Half Life with Jelly Fish, a post premier chat with writer/director Jennifer Phang

By Michael Ricciardi

I sat down for coffee with Jennifer Phang (writer-director of Half Life) at the Joe Bar, just across the street from the Harvard Exit Cinema on Roy St. in Seattle, to discuss her first feature film, its inspirations and intent.

I noted that, watching Half Life, there was this constant sense of pending apocalypse or momentous change. Phang jokingly offered: “Maybe we should have called it ‘apocalypse pending’…we wanted to convey strongly that something is happening in the world.…and offer a macro/micro look at crisis.”

One of the strangely ominous threads in the film involved jellyfish (an image that would become central to the mother’s eschatological dream). I ask Jennifer to clarify the origins of this. Phang stated she recalled “reading about a jellyfish invasion in Scotland which killed off all the salmon there.” Odd, recurring elements like this contributed decidedly to the tone—the sense of moment--of the film.

The film maintains a near constant drumbeat of disastrous (and some more promising perhaps) events from around the globe.

“We put out a call for footage (news footage of disasters and other ‘earth-shattering’ events) on Craigslist.org,” explained Rueben Lim, the film’s main producer (who also joined us for coffee), “…we were amazed at the responses from all over.” Use of such footage proved to be an important textural element in crafting the film’s tone, pace, and total look,

As a writer, one needn’t have to make up dire sounding news about world-wide environmental change—it’s already out there, all one has to do is pay attention.

The film Half Life is getting a good degree of deserved, critical praise.

So many great films made by artists of Asian descent get pegged as “Asian”, and rarely get seen outside of ‘Asian or Asian-American Film Festivals’. That could have been the case with Half Life but for Phang’s broader story telling pallet, the inclusion of more global currents, and situating her broken Asian American family in a sunny (and rather hot) SoCal valley, middleclass neighborhood. “I wanted to connect with a wider audience”, says Phang.

In the Q & A after the screening someone asked to what extent race played a part in the casting. Phang responded by first mentioning that someone else had asked her ‘Why are all the white people ‘evil’?’ “The casting”, says Phang, with a laugh, “just fell into place, it just worked out that way.” Phang added that one of the Asian characters (the neighbor’s homosexual son whom the daughter is infatuated with) “is evil—just more complexly evil.”

There are many mysteries in Half Life, and the tone is both poetically captivating and a little spooky, at times.  A film viewer might infer some type of supernatural agency at work, to a degree, and also, there is this over-riding sense of something imminent in the world. “It was about creating an emotional space, or effect,” explained Phang, “not supernatural, per se, but more an emotional tension that is always going on…”

Maintaining such emotional pitch and tension, while trying to communicate ideas at the same time, is no easy feat. Jennifer acknowledged her challenge, in making the film, to balance “pragmatism with vision”. But, added: “I am happy with the result now, having achieved, I believe, the balance there between the two.”

The film wrapped shooting in 2006, and from there until early 2008, her time was devoted to post production and the development/finishing of the animation sequences (one of which was edited out of the final cut—for “pacing purposes.”).

Jennifer’s next project (the cat is already out of the bag) is an adaptation of the play ‘Look for Water’ by Dominc Mah (one can sense, again, a strong environmental theme continuing), a script that she has been working on through the Sundance Screen Writers Lab.

Having enjoyed viewing and discussing her first film, I am greatly looking forward to her next. Perhaps we will have another sit-down, coffee chat—as long as the world doesn’t end, or change so radically that good film making is not longer relevant, or needed.

Better keep an eye on those jellyfish.