Dummy Babies, House Hunting, Stunt Doubles: Confinement Director Kelvin Tong Answers Our Silly Questions

Kelvin Tong resisted making a sequel to his 2005 hit film The Maid for a long time.

The horror tale follows a fresh-off-the-plane Filipino domestic worker (Alessandra de Rossi) who has a close encounter with the spooky kind after she starts working for a couple (Chen Shucheng and Hong Huifang) who runs a Teochew opera troupe on the first day of the Hungry Ghost Month.

Every now and then Tong would have folks — mainly “people in the industry” — asking him if he plans to make a sequel. While there seemed to be a demand for a follow-up, the lawyer-turned-journalist-turned-filmmaker, 51, wasn’t as enthusiastic.

“The box-office was great, and a lot of people wanted to watch it,” Tong tells 8days.sg over Zoom. “But I myself am a bit leery of doing a sequel simply because I felt I ended that story where it needed to end.” (For a while, there were even talks of a spin-off set in New Zealand.)

“It was very difficult for me to think of a way to drag out the storyline some more and revisit it,” he adds.

The premise of a domestic helper (“a complete stranger”) suddenly being inserted into the dynamics of a family continues to intrigue Tong: “The idea just stuck in my head, not so much a sequel but a thematic sequel.”

But he had to wait for a few years before he figured out a way to crack the code.

“I had my first girl — now eight — in Hong Kong, then we employed a Hong Kong confinement nanny,” Tong recalls. “Then I came back to Singapore and we had our second child — now four — and then we employed a confinement nanny from Ipoh.

"The moment I saw the second confinement nanny, I knew I had the subject matter for my next horror film. [Postpartum] confinement is such a big fertile ground for a psychological horror film.”

The result is Confinement, which opened in cinemas last week.

Rebecca Lim stars as a single mother who moves into a creepy house with her newborn while Cynthia Koh plays the even creepier confinement nanny hired to look after them.

Shortly after, weird things start to happen around the rookie parent — looming long-haired figures, barking dogs, and disembodied whispers. What's going on? Is everything happening for real or just in her head?

Here, we asked Tong about how he found the house — the film’s unsung third character — in Malaysia, working with babies, and memories of the Covid-19 pandemic. Warning: the interview contains some minor spoilers.

8 DAYS: I’m not going to bore you with questions about Rebecca Lim and Cynthia Koh. Let’s talk about the house where you shot Confinement instead. What about it that screams, “I need to shoot in that house!”

KELVIN TONG: Actually, the short answer to your very interesting question is surprisingly benign. Right after I finished writing the first draft of Confinement, I knew I needed to find a very suitable house. At one point, I was planning to shoot the film in Singapore. In our initial research, I got my location manager to go back to some of the houses I had shot before in Singapore — including, the one I used in The Faith of Anna Waters — just to get an indication of the prices. But, if you recall, about two years ago, the rental rates in Singapore started climbing like crazy and there was just a shortage of rental houses. The answer came back, I can’t tell you the exact price, but it had risen fourfold.

And when I heard how much we had to pay per month, it didn’t make financial sense at all. We needed the house for six months. We had to move in, dress it up, and return it in its original state to its owner. I just did what any filmmaker in my position would’ve done: I told my location manager to shift our search to Kuala Lumpur. And within a week, they found me a range of houses to choose from. But this house [that I ended up shooting in] I really felt was very Southeast Asia. You’ll find this weird combination that’s kind of Chinese-sy but with Western architectural elements as well. It’s very unique to our region. I fell in love with the house straight away.

We have to thank the weak Malaysian ringgit for that!

Part of the decision is that, yes. At the same time, I’d shot this quite a personal arthouse film A Year of No Significance, starring Peter Yu. The film sort of languished during the pandemic, but it will premiere at the Singapore International Film Festival this year. That film was shot in Batu Pahat and the cast and crew were out in the boondocks for a while together. I found that, creatively, to be very fruitful. So apart from the ringgit, when I found the Confinement house [in Malaysia], I knew that it was right to take Rebecca and Cynthia out here. Let’s really get cabin fever in this house, which is going to be the third character in the film. Let’s have a good time with it, and we did.

