How Did The Peter Yu Renaissance Come About?

Legend has it that if it weren’t for Nicole Midori Woodford, the Peter Yu renaissance might not have happened.

As much as the Singaporean filmmaker and NTU lecturer loves to take credit for it, she believes other forces were at work that prompted the erstwhile Mediacorp actor to step in front of the camera again.

Woodford, however, does recall encouraging Yu, back when he was a full-time taxi driver (and had appeared in one short prior to meeting her), to continue acting while discussing a potential project that would eventually become For We Are Strangers, a 2015 short about a soon-to-be-released convict (Yu) and his counsellor (Adele Lim).

“I remember we had this long conversation at Raffles City, and then he agreed to do it,” Woodford tells 8days.sg over Zoom. “I was like, thinking, yeah, he’s gone through so much [pitfalls in real life] that it lends to his character [in the short].”

Cue to the present: Woodford got along swimmingly with Yu — who has since become the actor du jour for indie filmmakers to portray world-weary, downtrodden, long-suffering father figures —  on For We Are Strangers that she reached out to him for her directorial feature, Last Shadow at First Light, which opens Thursday (May 9) at The Projector.

(FYI: Woodford also vouched for Yu when her friend, Yeow Siew Hua, was looking for a leading man in  A Land Imagined, the 2019 noir thriller — aka the one where Yu ran butt-naked on a treadmill — which went on to win Best Original Screenplay… but that’s another story for another time.)  

It was also one of the five features showcased at the Singapore International Film Festival to star Yu.

“I remember someone making this comment on [cineaste social platform] Letterboxd [about Last Shadow being] ‘another addition to the Peter Yu cinematic universe or something,” Woodford adds, with a laugh.

Last Shadow, which had its world premiere at last September’s San Sebastian Film Festival, picked up the Jury Prize, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography and Best VFX at Ho Chi Minh City International Film Festival in April. (It was at the same event, Yu and Mark Lee received kudos for the 1980s-set drama Wonderland.)

The story follows Ami (newcomer Mihaya Shirata), a spectre-sensitive teenage girl who embarks on a road trip from Singapore to Japan. There, she hopes to unravel the mystery behind her mother’s (Mariko Tsutsui) disappearance years ago circa 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Yu plays Ami’s father and Masatoshi Nagase (Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train, Umin Boya’s Kano) is her estranged taxi driver uncle, still reeling from a personal tragedy.

Woodford previously told Variety that her existential ghost story was inspired by a conversation with her Japanese grandmother who developed dementia after a stroke.

“[My uncle] told me she had missed the train that very morning of the Hiroshima atomic blast and narrowly escaped death,” said the National Arts Council’s 2020 Young Artist Award recipient, whose father is British-Portuguese Eurasian. “This near-miss encounter changed her perspective on life and she decided to leave Japan.

“Knowing this helped me understand how she moved on despite encountering trauma. I became interested to explore trauma as a cyclic undercurrent that recurs throughout life with repercussions on a person and the others connected to them.”

Last Shadow, which reportedly cost US$550,000 (S$743,000) was filmed in both Singapore and Japan. Woodford said her experience working on an episode in the HBO Asia horror series Folklore — served as “good training”, notably during the hectic Japanese leg of the shoot which spanned four prefectures, Fukushima, Miyagi, Chiba, and Iwate, over 13 1/2 days.

Shooting ‘The Excursion’ episode under stringent safe-distancing conditions during Covid-19 taught her to “to be very disciplined” and “well-prepared” when it came to filming on-location — and “there were tons of locations, all spread out.”

“Because of that, we had to be very quick on our feet, so there’s very little artifice in the film,” she explains. “Almost everything you saw in the film is on the first take.”

“My main focus was how to depict the relationships in the family in a very realistic manner,” she says. “I really just tried to focus on getting the performances to be nuanced and close to what I wrote.”

And having seasoned performers Nagase and Yu means half that battle is won. For starters, you don’t have to explain too much to them. “Once he gets in the car, the camera starts rolling, and he [just takes over],” said Woodford of Nagase. “That’s why I can get the first take and use it — I really enjoyed working with him.”

Elsewhere, Yu was instrumental in helping Shirata acclimatise to the workings of a film set. “Because he’s a dad in real life, he was very kind to Shirata. That set her at ease when she only had a very few days to rehearse with him. Before meeting him, she was terrified, and because she had to say the lines in Mandarin, it was even more nerve-wracking.

“Another wonderful thing about Peter is that, he’s a very generous collaborator with his fellow actors. I think that’s the reason I decided to work with him again because some actors, who are more veteran, more senior, might not be as empathetic and patient to their younger counterparts when sharing a scene.”

By and large, Woodford didn’t just cast the veterans for their vast acting experience. “I cast them for the life that they have had,” said. “The camera lens is very unforgiving: It scrutinises every part of the face, you know? You can’t help but just read the story [on their faces], even if it’s a shot where they’re not saying anything. In the film, there’s not a lot of dialogue, so I needed actors who have history on their faces somehow.”

Why do indie filmmakers gravitate towards Yu?  “In Singapore, we are challenged by a lack of actors who are suited for art-house or independent film,” Woodford said. “We tend to look for faces that have a bit more grit— almost as if life has etched itself on their faces. As characters, I think that’s why we are drawn to that.”

Are there any plans for another Woodford-Yu team-up?

She hasn’t thought that far: Right now, she’s too busy playing mother to her two-month old baby daughter. “It’s really hard to write in between breastfeeding and pumping and changing diapers,” she said. But she does have some ideas brewing. “I want to do something that is not so inward, but more outward and a lot more messy, like body fluids and blood,” she chuckled. “It definitely has a strong female protagonist, a mother figure.

“It’s definitely more genre-focused than Last Shadow, which because of the subject matter, I had to be very delicate about it. So, for the next one, I want it to be a bit more no-holds-barred and not based on a true event.”

Woodford also wants to make it a point to catch more local telly. Yu is constantly on her radar because “when I was younger, I watched all his dramas, so I’m familiar with the old guard,” she says.

After working with Shirata, it’s high time she pays more attention to the younger actors. “I feel that if someone comes my way and actually approaches me to want to shape their performance or do something together, I’m actually keen on that because that kind of collaboration also pushes the director. I was made to think out of the box during my time working with Mihaya.”

Last Shadow at First Light (PG13) is showing exclusively at The Projector from Thursday. The director and her cast and crew will be doing a Q&A at the Cineleisure on May 9, 7.30pm and May 11, 4.30pm. Folklore is now streaming on HBO Go. Wonderland opens in cinemas on Aug 8.

Photos: Potocol