XIA MAGNUS: “When I set out to do something, I'm always trying hard to do something that feels new to me, that will be exciting to me”
fantasia
CLAPPER: As your first ever feature film, Sanzaru must have been a challenging film to get into production. How did you go about planning and getting the proper resources so that you could make this film?
XIA MAGNUS: I had a short film that I shot in Texas [back] in 2016, and so I had gotten to know the filmmaking community down there. [There] was sort of a Neo-Western vibe to that film, so that's why I was in Texas doing that. Through that film, we picked up a Texas-based producer who was interested in expanding that into a feature, and I basically [said], "no, I don't really want to do that, but I have this other scripts that would be cool to make." That was Sanzaru. And so, he read it and he was super enthusiastic about it. He was like, "well, if you want to shoot this down in Texas, I think I can make it happen and get you the resources you need and to do it pretty low budget," and we were like, "sure, let's do it." That's how it started.
Anyway, it snowballed from there, and a production company duelist came on board who's interested in helping first time filmmakers. They really gave us a lot of resources and money. They kind of held our hand through the whole process which was really helpful. I would say it all happened very fast, actually.
Despite studying experimental storytelling, your first major projects were documentaries about the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami and the Romanian Revolution. What drew you to documentary filmmaking after a radically different focus in your cinematic studies?
I think I was interested in telling stories, and those were the opportunities I was given after school, because there were people who wanted to make those [films]. They had money so they could support the production of those. So I just kind of jumped into it because I'm interested in all types of storytelling.
I was starting to move away from more experimental pathways, in terms of narrative and that's how I landed in that documentary space. But pretty much immediately after I was working on those, I was writing narrative. You know, feature scripts and short films. I transitioned right away, and I started to realize, as I was doing that, that my heart was in a more literary narrative form.
So in the early stages of your career, you’ve worked on numerous documentaries and music videos rather than feature length narrative films. What was it like making that transition from those to narrative films, and what part did your short films play in that transition?
Well, I think a lot of ways it was sort-of finding my home. I think I had taken a circuitous path to get to where I was meant to be. My earlier works and projects in school, were somewhat about learning alternatives to what I actually wanted to do, because what I actually wanted to do seems so difficult and out of my reach at the time and I just didn't have confidence. So I think I gravitated towards the opposite end of the spectrum, and really went far out. And then through that process, I was able to gather the confidence and life experience that made me realize that I was really interested in narrative feature filmmaking. That's where I was coming from.
It was about the journey, not the destination in some ways, but once I got there, I felt really ready. I [thought], oh, this is immediately when I started making short films that were narrative in the classical Hollywood sense. I was like, "Ah, here I am. This is what I belong. This is what I meant to do."
Sanzaru is a very ambiguous film at its core, and has a very experimental nature. What first drew you towards this style of experimental filmmaking?
I'm always intrigued by art forms that push boundaries. When I set out to do something, I'm always trying hard to do something that feels new to me, that will be exciting to me. So I think I'm just inherently drawn towards that. I'm glad that you use the word, "ambiguous," "ambiguity," because that's actually an important element of my work, and I have my artist friends, Christina Quarles. She's a painter, but she has a more philosophical bent on what ambiguity means, and for her, it's the overlapping of information, so it's actually getting extra information to the audience, which is something I really identify with. I think about adding adding a lot of information over on top of each other, so you think about all the layers of the film and the way that they slowly add up to something but it remains a little bit unclear exactly what they're adding up to.
Does that answer your question?
Yes, and I have to say, I'm very much in the same way that that's really the type of film I like: the ones that push boundaries and are ambiguous, so I'm glad to hear that you think that way as well. So, what does your creative process look like as you begin to formulate the narrative in your head, and how does it apply to the making of this film?
In my head, an idea usually comes to me in a flash, if you will. Whether that's a character, the mood and the tone of a film or something. I think it varies, but I'll have an initial idea. Like a seed of an idea that will get me excited. And from there, I'll start to expand outwards in either direction, trying to fill in the movie around it whether that's a character or a situation. And I think for Sanzaru, it came to me as well.
This is probably going to sound funny but I'm gonna say it anyway. I was watching that movie called The Skeleton Key with Kate Hudson from [2005], and it's a cheesy horror movie. It's okay. It's decently done, I guess, but it's definitely nothing like this. That movie is also about a nurse who's taking care of a person in a haunted mansion, and I was like, "What if I did that type of movie but in this other way?" Bring in the ghosts and characters, and tell the mystery from the inside out, if that makes sense. Make it a much more psychologically subjective film, because those tend to be the films I'm most drawn towards. So I think that that's kind of where it started and then there was obviously a long path to the final film, which doesn't look anything like what I originally thought it would look like, but that's the seed, the seed I had.
Apart from that one that you mentioned, the film does seem to take inspiration from various films, as well as other literary tropes. So what piece of media and literature influenced you in the making of this film, and to what extent are they seen since?
