Q&A: Fergus Ong (The Red Street Diner)

Fergus Ong has come a long way from coiling cables as a TV production assistant to running his own production company, Large Door Pictures to writing and directing his first feature film. This month, we talk to Fergus about his upcoming film The Red Street Diner (http://www.redstreetdiner.blogspot.com).

How did you get into filmmaking?
Jean-luc Godard - the seminal French New Wave auteur - is responsible for this. I saw his film A bout de souffle in uni, and within a fortnight, I traded in law for cinema studies and creative writing. When I graduated, I met Albert Hue, a brilliant director of photography and a comrade in film. I did some work with him before gradually meeting more and more people who shared the same dream of making a movie.

Tell us about The Red Street Diner, which is your first feature film.
It's about four lonely people looking for love and attention in a nocturnal city. A failed TV chef looking for a dinner guest, a lonely video store clerk looking for an audience, a noir hero and his former lovers, and a femme fatale who is an old man's trophy lover. The characters are loosely connected and they mostly live in their respective worlds. In some ways, it's like four small films sewn together in a patchwork.

Why of all things is it a noir musical?
Because there are few things sexier than a black and white film with Technicolor song numbers! I'm actually very intrigued by putting unconnected genres into the same film space and letting them relate to one another. It was thrilling to film in this way because some of our sets were very colour-conscious, musical-focused, and then others were a lot more hardboiled, and photography driven.

Who’s in the main cast of the movie? Did they really have to sing?
Our four leads were Justin Chan, Belinda Chee, Ash Nair and Ong Ker-Shing and they were all fairly new to the experience, which was really appropriate because it was like all of us holding hands and taking the first step into a new adventure. And yeah, they sang all their parts themselves. I realised that I didn't need brilliant singing (though I still got some pretty awesome singing).

Do you think Malaysian audiences are ready for this?
Of course, but you can’t please everyone. The film isn't set in Malaysia (or anywhere for that matter) but I think that somewhere between our cheesy Chinese karaoke song, our Hindi number, and characters weaving in and out of English, Mandarin and Cantonese, there's going to be quite a chunk for Malaysian audiences to identify with.

Did anything interesting happen while you guys were filming?
We shot some scenes in my hometown in Muar, and we had a road in town closed from midnight onwards. It felt like the whole town had come out to see what we were doing, which made us feel really professional. On other nights, though, we were tapping electricity from an abandoned building project somewhere here in KL, hauling cables across the streets just to get enough light into an exterior night shot. And that made us feel really guerilla!

Text Didi Ramlan Photo Jack Lim