Super Sammy (Cindy Cheung) gets serious in the Happy Fun Room (Photo by Sam Chase)
Long before Greg Pak became known for his comics, he was a successful film director and screenwriter. He recently released a brand new short film, Happy Fun Room, which can be viewed on YouTube (as part of the Futurestates.tv storyworld). Pak happily indulged my curiosity to email him a slew of questions for him to answer regarding this latest project. Enjoy.
Tim O’Shea: In what ways do you feel more confident as a short film writer and director with Happy Fun Room, as say compared to your 2011 effort, Mister Green?
Greg Pak: That’s an interesting question. A number of smart people have said that directing is basically deciding. A director has to make dozens of decisions every day in order for everyone else working on the film to be able to do their jobs. If a director can’t decide, everything grinds to a halt and the film eventually falls apart.
I don’t know for sure if I’m a better director than I was a few years ago. But I think I’m probably a better decider. I think that’s a skill that working in comics has helped me hone. Comics move insanely fast — in any given week, I have to make a hundred different decisions about key details from every stage of the production. So I’ve learned to think fast and do my very best in the limited time I have — and trust my own judgement and my collaborator’s tremendous skills.
Working in comics probably has helped me in at least one other way as a film director — I think I’m much better at talking about art direction and color than I was before. Every month I’m looking at dozens of pages of colors in comics — over the years, I think that’s helped me develop a better sense of how color affects emotion and storytelling and has helped me as a filmmaker.
What prompted you and Lois Drabkin to cast Cindy Cheung in the lead role?
I worked with Cindy on my feature film Robot Stories way back in 2001 and thought she was just amazing. I first got to know her as a comic actress when she was doing ridiculously funny and weird character work with Mr. Miyagi’s Theater Company in New York City. But in Robot Stories, she played a relatively straight dramatic role with enormous heart and subtlety. So I knew Cindy would totally nail the character in Happy Fun Room — she’d have tremendous fun with the goofy children’s television show host part of the character and then dive deep with the emotional trauma and violence the character’s repressing.
It’s worth noting also that I initially wrote the character as male. But as I started considering whom to cast, I found myself thinking about Gina Davis’s remarks a while back challenging screenwriters to change the world by simply changing the gender of characters. So Super Sammy became a woman and I realized Cindy would be absolutely perfect in the role. In the end, five of the film’s six speaking roles went to women.
I am fascinated by the different roles in film-making, what values and assets did cinematographer Sam Chase bring to the project?
I love Sam so much. Without him, there would be no film. I worked with Sam for the first time on Mister Green and probably never had as much fun on a film set because of the positive energy, tremendous work ethic, and amazing eye he brought. He worked the same kind of magic on Happy Fun Room.
To describe the process a bit more specifically, Sam gets to the heart of the emotional story of the project and comes up with ideas for how to bring those emotions out through the color and light of the cinematography. Part of the huge fun of working with Sam is that he’s always willing to try something crazy to get to the heart of that emotion. So for Happy Fun Room, he proposed using two different kinds of cameras — an older, traditional, studio digital video camera for the “show within the show” children’s television show scenes and smaller, prosumer four thirds cameras for the more verite, behind-the-scenes moments. We also shot those behind-the scenes moments multicamera, meaning our fantastic assistant director Joe Ciccarella was usually shooting the same scene from another angle with another camera. I’ve never had the chance to work that way before and the tremendous energy and options it gave me in the editing room were huge boons.
Sam also gave me great feedback when I was editing. He pushed me to include more graphics and text over the “show-within-a-show” footage, which of course was right on and made those moments pop so much more in just the right, cheesy way.
Not to give too much away, but while this is a show about a children’s show on one level, there are some dark conflict between Sam and the children. How did you and Cindy prepare the kids for that one critical scene where she went into the violence Sam experienced in the past?
Cindy’s a real pro. We just talked through the character and her life and experiences and she did her thing. My job was to make sure she knew what brought her character to the moment she was experiencing on screen and maybe to remind her of what specific thing she her character was trying to achieve in that moment. And then Cindy made it all come to life. I think we were helped by the fact that Cindy and I have known each other for years now and have worked together multiple times — and we have similar senses of what’s funny and what’s tragic. So I think we communicate with each other pretty darn efficiently and effectively. But the depth and subtlety of that performance is all Cindy.
The crazy thing is that working with the kids is really pretty much the same process. My job was to make sure they knew what their characters were trying to do in the moment on the set and then get out of the way and let them get there. The main difference is that we worked extra hard to minimize anything on set that might distract the kids from the scenes and we made sure to schedule the day to give them the first whack at every important emotional scene — so they didn’t get burned out by running an emotional scene multiple times without being on camera. I also made a point of preparing them a bit for the yelling scene by reminding them that Cindy’s going to pretend to be angry — but it’s all still make believe. It’s a tricky thing, because you want the kids’ reactions to be real and spontaneous, but I’m not the kind of director who’s willing to manipulate kids (or anyone, really) by putting through an actual traumatic experience for the sake of the film.
