Jason Godfrey Says He’s Not Smart Enough To Venture Into F&B, So He Started A Production Company Instead

Write what you know, as the familiar saying goes. And that was precisely what Jason Godfrey did.

In 2018, the Filipino-Canadian actor-TV presenter — best known for his roles in several Mediacorp productions such as the period policier Mata Mata, the long-running soap opera Kin and the recent terrorists-on-a-train thriller The Third Rail, wrote Catwalk Fail — a satirical novel about the modelling industry, inspired by his own Derek Zoolander days.

“It didn’t do anything,” says Godfrey, 45, about the book’s reception. “Apparently no one reads books anymore.” But he isn’t discouraged. He plans to do another one.  “No timeline,” he tells 8days.sg over Zoom. “I imagine myself living in a house in rural Canada with not much to do and deciding, I’ll write a book and garden.”

Until then, Godfrey’s hands are full of TV scripts — not reading, but writing them.

His writing side-line started with some script-doctoring on 2016’s Left Behind, Fiona Xie’s 2016 comeback drama following a troubled psychiatrist, in which he also starred. He then went on to full-on ink-slinging on Mixed Signals, an adaptation of Michael Chiang’s play about Singapore’s dating hang-ups, After Love, a supernatural dramedy starring Benjamin Kheng and Roz Pho, and The Cheaters’ App, the Oon Shu An-led rom-com revolving an infidelity-predicting software.

On top of his telly-scripting commitments, Godfrey — who shares a three-year-old with his Romanian interior designer wife Sorina — also helms an op-ed column in the Malaysian newspaper The Star called ‘Big Smile No Teeth’,  which happens to be his Instagram handle.

Writing at home with a tot is no walk in the park. “He’s like five cats — and they are on top of each other,” he says, with a laugh.

But the work must go on. Godfrey’s latest, Veil, now on meWATCH, is a psychological thriller about an unhinged woman (Derek’s Cheryl Chitty Tan) who inherits a walk-up apartment building from her father (Lim Kay Tong), who may or may not be dead.

There, she finds a hidden room rigged with surveillance gear to spy on the creepy residents (played by Alan Wan and Cynthia Koh, the latter in sultry outfits that won’t disappoint her Greek fanbase ).

Instead of calling the cops, she decides to indulge in some Peeping Tomfoolery herself and stumbles upon a deep, dark secret (cue sinister music!).

Here, Godfrey shares more about Veil’s origins, life after Kin, and the prospects of being replaced by ChatGPT.

8DAYS: Veil deals with voyeurism and invasion of privacy. As Mediacorp shows go, it’s pretty twisted and naughty. It reminded me of the 1993 Sharon Stone erotic thriller Sliver. What was your inspiration for Veil?

JASON GODFREY: The idea of Veil came from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, where Jimmy Stewart’s character breaks his leg and he ends up in his apartment where he can’t do anything but spy on his neighbours with his binoculars.

I always kinda like those kinds of movies. And then there was Suburbia with Shia LaBeouf in 2007. So there's been different variations of Rear Window over the years. I just thought it was kind of interesting: What if we did it in like a more modern way, a surveillance system [to replace the binoculars].

Instead of somebody breaking their leg and deciding to spy on their neighbours, I thought, what if someone found this surveillance system? Once you have that status quo set up, then you’re like, Well, why would somebody be watching their neighbours? Th­­e obvious reason is they’re creeps and they just wanna look at their neighbours, which I don’t think is a very interesting explanation. So you wanna get away from that cos that’s the first thing you would think of, right? But what if they were using the system to help other people?

You came up with Veil and co-wrote it with director M Mahfuz. Did you write the show with yourself in mind to act in it?  

No, I don’t Matt Damon myself into the show. Sometimes, I’ll be writing something and I’m like, Oh, man, I think I could actually do that character. But when I was writing Veil, I was like, I can’t do any of these things (laughs). Which is fine, cos once I start thinking that I can do a character, it just seems that my motivation is a lot more suspect as to why you're trying to write this. I think it’s better if I’m not necessarily in it.

When Kin ended last year, did you feel this phantom sensation or feeling of being free and lost at the same time?

