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| Grant Rosenmeyer and Paul Raci in The Secret Art Of Human Flight |
Filipino-American filmmaker, musician and artist HP Mendoza's The Secret Art Of Human Flight, written by Jesse Orenshein, is a quirky tale about loss and grief. When Ben Grady (Grant Rosenmeyer), who is grieving the death of his wife, comes across a self-help book by the enigmatic guru 'Mealworm' (Paul Raci), who claims to have harnessed the power to fly, he orders a copy. The book arrives with a surprise - Mealworm himself. The intrusion of the guru, and the beginning of an unusual journey, set Ben on a path to potentially heal and maybe take flight.
Mendoza's latest film is an extension of the director's previous quirky, dramatic and comedic character-driven premises. He made his directorial feature début with the 2009 comedy musical Fruit Fly, about a Filipina performance artist who visits a commune in search of her biological mother, a journey that results in surprising revelations. His 2012 sophomore feature, the horror thriller I Am A Ghost, centred on a troubled spirit who enters into a therapeutic relationship with a clairvoyant. His other films include the 2018 Christmas black comedy Bitter Melon, about a Filipino-American family's plot to kill an undesirable member of the family, and the animated musical and sci-fi hybrid Attack, Decay, Release (2019).
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| Grant Rosenmeyer in The Secret Art Of Human Flight |
In conversation with Eye For Film, Mendoza discussed what The Secret Art Of Human Flight would have been 20 years ago, tempering the quirky aspects of the story, and how he finds the way he has been represented incorrect and amusing.
Paul Risker: Why film as a means of creative expression? Was there an inspirational or defining moment for you personally?
HP Mendoza: I feel most people in this industry say, "Oh, this is what I've always wanted to do." I have never been asked this question and the truth is, my earliest memory of telling my parents I wanted to be something was when I wanted to be a magician [laughs]. I loved the feeling of watching all those Eighties magicians tell stories and surprise you. I think it's one of the reasons I always liked Tales Of The Unexpected or anything with a twist ending, or anything that messed with your perception of what you thought the narrative was.
I moved from magic to doing a lot of theatre, and when I say a lot of theatre, I was seven-years-old, so I was hardly doing Chekov, but I was doing really performative things - playing with my Transformers and dolls. When my father brought me a Super 8 camera, I would take all my Transformers and dolls and make things in stop-motion, because if you remember, you could just tap the button and do your own stop-motion. Now you have to buy a bunch of apps to do that. As time passed, I was also doing a lot of music and I thought, "I wish I could do all these things that I love to do in one thing, so I could say 'Here's the thing that I do.'" And I guess now, that's movies.
PR: Advances in technology are contradictory, in that they are not exclusively positive.
HPM: No, but that's technology for you. If you look at very old issues of Popular Mechanics, they show the advent of the washing machine. In classic sci-fish, retro-futurist-sexist marketing, they show the housewife, and they say, "Now you don't have to spend all your day washing dishes. Now you can do things that you love doing, like shopping and doing your nails." But did that really happen? The more technology improves our lives, so to speak, it gives us more reasons to be anxious.
When you think about how people talk about the democratisation of the media: "Oh, you can just upload your own movies to YouTube, and you're a movie-star." Yeah, but you're part of the total noise. How do you emerge from this sea of YouTubers? I do agree that democratising everything is amazing, but it's always going to be a little harder before it's easier.
PR: Your broader point ties into The Secret Art Of Human Flight's themes that emphasise the importance of connection and emotional expression.
HPM: Well honestly, I'm happy to hear you felt that way because one of the things I spoke about with the actors as they showed up on set was, "We're all in each other's orbits now; there's no one lone genius here." It was during the Pandemic, and we were in lockdown. Each of us had suffered our own losses through Covid, whether it be job losses, housing or loved ones, so we were all experiencing grief.
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| Lucy DeVito in The Secret Art Of Human Flight |
We talked a lot about each other's orbits and the one thing that's interesting about having to shoot a movie during Covid is you're with everyone all the time. We had a Covid bubble with Covid officers, and we tested every day. We wanted that to bleed into the film, so, every time we would rehearse a scene, we would all check each other - "Does this feel natural to what you'd actually say?" I would ask Maggie Grace, "Okay, as a mother, how does this resonate with you?" She would put a lot of thought into this and whenever I watch the film, it reflects the way we felt about each other. Maybe I'm blind, and pushback if I'm wrong, but I see a lot of warmth with everybody on set.
PR: I wouldn't push back and to point out filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, there shouldn't be that warmth, or it should be less obvious. Not all films should feel warm, but in my opinion The Secret Art Of Human Flight should.
HPM: If you had caught me 20 years ago, I probably would have made the film feel like Bergman's Persona. I would have made a chilly, damn near dialogue-free version of this script.