So in the climactic scene of the film, Cindy loses her mind screaming at the kids and our lead child actress cries. I knew that child actress, Lilyana Cornell, was something special the minute I met her. She’s a super smart kid who totally understands the process of acting and filmmaking. But she’s also totally emotionally there at every moment. If she’s thinking it or feeling it, it’s right there on her face. She even started tearing up during rehearsal, just when we were talking about the kinds of things that make us cry. So I was pretty darn sure she’d bring that to the set. But to help as much as possible, when we got to that scene, we had two cameras on Lilyana and shot her half of the scene first. And that was the first time I had Cindy completely cut loose with her performance. Beforehand, I told Lilyana we were about to shoot that scene and I reminded her that it’s all make-believe, but that Cindy was going to be really scary. And boy, Cindy was terrifying. I think I told Lilyana to be sure to keep looking at Cindy’s eyes, no matter what. And she did — and as Cindy raged, Lilyana’s face flushed and her eyes got big and then the tears welled up and started falling. I got chills on set. And then we did one more take and the kid did it again. She’s just amazing — seriously, a total pro.
And of course huge props go to Cindy and Sam and everyone else in the cast and crew who understood what we were doing and helped keep the right vibe so we could get there.
You were not afraid to allow moments where the film breathed in silence (I swear I could hear a heartbeat at one point, maybe it was just my own). How much of a risk to do that in a short film?
We live in a one-click age of instant gratification, so yes, it’s always a bit of risk to let things breathe in a short film, particularly one that’s primarily going to be seen on the internet. But in the end you have to be true to your material. If I’d cut the film super-fast and choppy, it might superficially have seemed more exciting in the first few seconds, but that would crush the emotional vibe and the film would become empty and boring.
Of course, there’s always the risk of overindulging yourself by lingering on moments that feel special and magic to you as a filmmaker because you have this extra memory of creating them with your cast and crew and feel a whole ‘nother level of magic that an audience member might not share. So it’s a balancing act. I had to edit the film under a pretty tight deadline, but I shared it with some filmmaker and comics creator friends who didn’t know anything about the story in order to get some objective feedback.
How hard was it to edit this short film-were there scenes you had to fight with yourself to keep versus moments you needed to cut?
In the final scene, there was a final exchange between some characters that on paper felt so right — it provided a thematic button and the dialogue echoed some earlier dialogue to create a really nice bookend and resonance. But in the editing room, I realized we just didn’t need it. The emotion was all there without that dialogue, as clever as it was. And I’ll always cut clever in order to increase emotion.
Am I wrong in thinking 9/11 plays a subtext to this film? Also I cannot help but think of the U.S. history with the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII and people’s ignorance of that stage in American WWII history?
The story absolutely turns on a past moment of national trauma. So yes, I did think of 9/11 while writing the script. I didn’t think of Japanese American internment. But I love the way science fiction stories can resonate with people in all kinds of different ways. It’s the audience’s film, now — I get excited by all the different (and, sometimes from my point of view, unintended) ways a film can be interpreted.
Care to discuss your use of pills in the film and divulge if that is a symbol or metaphor for anything?
I included the pills because they made story sense to me. Sammy’s dealing with ongoing, long-term reactions to trauma, and medication is part of how she deals with it. I did think it was important at the end that when she takes her big step forward, she’s still holding onto those pills, because as important as that step is, it’s just one step, the first part of a long process.
The pills that the kids take similarly are part of this society’s reaction to the terrible trauma of Phoenix that’s obliquely referred to. This is a shell-shocked world that’s embraced all kinds of medication and treatment for everyone. I like the way the pills are treated as totally normal in a creepy way in the context of the kids’ show.
In deciding props for the movie, I was struck by the happy colors of the locks on the door, the adorable nature to the police costume-can you discuss your thought process on those and other elements of the show’s set?
Sara K White was the production designer and Kitty Boots was the costume designer, and they were both amazing. We shared different images from classic kids’ television shows and talked about using bright colors and soft edges, trying to make everything feel clean and bright and super safe all the time. Sara and Kitty and their teams absolutely killed it. I remember standing on that set when it was done and just dancing around, it felt so right. We all wished we could have hung around to shoot a real kids show there, it was so perfect.
Does the film also try to broach PTSD on some level?
Absolutely. I think the story also has the potential to resonate with anyone who’s suffered trauma, whether or not it reaches the level of a clinical diagnosis of PTSD. We’re all carrying around reactions to the world that we have a hugely difficult time getting past.
Anything we need to discuss that I neglected to ask?
Happy Fun Room is part of an amazing online storyworld that you can visit at Futurestates.tv. There are a bunch of other short films in the project that take place in the same world as Happy Fun Room but explore the world from very different angles. Check ’em all out — they’re great!
If you’re in New York next weekend, you can even see part of the Futurestates project on the big screen at the New York Film Festival! Check it out here.
