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Interview with Celso Ad. Castillo, 23 October 2010

“Nympha may yet become my Citizen Kane.” — Celso Ad. Castillo.
Photo from the Video 48 blog, where you can read Clodualdo Del Mundo’s review of Nympha from 1971.

JessicaRulestheUniverse: There are so many memorable images from your movies, but the two that automatically pop into our heads are Vilma Santos’s long dance near the end of Burlesk Queen, and Gloria Diaz riding that horse on the beach in Ang Pinakamagandang Hayop Sa Balat Ng Lupa (The Most Beautiful Animal on the Face of the Earth). How did you conceive these visuals and how did you shoot them?

Celso Ad. Castillo: I don’t storyboard. I don’t write the scene, I create it during the actual shoot. It’s different from writing the script and having people follow it while shooting. I create the scene right there on the spot; I am at my best when confronted by the elements. I thought I was a freak until I read that many other directors work this way. I thought I was the only one.

The good thing about Gloria Diaz is that she’s a trouper; if she weren’t I would’ve had a tough time. As a trouper she was my willing victim. I just made sure she would look glamorous in the movie, I used portraiture shots to make her look really beautiful. There were scenes where I shot her between slits of bamboo to project the quality of her being stranded on the island. As if she were inside a cage.

Photo from The Search For Weng Weng blog

One time, while we were waiting for nighttime, sitting on the beach, I saw a horse. It was a workhorse used for carrying copra. I remembered reading that Gloria was an equestrienne. I said to her, Can you ride that horse?

She said, Yes.

Even without a saddle?

Yes.

Please show me.

She got on the horse, galloped around the beach, and that was it.

I told my staff, Don’t let the horse go, I’m using it tomorrow.

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Most days when I wake up my cat Mat is on my pillow, hugging the top of my head like a hat. Then he says something cryptic, like “Nyork” or “Nyatch”.

The Yucch-meter has just had a delicious, MSG-rich ramen dinner and is in no mood to critique your entries. Instead, the Yucch-meter will proofread your first paragraphs, then declare a winner.

# 2 mak
I am not sure if I am dreaming, but all the sensations are real. (?? How can you be sure they are real if you’re not sure you’re conscious. You mean “feel real”.) The wetness, the stench and the moist are all here for me to bathe in. I cannot move my body and my hands and my feet are gone. I don’t know what is happening. All I remember was that I was drunk and I passed out on the sidewalk. When I opened my eyes I was here, standing alone in a comfort room (“Toilet” would be more appropriate under the circumstances), with my spine bonded onto the wall, my face wet and reeked in reeking of urine.

# 3 thesocialinception
Before Miranda Priestly slept that night, she felt uneasy. She had this queasy feeling (felt uneasy, felt queasy, change one) that something will would happen. She drew her curtains aside and stood looking at her flamboyantly and meticulously horticultured (Horticultured?? Botanied? Chemistried? Try synonyms for “arranged”) garden, looking for anything that might cause this anxiety whatever might have caused this anxiety (Huh? Why would the garden make one queasy? Unless some foul stench was issuing from it). But all she saw was nothing worth her attention she saw nothing worthy of her attention. She withdrew from the window and hastily clutched her mink Chanel robe (We’ll overlook the pretentiousness in case pretentiousness is the intended effect) and laid her body in on her precious curly maple Parnian Furniture bed (Oy vey) and drifted off.
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New news so confusing we put it on top: Coach Simon McMenemy replaced? What the.

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This is all tentative, but if you’re planning to watch the Azkals Philippine football team take on the Mongolian team in the AFC Challenge Cup 2012 Qualifiers in Bacolod next month, you might find the information below useful. Thanks to our indefatigable head of online research, brewhuh23.

Neil Etheridge fans: We don’t know if Neil can join the Azkals in February as he has been named to his club Fulham’s first team. It would be great to see Neil in Bacolod but. . .He’s on the first team of an English premiership club! First player of Filipino descent, as far as we know.

Of course the all-time leading scorer of FC Barcelona with 357 goals in 357 games is the Spanish-Filipino Paulino Alcantara, who played for the club between 1912 and 1927. In 1922, in a game between Spain and France, he hit a goal so hard it ripped the net. (Second most important factoid I picked up while doing Flip magazine, the first being the YC jingle lyrics.)

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Our conversation turned to the fairy tales we had loved as children. One of the first things my mother read to me was Little Red Riding Hood, using different voices for the girl, the wolf, and the grandmother. Later I read Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment and went, Hmmm.

Neil Jordan and Angela Carter collaborated on the film The Company of Wolves, based on the story in Carter’s book The Bloody Chamber. The Company of Wolves takes off from Little Red Riding Hood; it starts with Granny knitting a bright red shawl for the girl and warning her to stay away from men with monobrows. If you have not read Angela Carter, stop reading this and find The Bloody Chamber at once. The entire collection is awesome but the one that will blow your eyes out the back of your head is the title story, a retelling of Bluebeard.

Photo: The Wolf Who Cried Boy by Robert Langenegger. See Robert’s lightboxes exhibit at Finale Art File at the La Fuerza compound, Pasong Tamo, Makati.

Another childhood favorite was The Little Mermaid, which I enjoyed reading under the covers with a flashlight when I was supposed to be sleeping. Do not believe the Disney-fied version: The Little Mermaid is a dark and tragic tale. I’ll never forget the description of the mermaid after she had traded her tongue for a pair of human legs: with each step she felt like she was walking on knives.

Then there were Rumpelstiltzkin, a bizarre tale about a little man who could help you do the impossible—if you knew his name, and Rapunzel, which bothered me because I couldn’t imagine the prince rappeling up the tower using her hair. And The Six Swans, in which six brothers are placed under an enchantment and their sister must sew a special shirt for each brother in order to restore him to full human form. Also, she must not utter a single word for six years. She finishes five of the shirts on time but the last one lacks a sleeve, so her youngest brother spends the rest of his life with a wing instead of a left arm.

The Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer (Otesanek, Alice) has some gorgeous claymation shorts based on fairy tales. And Jim Henson’s The Storyteller series is wonderful, particularly The Soldier and Death which was based on a Russian folk tale, and Fearnot, the boy who left home to find out about the shivers.

Oscar Wilde wrote one of the loveliest, saddest fairy tales in existence: The Happy Prince. Here’s the cartoon adaptation that made us all cry when we were little.

The Happy Prince, Part 2

The Happy Prince, Part 3

While reading a review of Jim Carroll’s posthumous novel The Petting Zoo I was reminded that Carroll, author of The Basketball Diaries, had written a poem on the death of Kurt Cobain. So I looked it up and now I am haunted by two ghosts.

8 Fragments For Kurt Cobain
by Jim Carroll

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The Dakar rally, the most grueling road race on earth, is on now. It used to start in France or Portugal and head on down to Africa but with increasing terrorist threats they moved to Argentina and Chile.

– Who are we rooting for?
– The bike race is almost always between the top two riders, Marc Coma of Spain and Cyril Despres of France.
– Under the circumstances shouldn’t Marc Coma have his name legally changed?
– Hahaha! He actually did go into a coma some time back.
– Haha! (That’s funny?!)

Here’s a montage of crashes at the Dakar rally. Do watch it with the volume off, the music is atrocious. Even better, watch the video while listening to Dakar by John Coltrane.

John coltrane – Dakar Found at abmp3 search engine