PR: To your point, the film will inevitably be influenced by the audience's individual life experiences, especially with it being about something as personal as loss and grief. Telling a story is, not always, but often, about creating a space for the audience to enter the film.
HPM: Absolutely. 20 years ago, when I first started making feature films in my late twenties, I was trying to be as impressive as possible. I'm a writer; I'm a director; I'm a filmmaker. They were very wordy and dialogue-driven scripts. I don't take it back, but now 20 years later, after working on this film, it was liberating to work on a script I didn't write, and be able to ask, "Okay, how much less can we say?" The less we say, the more we create a set of cyphers on screen that any audience member can step into the shoes of - instead of saying, "Here's a character. You're going to like this person. They're very different from you, but just enjoy."
Talking to various people over the past year on the festival run, there are those that say, "Oh yeah, I really feel I'm like Wendy (Maggie Grace), the neighbour." There were also people that said they didn't really relate to anybody until they met Roger (Sendhil Ramamurthy), the husband who shows up for five minutes.
The thing that really resonated with me was because I removed a lot of the things that had to do with 'wisdom' or 'life experience', I made it so that every character is still baffled by life. There are people that say the second half resonates with them, and those people are older. There are people who say that the first half resonates with them, and those people happen to be younger. I don't want to say too much, but I do feel the less you say, the more people will listen.
PR: The dominant means of communication isn't verbal, its body language, and yet cinema still emphasises dialogue over other silent and subtle modes of communication.
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| Paul Raci in The Secret Art Of Human Flight |
HPM: I'm a fan of [the 1999 film] The Talented Mr Ripley but Steven Zaillian, leave it to an old school Hollywood person to really nail cinema in episodic form. In some of those episodes, I'm just watching Andrew Scott walking, and they are damn near dialogue free. You feel his sinister intentions; you feel his regret, and it's all in how he picks up an ashtray and hides behind a newspaper. I think to myself, "Wow, this speaks a lot more than the two-and-a-half-hour version that came out in 1999."
PR: Picking up on the idiosyncrasies of the way stories can be presented, how do you think The Secret Art Of Human Flight's quirks complement its themes and ideas? Do you need to be cautious of how quirky you go because it can both stimulate a deeper connection with and alienate audiences?
HPM: Well, this is where I want to pay credit to the screenwriter, Jesse Orenshein. He had this fable, and it is a fable about grief and loss. As the script was doing the rounds, Grant Rosenmeyer would touch the script and inject a bit of his own humour into it. Grant has a good sense of the vaudevillian - the boorish humour that works when he's doing the physical humour in the film.
[…] I had this quirky script, and I had these quirky people, but how quirky did we want to be? We would pare it back and say let's not forget what we're doing here - we're literally talking about a guy who hasn't slept or eaten for three days because he's grieving the death of his wife. So, how quirky could we be?
I think everybody in the film has their brand of quirkiness, and you don't want to force it too much. Had this been 2004, the general sentiment would have been to make it feel like Napoleon Dynamite, or centre everything and make it all about production design, because quirky visuals would pull the audience in.
The truth is quirk is not just an aesthetic, it has become a genre now. You could have a whole video section that says 'quirk'. One thing we all agreed on was to have our laughs, but not forget how we want people to feel because you can be quirky about something to the point that you're being ironic. And the more ironic you become, you start to horseshoe a little bit, inadvertently, where you're saying, "Oh, I'm so ironic and detached from this thing, I don't feel these stupid feelings I claim to feel." But by the third act, you have to actually still execute the thing. So, if you're going to end up there and have to execute, then why not just do the thing? I like to think the quirk in this was organic.
PR: The Secret Art Of Human Flight is a mix of drama and comedy. It's quirky, meaningful and humorous, but it's not sentimental. It expresses a message or more subtly expresses its thematic intentions, but it's an example of the way a film can disarm its audience and encourage them to be vulnerable alongside the characters. It's a frightening world and allowing ourselves to be vulnerable is difficult. Maybe the reason we're so drawn to characters in films is because they create a safe space and encourage us to lower our guard. It's important to consider vulnerability when making and talking about films.
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| Rosa Arredondo in The Secret Art Of Human Flight |
HPM: It is very important to me, and apparently to you. But the truth is that it's important to everybody - they just don't know it. I have only ever done very sincere things, and it's hilarious that, for the past 20 years, people have painted me as the funny, raunchy queer guy, who loves being ironic and making people laugh. But if you finish all of my movies, you'll see that there's always that endearing and tear jerky moment.
A producer on the set of The Secret Art Of Human Flight actually said to me, "You're heading into some pretty vulnerable and sincere territory. How do you feel about the idea that there will be some people along for the ride and when they get to that sincerity, they're going to want to leave the room?" And I said, "Well let them; they'll be back."
The Secret Art Of Human Flight is released digitally on 23 August 2024.
