There’s a reason why you may not have heard of filmmaker and novelist Sandi Tan until this year, upon the release of her brilliant Netflix documentary “Shirkers.” In 1992, Tan and her friends Jasmine Kin Kia Ng and Sophia Siddique Harvey sought out to make an experimental, surrealistic, art house film titled “Shirkers,” with their film teacher, mentor, and friend Georges Cardona. With Cardona set to direct, the film went through increasingly bizarre obstacles, all involving Cardona, who posed as a prominent American film professional. After the film was finished, the 16mm film it was shot on vanished, along with Cardona.
Discouraged and understandably put off by her experience with Cardona, Tan largely gave up on her filmmaking pursuits. That is, until, the 16mm film rolls containing the entirety of the original 1992 feature “Shirkers,” unscathed, mysteriously resurfaced 20 years later. Tan’s documentary follows her as she reestablishes contact with her old friends and filmmaking colleagues to uncover the truth behind the missing tapes and Cardona’s disappearance.
Recently, Tan and I sat down to speak about her documentary “Shirkers,” the inspiration behind the original cult-hit-that-never-was, the documentary’s subject, and more.
I loved “Shirkers.” You capture a changing Singapore in your documentary. What effects did the landscape of Singapore have on your growing up, creatively and personally?
It was pretty darn urban. It was not bucolic. And the division of Singapore that we had is distinctly curated to be completely different from the Singapore I grew up with, which is schools that look like spaceships. and skyscrapers, and that kind of thing. So it was a deliberate attempt to do a very different thing. I was very deliberately wanting to create my own mythology of Singapore that had not been seen that had all my favorite places in them. The sleepy, suburban neighborhoods. That gate that says “my blue heaven.” For the longest time, I’ve seen that gate and I’ve wanted to put it somewhere in the movie.
And all these odd things like mannequin stores. I mean, there are so many of them, and I knew that they wouldn’t exist for much longer. I just knew. And then the topiary that ballerinas dance around in the botanic gardens? That does not exist anymore. They didn’t preserve it. We tried to pinpoint where it had been. I went back there, like, three years ago and tried to find the spot and I couldn’t find it because it’s been completely paved over. They didn’t even preserve the beloved topiaries.
What are some of your artistic inspirations as a filmmaker?
Back then, I just wanted to create my own mythology of Singapore. The world that I saw with my friends and with Georges that was completely different from what the tourist brochure or what my family or my friends saw of Singapore, which I thought was a completely depressing vision of the world. If I lived in their Singapore, I would have killed myself when I was 16. So, I had to create my own, somehow, to keep myself alive and to make it seem more heroic and more interesting. So, I was interested in movies that really created a different world. Because I remember reading interviews with Tim Burton because he grew up in Burbank or something. And just suburbia: that’s the most boring, flat kind of thing. And in movies like “Beetlejuice” and “Edward Scissorhands,” he’s doing a mythic version of his world.
And “Heathers” did a heightened version of reality as well, and I was very interested in – back then in a community, too, in Singapore – to do kind of a heightened version of what I saw around me. So, in the original “Shirkers,” there was a lot of coded things like people in my life played roles in the main character’s life, like my grandmother and my cousin. And the mystery boy was a boy I knew. So, there’s a key to it being kind of a version of my life.
I went back to school in England, and the first film I watched after I finished “Shirkers” was Leos Carax‘s “The Lovers on the Bridge,” “Les amants du Pont-Neuf,” which is still one of the greatest films ever made. It was a financial disaster. It was made in 1991 in France, and stars [a] very young Juliette Binoche and Denis Lavant, and it’s just a non-linear, experimental love story in Paris. Very unusual and very exciting and very ambitious. So, that was the first movie I saw after “Shirkers,” and when I saw it, I was ecstatic, because I thought this movie kind of saved my life because it’s what I wanted to do. And I just shot a movie that would get me into the scene. Not the same universe, but I was gonna get somewhere within the same galaxy as this guy and this film that I admired so much. And I was obsessed with this film, so I watched it 20 times in the movie theater in England in the ensuing year.
Anyways, movies like that, for me, are eternal movies. I love also another movie that is personal seeming is Charlie Kaufman‘s “Synecdoche, New York,” which I find one of the most moving, ambitious movies ever made. Of course, another financial disaster…But I do really admire Jane Campion‘s “An Angel at My Table.”