No, I never felt like that. After five years on it, I loved working with everybody there and I had so much fun with the cast and the crew. It was great coming to work. Sometimes as a freelancer, you don’t know everybody all the time. But five years on Kin, I knew everybody there. That was great. After five years of doing the same show, I was like, If this ends now, I’m okay. If it keeps going, that’s terrific too. If it has to end, it’s not that big of a deal. Of course, a year later I am going like, Well, the money was kind of nice. But immediately afterwards, I was happy to move on to do different things, and there were a bunch of different projects that happened last year.

Does your writing sideline complement your acting or supplement your income?

I think the potential with writing is greater than acting unless I were to somehow start acting internationally.

Is there a word you frequently use in your scripts that is uniquely Jason Godfrey?

Not that I’ve spotted. I use the word ‘just’ a lot and I tend to delete them on re-reading my work.

You’ll star in Pangdemonium’s staging of Doubt in June. Amid all the writing engagements, I take that acting still intrigues you.

Oh, acting intrigues me even more now because it’s much easier than what I’m doing right now (laughs). It’s much easier than pitching. Writing is not going to take anything away from acting. Acting is very instinctive. Even though you have to do a lot of preparation but a lot of it can be instinctive, you know? I read this story the other day about Paula Scher who designed the Citibank logo. Apparently, she walked in and just drew it on a napkin and said, This is what the logo looks like. And they were like, how’d you come up with that in a second? She replied, “It took me a few seconds to draw it, but it took me 34 years to learn how to draw it in a few seconds.”

So I feel like that’s what acting is. It’s a minute plus a lifetime. An actor can come in, I’m not saying I'm this great of an actor, read a script, deliver it, and you can say, Wow, he’s so great. And he did it in like two minutes. He did it in two minutes plus the lifetime of his experience that helped him get to the point that he needed to be.

With directing, producing and writing, you’re not going to get anything done in two minutes (laughs). You’re gonna put in a lot — a lot — of time. You pitch things, they get rejected, you know what I mean? There’s a lot more work going in for potentially less payoff, whereas acting — once you get the script — you do it, it feels good, you enjoy it and hopefully people like what you did. So from that perspective, I definitely still wanna act. I still enjoy it. In fact, I need it more now as an outlet (laughs).

You worked on Veil as a writer for hire. You just started a production company, Nightjar Films, with Lion Mums actress Vanessa Vanderstraaten. I pegged you as someone who would go into the F&B business as so many actors and radio presenters here do.

The margins are slightly better on the production house; I think the margins on F&B are like — what? —one to 6%, I guess. You gotta really sell that coffee and alcohol (laughs). I think those actors are probably smarter than me. They’ve probably decided to go into businesses that are probably a little more fun for them to run. I went into [Nightjar] just because I had the obvious writing background. So I thought, this is where I can add some value. I went into the thing that seems a little bit harder but, hopefully, it'll be just as rewarding as F&B, if not maybe more.

So it’s never crossed your mind to venture into F&B?

No. Because once again, the margins are really thin. When I think about my dream scenario: I’m some old guy like in Rocky IV where Rocky Balboa owns that Italian restaurant. He just walks around in a suit talking to patrons about how he used to beat people up. That’s how I picture myself doing it: I’d wear a suit, I'd come out to meet the guests, drink some wine and say, Welcome! Hey, you need some lasagna? Okay! And then it would all be fun and games. But that’s just the fantasy. I think the reality is you'd be going in wondering: these margins are so thin, how do I make any money (laughs)?

You recently shared on Instagram an AI-rendered version of you as an action figure. What are your thoughts on ChatGPT-written scripts? Have you tried it?

Of course, I’ve used ChatGPT to crank out scripts to see what it can do. It’s mostly very basic because ChatGPT at this point is a kind of super auto-correct. But it’s sort of scary because, with the right prompts, I’m sure future iterations of it will be able to spit out unique and interesting scripts in seconds.

Aren’t you scared it’ll steal your job?

Not yet. Just like in coding, it seems like ChatGPT might cut down on the number of people necessary to do a task but it won’t eliminate people entirely. Just yet. Right now, ChatGPT works really well as a starting point for a small team. But its work on its own isn't good enough yet. And I think it will get there but you’ll always need someone to prompt the AI and curate what it spits out.

Veil is now on meWATCH. Watch the first episode here: