Shopping Malls, Casting Babies, DVD Collections: Golden Horse Award-Winning Director Yeo Siew Hua Answers Our Silly Questions About Stranger Eyes
Stranger Eyes, starring acclaimed Taiwanese actor Lee Kang-sheng, was nominated for six Golden Horse Awards last year, winning one for Best Original Score.

In Stranger Eyes, Singaporean filmmaker Yeo Siew Hua’s follow-up to 2018 Golden Horse Award-feted drama A Land Imagined (aka the film where Peter Yu ran butt naked on a treadmill)., a young couple (A Sun's Wu Chien-ho and Anicca Panna) whose marriage is on the fritz after their baby daughter is abducted. Oh, it gets better: they start receiving videos of themselves at their home a la Lost Highway (you’ll be missed, David Lynch). They suspect the neighbourhood supermarket manager (Taiwanese veteran Lee Kang-sheng, always moody, always weird) is behind the voyeuristic torment, as well as their child’s disappearance.
A slow-burn rumination on loneliness and the dark side of social media, the Singaporean-Taiwanese-French produced mystery picked up six Golden Horse Awards — including Best Narrative Feature and Best Director — winning one for Best Original Score.
In an e-mail interview, Yeo tells 8days.sg why he picked a certain shopping mall to set his thriller, working with children, and what the younger generation is missing out on DVDs.
(Full disclosure: this writer was invited by the director to read for a part, probably a calefare. True story. Not sure why he thought of me. Maybe he took up my offer when I casually told him to put me in his films, one of those things you say at the end of interviews: you mean it, but don’t really mean it. Does that make sense? Well, be careful what you wish for. Then again, I didn’t get the call back — guess I didn’t wish hard enough.)
8 DAYS: A few scenes in Stranger Eyes were shot in 112 Katong. I happen to live nearby, so as a Joo Chiat resident, why 112 Katong, pray tell?
YEOW SIEW HUA: 112 Katong was the Goldilocks mall for me, since I was looking for something not too fancy and not too rundown. More importantly, I had set the main locations of my film around the east side of Singapore and I wanted something around that neighbourhood. 112 Katong also has a special place in my heart because I used to live around the area, so it was the mall I go to frequently.
Which shopping mall, past or present, would you have love to shoot? And why?
I would have liked to film an entire film in Golden Mile Complex as I go there quite often. It’s a mall that has lots of interesting spaces and textures to explore. It would have been nice to capture the smells and aromas one experiences there. Unfortunately, the mall is going through major changes now and it’s no longer how it used to be anymore.
You also filmed at Snow City. It must have been shiok to shoot in a cold climate. Were those the most difficult scenes to shoot?
The ice-skating rink was really pleasant to shoot in but what was surprisingly the most difficult scene to shoot was that of Snow City. We did not expect it to be so very, very cold in there. Even with winter wear, it was unbearably cold and the crew was dancing on their feet while shooting just to keep themselves warm over the long hours. I had a take where my actor’s face froze up so badly, they couldn’t deliver their lines without their teeth chattering.

Clean up on aisle nine: Director Yeo Siew Hua (right) shows Lee Kang-sheng where the good stuff is stashed at the supermarket.
The stalker stores his voyeuristic footage on DVD. One character says, who does that anymore? He could’ve used either a thumb drive or drop box. Why DVD? What about physical media like DVD and Blu-ray are the young people are missing out on?
I have a nostalgia with DVDs and Blu-rays because that’s the medium I grew up watching films on, outside of the cinemas. There is something romantic about that tactile experience which I think is lost in our consumption online. We have definitely come to develop a different relationship with our content, which used to be more precious for me, like the collecting of vinyls and music CDs with inline notes and lyric sheets.
Do you collect Blu-rays/DVDs? How big is your collection? What’s the jewel of your collection?
I am a bit of a hoarder, so I do have quite the collection of DVDs. In fact, I still probably have some hard-earned karaoke LDs in my collection, if people still remember what laser discs are anymore.

