RON Bryant admitted that documenting the life and career of filmmaker Celso Ad. Castillo was ?daunting.?
The biggest challenge, Bryant told Inquirer Entertainment, was telling ?a cohesive, meaningful story about an enormously complex subject from a wealth of materials [while] maintaining a balance between objectivity and subjectivity, entertainment and education.?
Apart from Castillo (known as ?The Kid? in the biz), Bryant and his team interviewed 18 film personalities, from Gloria Diaz to Maria Isabel Lopez, from Eddie Romero to Peque Gallaga.
?It was an editing nightmare,? said Bryant.
10-hour footage
The interviews amounted to over 10 hours of footage, starting with a sit-down with producer-actress Susan Roces in May 2008 and ending this year with the portion of scriptwriter and 1977 Metro Manila Film Fest juror Ricky Lee. All the interviewees cited Castillo?s ?madness? and ?genius.?
Bryant and film editor Nani Hona came up with a two-hour, 17-minute docu, ?with our heads intact.? Bryant plans to unveil the finished product in Cinemalaya and Cinemanila next year.
Although actual production took just a year and a half (when he received support from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts in May 2008), Bryant said he had been ?silently working? on the project since 1999, when he first met Castillo.
He recounted: ?The original idea was to write a book on filmmaking, which evolved into a coffee-table book, then into a docu in 2007.?
The long wait, Bryant conceded, gave him time ?to mature ? in my knowledge about filmmaking and local cinema, of which Celso Ad. is a vital part.?
Bryant divided the docu into two parts?Castillo?s commercial works (from ?Nympha? to ?Maligno?) and his artistic breakthroughs (from ?Burlesk Queen? to ?Paradise Inn?).
Castillo?s heyday, which also saw the rise of Lino Brocka, Ishmael Bernal, Mike de Leon and Elwood Perez, among others, coincided with an incredibly creative period in Philippine cinema?a ?golden age,? as Lee points out in the docu.
Bryant found good archival footage of the Fernando Poe Jr. and Susan Roces films, but Castillo?s earlier works, like ?Nympha? (1971) could only be represented through posters and stills. Footage from ?Pagputi ng Uwak, Pag-itim ng Tagak? (1978) is scratchy, obviously from a damaged source.
An important point raised by admirer and filmmaker Lav Diaz is that there is no good copy of ?Burlesk Queen? (1977). ?All we have is a poor video copy. It just goes to show how we treat our masters.?
The interviews were framed by the sessions with Castillo, set in a beach front location in Real, Quezon province, as homage to his films, ?Pinakamagandang Hayop? and ?Isla.?
Bryant said he steered clear of Castillo?s Asean and international films, current digital movies and work as actor (in indie films like Bryant?s ?Rotonda? and Pepe Diokno?s ?Engkwentro?): ?The 1990s to the present, including the digital revolution, they belong to another discourse altogether.?