There’s also another unsung character — the baby! What does a baby audition entail?

Actually, when we did the auditions, the camera was on the baby, but I was looking at the parents — we were auditioning the parents. What’s important is, first of all, the baby must look right for the part. But beyond that, most babies look like babies, right? What’s important is knowing their feeding and sleeping habits. When you have 60 crew members waiting to shoot a scene, you want the baby to be as predictable as possible. It’s okay for the baby to take four-hour naps, but as long as we know beforehand that he’ll be napping, we’ll be shooting other stuff that doesn’t involve him. And [when the baby is about to wake up], we are on standby and the moment he wakes up, we do what is required.

I said I was auditioning the parents because, especially when you’re shooting a horror or psychological thriller, there aren’t just happy scenes with the baby just smiling in a cot. There’s thunder and rain and if you've seen Confinement, a dog barking right next to the crib — and it’s a live baby there! You really want to make sure that the parents mean what they say, “It’ll be a great experience for the baby to be in your film” and not start freaking out while we’re shooting the scene and jump in front of the camera and say, “No, no, no, no, this is too much”.

There was one night when the baby was sort of acting up. By right, according to his timetable, he was supposed to be quite content and awake, but he just cried and cried. We wanted to give the baby a break but the mum said, “Just let me pat him again”. And we kept doing that for more than two hours. For a while, as the baby was quieting down, he started fussing again. I could see the mother standing beside the camera and she was crying. Weirdly, that was actually one of the hardest moments I’ve had as a filmmaker. I knew the mum wanted to help the production go smoothly as much as possible, but she also knew it was coming at a cost to her child. But bless her soul, she was so cooperative. But it was one of those moments that I felt bad.

Did you use dummy babies?

We used them sparingly. There’s one shot towards the end where Rebecca sees something coming down the stairs and she backs away and trips. We used a dummy because there was no way we would risk a real baby. Have you carried babies before? Newborn babies are very, very soft. Even their skulls. Even though the baby’s parents were very gung-ho and watching by the side, I said, no, no, no. I didn’t want to take that risk. So that shot, and maybe a few other scenes we used a dummy. But there was one shot of Rebecca where she was fleeing from the house, running barefoot, and she was carrying a real baby.

The funny thing is, during pre-production, we actually fought for a lot of things to be shot with the dummy baby because why make your life so difficult, right? Like when it is a very wide shot, let’s just use the dummy. But somehow by day 14 or 15 of the shoot, Rebecca had gotten really well with the baby, as did Cynthia. The parents were very much involved in the film that it almost felt like they were acting in the film as well.

You mentioned earlier about the scene involving the dog and the baby…

Like they say, the two things you don’t want to shoot in a film are children and animals. I had one scene with both of them! My God. It took a lot of patience. In that scene, Rebecca was supposed to be very freaked out, to the point that she had tears in her eyes. She had to hold that for three to four hours while we were wrangling the dog to be in the correct position, and the baby had to be crying. Yeah, three to four hours of that. Those scenes were excruciatingly difficult to shoot.

Rebecca plays an artist in the movie. There are a few close-up scenes of her painting. Is that really her hand or a stunt painter’s?

No, it was Rebecca’s. As I said, for this film, we went out to KL for a good couple of months. We found a prominent artist and his technique is very interesting. He paints on acrylic, peels off the paint, then recuts it into pieces and re-sticks them. He conducted a couple of workshops for Rebecca. There’s nothing I hate more than an actor who’s supposed to play a singer but can’t sing, or an actor who’s supposed to play a dancer but can’t dance. I think it’s something good for the actors because they would take away from this production with one more trick to their bag of tricks.

You made a short horror, Trapped, for Income insurance in May. It's about a couple who are quarantined overseas after they were down with Covid-19. Was that filmed before or after Confinement?

