By Ian P.E.
(Johnny Wu on set)
Independent filmmaking is a tough business. The deck is always stacked against you…limited budgets, lack of star power, few options for distribution and there’s always somebody else out there with a better connection and a more commercially viable film on
their hands.
Despite the odds against success, local film director Johnny Wu has fared pretty well with his past efforts, and began carving out a niche for himself with his previous film, The Rapture, which obtained video distribution in Japan and Thailand as well as many showings at film festivals across the country.
During our conversation, Mr. Wu stressed the idea of challenging himself with every new film, he seems to really enjoy pushing his limits and learning on the fly…and that’s really the only way a director can make progress. It’s good that he’s up to the challenge, because after all – making a film is truly one of the hardest occupations out there. Thousands of things can go wrong in a single shoot (and hundreds usually do)…it takes passion, drive and patience to walk the tightrope between chaos and brilliance in order to see a film to completion…and a little old fashioned work ethic also helps (The Rapture was shot in 11 days using 2 crews – an insanely short period of time for a feature film).
With his cohorts at MDI films, Johnny’s been able to mix a healthy dose of live action effects (kung-fu wire work, bloody zombie gore) and post-production computer effects to create some very intricate visual displays considering the size of his budgets. Mix in a healthy dose of parody and you have a Johnny Wu film – entertaining, fun…and also a bit of a curiosity due to his stylistic use of visuals and editing.
I had the chance to sit down with Johnny at his house on the West Side to talk about his latest film, Jean Claude the Gumming Zombie (showing at this year’s Ingenuity Fest)…he’s a busy man – one of the founding members of Cleveland’s Indieclub, a local network of independent filmmakers who meet up every month to show their films, get feedback, listen to guest speakers and chat over drinks…and he’s also the president of the Organization of Chinese Americans of Greater Cleveland.
Zombies – are there any reasons why you chose that genre?
My friends Jim and Carl were over at my place drinking lychee wine, which is a Chinese wine. We were getting drunk and they brought up the idea of – what happens to a zombie without any teeth? So that’s when the whole idea came about and I told them “if you write a script and I like it – then I’ll shoot it”.
Originally, the script was almost 60 minutes long. We felt like it was either too long, or not long enough…you either have to go for a full feature length film or for a short. In the end we opted to go for the short film – it’s much easier.
Cool…and it’s kind of a zombie satire right?
It is a Zombie satire. It’s a comedy that pokes fun at lots of things we already know about…mostly making fun of the former administration.
Hell yeah, I caught that – and also the all American family with kitschy, close-minded views…
Yeah, mostly it’s just about the 1950’s styled family who actually lives in our current times, but is somehow still stuck in the past. It’s a bit similar to Fido, which is another zombie comedy. When we were finalizing the script, we read that it was coming out, so we ran out and watched it, and luckily it wasn’t really the same.
(Tom Luhtala – Pink Eye’s favorite Gore Artist – checks out his life cast.)
Oh, that’s tough when someone beats you to an original idea…It’s no longer original, but it actually is. When did you finish it up?
It took two years to finish. We decided to shoot during the weekends, when everyone would be available. We ran into some troubles and wound up having to ADR everything [replacing the voices in post-production].
Yeah, I could tell by the quality of the voices. But you did a great job syncing it up.
It’s tough, but we managed to do it. We had a lot of video issues, where syncing became a problem, but we took advantage of the issues we had and turned them into something much more interesting. It was shot on both SD and HD cameras, which was a problem at first, until we blended them within a frame, and decided to do it consistently throughout the film…and used a lot of color correcting to makes things even more interesting.
Yeah, creative problem solving, that’s probably one of the most important qualities in a film director…any other tips on directing films?
We spend a lot of time preparing the actors for their roles so that they can really get into character, in this case, lots of background stories for them to work with. For Jean Claude the Gumming Zombie we wanted theatre actors, because we wanted it to look like a staged performance…more exaggerated, most stage actors use large exaggerated motions so as to be able to project to the audience. The family is very 1950’s, so we wanted this exaggeration…and Jean Claude is a Frenchman, so he was already over the top!
(Good clean family fun.)
Did you shoot primarily in a studio environment?
We shot mostly in Creative House Studios, in downtown Cleveland, where we shot all the green-screen and also created the dining room, kitchen and living room sets there as well. A couple other scenes were shot on location at a house and in a basement as well.
How about filmmaking in Cleveland…we hear a lot about the need for tax incentives in order to bring in production companies, does that also affect local filmmakers?
It depends on how you look at it. Obviously, having a tax incentive will help bring other films to Cleveland and create more opportunities for people here. However, independent filmmakers that are already established here don’t really have to worry about the tax incentive, because they’ll still do what they do. In the long term, though – it should help create some opportunity for filmmakers like myself as well…not necessarily in the short-term, but filmmakers here need to keep making noise, the movie making noise and move forward regardless.