Yeah, I'll add on another comment by saying that I don't know [if] the film, The Skeleton Key, in general, really influenced anything other than that initial idea, but I love horror films, all of them, and I watch anything like it doesn't matter how lowbrow or how highbrow it is. I love watching genre films, so I think that I approached [Sanzaru] as a more impressionistic take on a genre film. Some of my favorite horror films are Rosemary's Baby, Stephen King adaptations and The Stepford Wives that take on social and interpersonal relationships within the horror genre. All those had a big influence on me going into this. And I borrowed a lot of the tone and the sense of dread from [Asian horror].
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall Past Lives [director] Apichatpong Weerasethakul was a Thai filmmaker. I definitely was thinking of a lot about him. His films just had this big blanket of atmosphere that hover over the whole thing and I find that so exciting to me so I think I approach [Sanzaru] that way.
I studied literature in school, and I would say that some Samuel Beckett definitely made its way in there with the speaking lights [which is] the more abstracted representation of spirits. They're very much borrowed from Samuel Beckett plays. He has this one very famous play, and it's called Play. It's three floating heads and there're these disembodied heads in in urns in the afterlife and they're arguing with each other a little bit over the way they perceived how they live their lives. And that had a huge effect on me.
More recently, I read and reread George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo, which had this Buddhist idea of the afterlife as a place where spirits wait to be reincarnated. That had a huge effect on the way I think about the supernatural elements in Sanzaru. I really wanted the spirits, the ghosts, to have their own personalities. I really wanted them to be characters that were interesting and have their own motives, because I feel like a lot of stories about ghosts always feel missing to me. Like I don't really understand why the ghosts are doing that. Even in classic Gothic literature like Turn of the Screw, the ghosts that haunt [the characters], their reasons for haunting them are really superficial. [They're there] to cause terror, which didn't feel honest to me. I wanted the ghosts to really have a reason.
Regarding the ghosts throughout the course of the film, many of the characters seem to be haunted by a glint of white light, as well as a mysterious red being. So what do those beings represent in the context of the film?
SPOILER ALERT, but white light is a representation of a good, kindly ghost, who's represented in the main character's mother. She's the disembodied voice that we hear, the old woman's voice that speak to us in Tagalog, and she is there to actually help Evelyn (played by Aina Dumalao) along through her journey in the film.
The more menacing red presence is the ghost of the families of the white family, the Regan Family patriarch, who has also recently passed and he haunts over them with his kind of traumatic past. He represents trauma, in general, and the way the Regan family can't quite get past what happens to them. I would say that those are the two spirits that are having their own kind of proxy war in the afterlife around these people, around the humans, which is, one of the ideas going forward in the film.
What advice would you give to young filmmakers who are trying to get their ambitious projects made?
I would say, have confidence in yourself. I think you know you have to find that in yourself because making films is just so hard and no one really is going to care as much as you do. So you just have to go forward, past so much rejection. I'd say that's the big one.
And then the other, more specific one: even though you have to be confident in your work and yourself, you also have to listen to the people around you and what they're telling you, especially if more than one person is telling you something, especially that something isn't working in your story, especially at the script stage. You really need to listen to that, and try and figure out why more than one person is telling you that they don't think something is working, because it can solve some of the problems in the script stage. It's going to save you a lot of work. If you just go ahead and shoot something, that actually doesn't work. Solving [problems] in post production, or even on set, it's going to be so much harder than solving it in the script stage.
So spend a lot of time on your scripts and don't let rejection get you down. You just keep going forward, and then wait until you really feel really confident about where the story is at when it's in the script stage.
What do you hope that audiences will take away from their viewing of Sanzaru?
That's a good question. I'm not sure if there's a single moral that I would want even though I mean I think that there are some morals in the film and some [messages] I intended to say. But I feel like film is a medium that you need to tell people what to think, or take away from it.
I just hope that people are experiencing [Sanzaru] through the characters, particularly through Evelyn, that they're kind of along for the ride. I would hope that they are able to watch it and have an out-of-body experience, if you will, that they're able to just identify and empathize with the character so much that they're just pulled along in the story.
That's what I love about watching films: it's that I get to be outside of myself. I find it a very ecstatic experience. it's almost religious, or like taking drugs when it's working.. You get to just like be outside your body and experience something that you would never otherwise get to experience. That's what I would hope people take away from it.
So what’s next for Xia Magnus? Can you tell us about what your future holds in regards to new projects?
Yeah, I mean I can talk a little bit vaguely. I don't have any thing I can announce yet, but I do have a couple. I do three projects that are at various stages of developments. And obviously, nothing is going to be shooting this year in the states anyway, so hopefully, by next year, I will be in full production. But I have a couple of bigger projects that are bigger budget that are being set up in various production companies and studios. So, you know, we'll see. We'll see what happens next year. I mean, right now is such a precarious time, and it's like no one knows when we're going to be able to actually start making stuff again. So yeah, I'm hoping to be shooting the next project next year though.