Right after. First off, I am not really in the business of doing television commercials for corporations. I’m actually quite known in the industry for turning them away. Not because I look down on them, not at all. But because I think the work that I have done over these last few decades is long-form narratives. They’re very different from the dynamics of a television commercial. So, I think it's too difficult for me to switch back and forth. As a matter of business, me and my team decided to focus on feature films. In a weird way, yes, maybe we make less money overall, but I'm quite gratified like that. I have been able to more or less keep up a steady output of films over the years, no matter how difficult it gets.

What changed your mind?

I had just finished shooting Confinement in KL, and it was an incredible shoot. It was really tough, but really fun because Rebecca and Cynthia were such troopers. The crew, which were from Singapore, are the people that I’ve worked with all my life, plus some new faces from KL. It was such a good shoot that in our third week, I remember I was shooting in the bedroom upstairs and when I came downstairs, the whole living room was full of people from the Malaysian film industry. My Malaysian production manager came up and said, “Everybody decided to visit your set tonight.” I was actually a bit grumpy because I don’t really like visitors on set. But I later found out that word had spread in KL that this shoot was going on very smoothly and very competently. A lot of them wanted to come down and see how it was done.

I’m saying this not to boast that we had such a chibaboom shoot, but rather that they came to share the fun of making something smoothly. I welcomed my fellow directors; there were a couple of producers, too. They stayed on the night to watch. I think it was very nice for the cast because usually, I’m the only audience besides the camera. Suddenly to have a room of people watching what they were doing, it was a nice feeling. When Income came up with the commercial, I turned it down at first. Then they asked again. I looked at the storyline and I reckoned, that because it had to do with being [stranded] in a motel, even Hoover Hotel at Balestier Road would be too small to shoot. So, I went back to them with one condition: I can shoot it but I need to shoot in KL — because I just wanted to work with the [Confinement crew] again and it had only been two weeks [after the movie wrapped]. Income said okay, and we went up to KL; I rounded up everybody again and we shot it over three days.

Both Confinement and Trapped brought back memories of the circuit breaker. What’s the first thing that pops into your head about the pandemic?

I think my first memory is that I was given no space to avoid my other responsibilities as a husband and a father. In a way, it’s also a little bit like A Quiet Place because I felt like I was in a horror film. Usually in normal life, it’s like I’m a filmmaker and I’m always allowed the excuse of work to [shun my household duties]. When I had it with the kids, I would go, “Oh yeah, you handle the kids, I’m going to the study and work on my script or something.” You can say things like that.

But during the lockdown, I wasn’t making a film. Nobody was investing in films. We weren’t even sure how long the whole thing was going to be, and there was always that huge possibility that this could be the end of days as we know it. So why even bother thinking about cinemas? During the lockdown, I was forced to confront those realities and it was difficult. But I think I did emerge from it a more hands-on father than I would’ve been without the pandemic. So good and bad, you know. I didn’t set out to make Trapped and Confinement as a kind of cerebral response to the pandemic and the accompanying lockdown, but I guess it must have permeated my consciousness. So when I was making horror, somehow it really was about physical restraints and constraints and trying to break out from them.

Have you heard of this story that Ajoomma director He Shuming was once on the set of The Maid?

Tell me about this. This is the first time I’m hearing this.

During the Ajoomma press tour, I asked Shuming if he’d worked with Hong Huifang before. He mentioned being on the set of The Maid — which also starred Huifang — with his grandmother, who appeared in the movie as an extra. Shuming had just finished his A-levels. I wonder if you’d met him then?

No, not at all. First of all, it happened like 20 years ago, but I’m so gratified to hear this story. Because Shuming is, you know, what a talent, and to be connected to him and to have Huifang figure in both our films. For a very dark horror film like The Maid to have a six-degrees-of-separation link to a bright, sunny, and very uplifting film like Ajoomma, it’s a compliment.

Confinement (PG13) is now in cinemas.

Photos: Clover Films, Golden Village Pictures