From Yen Tan, Ciao’s co-writer and director:
Director’s NotesTHE BEGINNING
On May 2003, I received an e-mail from Alessandro Calza, a web designer in Genova, Italy. He wanted to tell me how much he had enjoyed my first feature film,
Happy Birthday. This sparked off a series of long, platonic correspondences that continues to this day. It all seemed rather
84 Charing Cross Road; the Helene Hanff true-life novel that was then adapted into a film starring Anne Bancroft as the book-loving writer in New York City whose letters with a bookseller in London, played by Anthony Hopkins, spanned over two decades. Like Ms. Hanff and Frank Doel (albeit cruder and gayer), the e-mails between Alessandro and I seemed endless; conversations that went on and on about nothing and everything. We were like two friends chatting nonstop from dusk till dawn, occasionally sharing a favorite song via an MP3 attachment.
It wasn’t long before the idea struck me: a simple story about two people who eventually meet after corresponding with each other over a period of time. There’s an Italian (Andrea) and an American (Mark). They write each other. They meet. They have witty conversations over candlelight dinners. A romantic comedy ensures? Something about this setup bugged me; it was too superficial, too lighthearted, too gag-inducing for my taste. But what if something happened to the American prior to their meeting? Like he died in a tragic car accident? Yes! Exit Mark, enter Jeff. Jeff was good friends with Mark and has no idea that Andrea, the foreigner, is coming to visit. We now have intrigue in the premise.
I bounded the initial draft off Alessandro. After all, I based Andrea on him and I wanted to avoid the Olivier Martinez cliché: The American’s eroticized idea of the passionate European with an accent who can kiss and fuck like there’s no tomorrow. Which, in retrospect, was exactly the kind of Italian I presented in the first draft. As I got to know Alessandro better on a more personal level and spoke to him on the phone several times, I gradually refined the character, which consequently made me define the gist of the story even more. I came to realize that the film is about grief. It’s about the birth of a relationship upon the death of another.
Two years and ten drafts later,
Ciao has been shaped into an emotionally astute screenplay about the incidental friendship between two strangers living in two different parts of the world. Their connection is linked by the unexpected loss of a mutual friend. One has been with him for many years; the other has never even met him, but may have gotten to know him on a more intimate level through the e-mails exchanged. How would these two people behave when they meet? What would they say to each other? In which ways do they mourn?
THE END
I’ve been meaning to keep a daily journal through production but alas, physical and mental exhaustion have prevented me from partaking in the ritual. There was a tad of laziness involved also, but hey, a man can only work so hard.
Returning to the day job has been difficult and surreal. Difficult because life doesn’t feel the same anymore. Surreal because everything that happened before seemed like a distant dream.
We wrapped on a Friday morning, shooting the pivotal love scene between Jeff and Andrea that turned out marvelously. I won’t go into details about what took place but I was quite enamored and entranced by what I witnessed. The moment I recall vividly occurred right after we rolled the first take and before I yelled "action!" I had requested that we play a two-minute excerpt from Aphex Twin’s
Nanou 2, with the idea of setting a tone for the actors. Adam had his eyes closed; Alessandro was watching him. At one point, Alessandro reached his hand over to fix a crease on Adam’s tank top. It was an unexpectedly maternal gesture that accentuated what followed. I was profoundly moved.
Over the weekend, I went back to unit 7, he condo we rented out to shoot a majority of the film in, for some cleaning and tidying before we turned the keys back. Alessandro assisted me later to take out bag loads of trash that accumulated over the past three weeks. We sat in the living room after and talked. Everything we said boiled down to “this is sad.” It
was sad. Production was over. People have gone back home. And all there was left is emptiness.
One of the unexpected stylistic elements that I discovered in the course of filming was my fascination with the negative space. It was very
Ozuesque: a sense of not wanting to leave the environment we were in. I did this in numerous scenes; requesting the actors delay their action in entering the frame at the beginning of the shot or not cutting the end of it until the actors have cleared the frame for several seconds after. None of this really caught up with me emotionally until I returned to unit 7 again. That was when it all clicked. The theme of the film became crystal clear: it was about our yearning to stay. To remain.
To never part.As much as I thought I was gonna collapse in the strenuous midst of production, I didn’t really want this whole experience to end. Something about the idea of moving on really disturbs me now. One morning in week two, I woke up with a pillow held tightly in my arms. I believed I cried in my sleep the night before. I still don’t know what I was holding onto.