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| The Moon, The Sky And You Photo: Fantasia International Film Festival |
A brief but intense cinematic experience, The Moon, The Sky And You is a small independent film which made a big splash at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival. Following a shy boy and a dangerous girl who meet during the course of a bloody school feud, it explores cruelty and vulnerability and the effort to create something magical in life no matter what one has to work with. It was made by Lin Hei-yau, who has worked magic himself with his modest budget. He and I met towards the end of the festival, when he bravely decided to do interviews without the aid of a translator – much more of a challenge than making casual conversation in a foreign language. We discussed the development of the project, its technical achievements, and the mysterious fish at the centre of it all.
“This is my graduation project,” he explains. “Usually student films are 15 to 40 minutes, and this is an hour long, because I wanted to tell a complete story from the beginning, when this project started, but I didn't have enough resources and budget to complete it. So I just cut out all the explanation of the background of the characters and why is there a hitman organisation, or just left it to the imagination of the audience. And so it's like this.
“I usually wrote the script with something from a stock music website, or Spotify or YouTube – something that when I listened to it, I was somehow trying to fit it into the story. The dancing part of the film actually is not related to the story. It’s the expression of the characters’ own feelings, and there's many other ways to do that. But it's actually about me. I actually love dancing, but I’m too embarrassed to dance, so I never do that. And so the solution is that I make a film for the characters and just let them dance for me.”
We talk about the attraction between the two central characters, and I tell him that I find this interesting because they seem to have different ways of feeling alive. One of them says that she feels alive when she's violent, whilst for the other, it seems to be his vulnerability that makes him feel alive.
“For myself, the part of this film about being alive is the carousel part,” he says. “There’s a word in Cantonese that's very similar – it's like being alive and living. I think most of the people now are just living. They eat food and go to work and go about living, but feeling alive is something that happens when you realise that you are really a part of this world, a connection between you and your life or something. For the characters, I think the connection between them is that they have both been hurt by something else. I think everybody gets hurt, but the most interesting part is, what do we do? How do we deal with it afterwards? For the characters, their situation is pretty bad, so they go ‘Fuck it. I will build my own carousel.’ I think that's the attitude for them.”
That’s one of many very beautiful scenes. Did he write the scenes in advance and then go looking for the necessary props and locations, or was it the props or locations with inspired the scenes?
“The place where we shot the carousel and the dancing part is actually an abandoned elderly home. When we went scouting, because we’ve got gunfire in there and it was during the pandemic – this film was shot after the pandemic, but we planned to shoot it during the pandemic – we needed someplace far away from the city. So that's it. Do you remember that there is a little toy carousel in the beach? Actually, there's the one that I plan to shoot for the beginning. And on the shooting day for the carousel, my art director came to me and had a cigarette and said, ‘I’ve got a surprise for you.’ And he wouldn't tell me what it was, so I just saw the carousel set for the first time that day.”
We discuss other aspects of the film’s iconography.
“I know there's many films about schoolgirls with guns in Japan, and a classic culture of it, but I didn't mean to become one of them. My reference is actually Oldboy. But it's different from this one. After the first shot I made, I knew that the film was going far away from what I wanted it to be, when I was writing the script. But it's very interesting that this story is more than what I can do, and I think it's because of the atmosphere and the relationship between the characters.
“I always thinks that the biggest difficulty for human beings is life and death. We start out a newborn baby and after we are born, how we go along with the world, what happens if we die, or the fear of being dead, or the sadness when some of your friends pass away...I thought killing and dying would be the best way to explore these feelings, and also might be selling points for the film.”
Where did the fish come from?
“I wrote six drafts of the film, and the goldfish came into the sixth draft, two weeks before the shoot. Because I always felt like something was missing. One day I was having dinner with my family and I just thought of it. The goldfish is very personal to me because it's very weak, and In the market the price of fish is actually pretty cheap, because there are many of them, and I think it's very sad.
“All the voiceover is actually the goldfish because is like the outsider, watching all the things. He has his own decisions and opinions. He knows all the things, but he can’t do anything, just see. So it's like for me, it's my own character in the film, Mr. Fish.”
The film features some beautiful lighting, and sometimes slips into black and white.
“I think that lets the audience focus more on character, action and feeling better than where they are. And sometimes the black and white helps to concentrate the emotion.”
Although he was working with a team comprised mostly of students, he had the benefit of a professional cinematographer, Wun Chung Sze-to.
“He’s working in the industry, and he comes to help us for no cost. It's a very funny story, because we had a total schedule of eight days to shoot. I was going with very easy hours, because the people are just coming to me and I didn’t want to be too harsh on them. I just want to have everybody be relaxed and chill. And actually the gaffer, after the first day of shooting, he had a little shock to me, and he schooled me really, really hard. Because he said, ‘I'm not here for the pay. I'm here for creativity. I'm here for creation. I want to do the thing that I think is beautiful.’ I'm very thankful to him.”
There are also some bold musical choices. Was that planned in advance?
“It comes when I'm editing,” he says. “Actually, all the music in the film is stock music. I went online and I did the research for half a year before shooting this film. I would browse the website every day and I would save all the songs that I found interesting. Before the shooting, I thought that the music should be something like a Tarantino film, and then I learned, when doing the editing, that maybe classical music should be there.”
He’s very much aware of how lucky he was in finding his two leads.
“It was like fate to us to meet, because I barely know them. I hadn't met them before in person. The first time I meet the actress was during the preparation, not the casting. I just phoned her and we talked some about the film and we were like, ‘Let's do it,’ but I never met her in person, so it's very surprising. Actually, I didn't do a lot of directing the actors. Every day on the set, I would just go to them and ask them ‘Is everything alright?’ And they would say ‘It’s fine, it's cool.’ And we would go. To set the atmosphere sometimes, I would play some music, and we could synchronise our feelings together.”
It was a big surprise to be selected for Fantasia, he says. “We are very glad of it. And after I attended the festival, I found this is one of the best places to watch and also show our film.”
Asked what he intends to do in the future, he smiles and says “It’s very simple: keep making films.”