Is this SFW? (from left) Vera Chen, Wu Chien-ho, Pete Teo and Anicca Panna inspect footage filmed by a voyeur.
Is there an epic story behind the casting of Lee Kang-sheng?
My choice of Lee Kang-sheng for the film wasn’t welcomed by all the producers at the start and I had to do some convincing. Thankfully, my wife happens to be an even bigger fan of him and I promised her that I would insist my way through the naysayers. Finally, I had my way… I mean, she did.
What did you learn from directing Lee Kang-sheng you wished you had picked up for your earlier films?
I direct different actors differently, depending on their background and experience. So, I wouldn’t use the same way I direct one actor with another. With Lee Kang-sheng I mostly learned to give him space for him to bring out an authentic performance, in his own rhythm which sets the pace for the film. I did not want to impose something that did not seem true to him.
You got Peter Yu to run naked on a treadmill in A Land Imagined. What hoops did Lee Kang-Sheng jump through for you in Stranger Eyes?
Lee Kang-sheng had to learn to dance the Dance Dance Revolution machine at the video arcade, which was not an easy task for someone his age. Unfortunately, the duration of the film was too long and I had to cut this sequence out of the final edit.
Don’t work with children and animals, so goes the showbiz adage. What’s the worst and best things working with children on Stranger Eyes?
Working with the kid on set is quite a nightmare. They are basically the boss of the shoot, since we needed to accommodate to their sleeping hours and whims. She was basically crying throughout the shoot but regardless, we had to make it work. But since she is so cute, she got away with it.
I have a theory: Are Lee Kang-sheng and Wu Chien-ho playing the same character? Chien-Ho’s character is the younger version of Kang-sheng’s...
You’re on to something. You could also say that there is a process of becoming in the act of watching, like you watch someone for so long that you start to become the person you’re watching. And just as well, we often project our own self onto the people we see. It’s a matter of perspective.

Don't talk to strangers: Taiwan's Lee Kang-sheng picked up a Best Supporting Actor gong at last year's Golden Horse Awards.
A Land Imagined centres on a missing construction worker. Stranger Eyes involves a missing child. You used the crime genre as a Trojan horse to explore bigger socio-economic issues. Does making a straight-up genre film interest you?
I would love to make a straight-up genre film too, just as I am interested in rom-coms. I might try that out in time. However, it’s not uncommon that filmmakers use genres like film noir to explore social issues. I see that as part of a much longer tradition.
When you read news about missing people, what’s the first thing that pops into your mind?
Missing people reports terrify me. It’s probably scarier for me than seeing the news of a death, at least there is certainty in the latter. Whereas a vanishing is almost always abrupt and unexpected, and in the worst case, indefinitely.
Speaking of A Land Imagined, that was the first time I saw what a foreign workers’ dormitory look like. Of course, a few months later, the Covid-19 pandemic happened. Who knew the dorms would be the hotbed for Covid-19? Did you feel like a writer for The Simpsons where you got a prediction right?
Like you, many came to tell me that they saw the foreign worker dormitories for the first time in my film, even though they are just as well a part of this country. It’s all very well hidden, out of sight, out of mind… until the pandemic broke out and overnight everyone was talking about their living conditions because we suddenly understood that their well-being is inextricably part of our survival. I don’t think it’s about making predictions but I’m glad that people are paying more attention now. But as you know, we are also very prone to forgetting.
Before I let you go, I have to bring this up. Two years ago, I received a call from you. You asked me to send my photo to your casting director. My wife was excited for, like, five minutes. Never got the call back, though. Anyway, which role did you see me in?
Sorry for keeping your hopes up! I was intending at first to try you out for the role of the [job] interviewee, in a one-to-one scene with the legendary Lee Kang-sheng… but at the end, the role went to Liu Xiaoyi in a totally different image from A Land Imagined [where he played the missing construction worker], many of the audience couldn’t tell they were the same actor. I really couldn’t turn down my leading man from my previous film, it makes for too good a cameo appearance.
Stranger Eyes is showing at The Projector; A Land Imagined is now streaming on Netflix.
Photos: Akanga Film Asia