apartment but to some place else, somewhere completely unknown? My goal in making any project is to try to replicate a personal emotional experience and do my best to make the audience feel something. A lot of this project was based on my own experiences with loss and observing not only how I, but also other people reacted to it. There’s something incredibly consuming about losing someone you care about and I tried to create a story that encapsulated that.
3) Your images are very beautiful - what were some of your guiding principles visually? How did you prepare (storyboards, etc), and what was the hardest thing to pull off effects-wise?
Even though Cecile is a hoarder, I never wanted her home to feel like “hoarders” but to have a surrealistic, fairytale like quality in the production design. I wrote in the script: “Gloria hoards, but her home isn’t a mess. It’s an intricately arranged piece of art, designed to create a barrier between herself and the outside world.” By making her home a bit more fantastical in the design, I believed it would better prepare the audience to accept the worms and the hole despite neither having any real basis in reality. In a lot of ways, the production design was meant to set the tone for the film.
I can be quite obsessive when it comes to composition and I think I spent at least ten minutes perfectly positioning the orange chair that covers the hole before she finds it. I tend to like dramatic, moody lighting that helps express character mood and I try my best to always consider the important story information that a composition offers to the audience. I still feel like I have so much to learn about telling an emotionally effective story so I mostly try to focus on the characters’ internal states and communicating information to the audience. In my mind, I have more work to do in learning how to also consistently and coherently incorporate theme into the compositions and shot choices.
This is the first project where I have used storyboards and I did them in order to better communicate the effects with the crew. Joy Sun, who drew the storyboards, and I only did them for the major effects heavy sequences due to cost constraints. I’m more of a verbal person so I created a detailed shot list with as much description as possible and then she drew the images and sent them back to me for notes.
4) What was the biggest overall challenge with this film, in terms of character, or story, or theme. Anything you wanted to say that maybe you were having a hard time saying, or any last minute changes to the script or in the editing process that significantly altered the final film?
The biggest challenge with the film was having a story with elaborate practical effects, stop motion animation and VFX on a low budget. Every discussion centered on how we could achieve the aesthetic we wanted with the budget we had. For a long time, I thought we would do the hole effects using miniatures, but the week before it became clear that was untenable and we had to quickly change gears to doing on set practical effects mostly involving fish wire pulls and human bodies moving furniture around. To achieve the hole effect, we build 6’ tall platforms with different sized holes and then would shoot plates to composite the hole back into the ground. It was incredibly stressful figuring out how to do it only five days before we started shooting, but it was also a relief that we knew it would work.
The film is relatively close to the script except for a few changes:
The original opening scene was Cecile picking up the package through the door. After getting notes from a few friends, the editor and I realized we needed to better establish her longing for the husband at the beginning. Therefore we doubled the incense burning scene to play as the opening before the titles.
In the original script, I had Cecile falling through the void holding the flower and walking through a field of flowers at the end of the film. We cut both scenes in large part because it felt odd to leave the house for the first time after spending the entirety of the film within it. The flower field we shot in also didn’t end up feeling beautiful enough. We put the drawn flower at the end and the recurring song to abstractly express the same idea -- that she ends up where she wants to be.
5) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
I recently saw The Souvenir which I loved for its incredible emotional resonance and restraint. It’s such a beautiful, thoughtful film. One of the best I’ve seen this year. I also recently rewatched Too Many Ways to be No. 1 (1997) directed by Wai Ka Fai, which I love for dramatic absurdity of the story. Even though the filmmaking style is very run and gun, the storytelling is so tight and nuanced. I highly recommend that film.
Bonus Question) What’s next for you?
I’m currently working on securing financing for another short film and working on getting a feature film together. I’m also still pitching on music videos and looking for staffing opportunities.
Contact Info:
Twitter/IG: @houangm