Jeremy Lu’s “Monkey Drum” begins with a simple setup: A father and boy, lost in a Japanese forest, knock on the door of an older man, living in safe but simple isolation. He offers shelter and food.
The film, making its world premiere this weekend at Flickers’ Rhode Island Film Festival, unwinds with apparent directness. You wonder: Would I be deeply satisfied, living in isolation, in lush tranquility? Relying on trees for comfort and shelter? And could these characters – three generations of men — give each other a similar sense of peace?
Then things go awry, and you begin to notice problems that have, perhaps, been there from the start.
Lu, a San Francisco Bay Area native and recent graduate of New York University’s film program, embraces a formal, analog tone for the film, reflective of its setting. In a throwback to the DIY culture of the ’80s and ’90s, he made a zine about the making of his movie, which he’s giving away at festivals. We asked him some questions ahead of his Sunday premiere, where attendees will be offered online access to the zine via QR code.
Jeremy Lu on ‘Monkey Drum’
MovieMaker: I was so impressed that someone so young — 22 — made a film so formal and cold. I’ve read about your Kurosawa influence and it definitely comes through. You also wrote a zine about making this film, to track its progress, which feels like a very late ’80s, early ’90s thing to do. As the editor of a print magazine, I love it. Who are you, and how did you come to this aesthetic?
Jeremy Lu: I appreciate the kind words. I’m a massive fan of films that have a handmade, sensory quality to them so bringing those sensibilities to the horror genre was definitely one of my biggest goals while tackling this film. Film is just one of those mediums where the creator has multiple avenues to engage with the senses of their audiences. It’s always my goal as a filmmaker to search for a cinematic language that goes beyond the expectation of a strictly audio/visual experience.
The zine, which wasn’t originally meant to be produced for a public release, was an attempt by me to see if I could create a “physical artifact” that audiences can take home from their cinematic experience with the film. It’s almost as if a little fragment of the film is following its audience home.
MovieMaker: You’ve mentioned in the past being tri-cultural — what are the three cultures and how do they influence you?
Jeremy Lu: I’m Filipino, Chinese, Japanese, and American so my upbringing has always been a very intersectional melting pot of all three cultures. Something I believe a lot of mixed people – especially mixed people in the arts — relate to is the endless struggle to figure out what side of yourself to reveal in the work you put out. I’ve always found this pressure to “pick” a side of me quite strange, so naturally “Monkey Drum” went through several drafts within several cultures before I landed on setting the film in the secluded Japanese countryside.
There’s an underlying element to the film’s narrative that is fundamentally built on societal expectations and the fear of appearing “improper” to those who protect us. The constant presence of these narrative themes always made it difficult for me to imagine the plot happening anywhere other than Japan.
MovieMaker: We met on Instagram, so you aren’t a Luddite. But the film and zine are so analog. What about that appeals to you? Do you think your generation is rebelling against the deluge of online stress, or is that just something older people like me want to believe?
Jeremy Lu: I don’t think that’s far off from what’s happening in our generation. At least from my perspective, I’ve been seeing an increased yearning for a return to the full analog days especially among younger filmmakers and artists. While films like Backrooms is one of the more obvious “nostalgia horror” films that popped into my head, the steady rise of the analog horror genre on the internet is a huge indicator for me that younger audiences crave films that carry those “handmade” elements.
While I was developing the All Alone in the Soil zine with our photographer Calvin Mumm, one of our key goals was to bring the “handmade” elements of the film to something you could physically take home and read. At one point in the intro page for the zine, I wrote something along the lines of, “We hope that these images show one more corner of our hearts the film missed.” and I truly meant that.
In a world that keeps threatening to convert seconds of our attention spans into profit, having something to sit with and read to further inform and contextualize a cinematic experience is something I’ve appreciated more and more. My only hope is for others to start sitting with things more.
MovieMaker: On the sixth page of your zine, you include a notebook entry with your ideas for the film, and it is, no offense, a mess. I doubt anyone but you could make sense of it. Yet it results in an incredibly clean, elegant film. Can you talk about how those messy pages evolve into such an elegant film?
Jeremy Lu: No offense taken. I completely agree that those notes were a complete mess. No director in their right mind would ever let anyone see those so naturally I decided to throw them in the zine for everyone to see. I do appreciate you describing the film as elegant though! I think the process of making this film had us constantly flipping within the full spectrum of “collected” and “utter chaos” so I’m happy that the end product landed more on the former.
I think it really all comes down to how much you trust in the structural integrity of the script itself. As a script, “Monkey Drum” is sort of structured like a loop in the sense that most of the narrative setups and dialogue return full circle by the end of the film–especially on a rewatch. As a writer/director, even though I tend to process information and create with a pretty loose and messy process, I generally always try to make sure everything is meticulously mapped out in my head by the time we get to production.
The photo of the notebook featured in the zine was taken three months before production but make no mistake, there is a stark difference between those notes and the notes I ended up taking to set.
MovieMaker: This film seems to take place in a metaphorical Japanese forest. I don’t think we’re in the afterlife, because there’s a landline phone. But there’s kind of a No Exit quality where these people can’t escape each other. Can you talk about your setting?
Jeremy Lu: One of the first things I discussed with Tian Pei, the cinematographer, and Vivian Zhang, the production designer, was how to make the house setting feel “of the Earth” — as if the house itself is an antagonistic force threatening the free will of our characters. There’s a sort of mythic, folkish quality we were chasing after in the film’s aesthetic where the house, as well as its inhabitants, are rooted deep within the soil and are unable to escape.
This rule ended up extending to the visual language we were using as the camera itself never actually leaves the house despite some scenes unfolding outdoors. We took a lot of references from the dollhouse aesthetic of Ari Aster’s Hereditary as there’s a similar mythically doomed quality to the characters that we wanted to accentuate. The horror and events that happen in the film are so far beyond the comprehension of our protagonists and we wanted the house to reflect that.
There’s no “cursed monster” under the bed in this movie. Only cursed people under the bed of a cursed house. Hopefully that adequately scares people.
MovieMaker: I was very curious about the sound of a fly, which we start to hear around the 11-minute mark. It’s either pre-lapped or post-lapped across two scenes — it’s ambiguous — and emerges again later. Flies usually mean decay, but I think your fly goes beyond that. Can you talk about why you included it?
Jeremy Lu: One of my favorite facts about nature — as someone who is grossed out by almost everything to do with rotting and decaying — is how whale carcasses sink to the bottom of the sea and essentially become thriving ecosystems for several decades. For me, decay represents a zone of “in-between” where life and death become inextricably linked and in my head, this film lives in that strange cyclical space.
There’s an underlying theme of rot and decay throughout the film that Margeaux Mccaughey, our post-production sound designer, did a wonderful job emphasizing. Even earlier in the film, we tried to establish a soundscape that implies that the house itself is rapidly deteriorating from the way it groans and settles. I don’t want to spoil too much but all I’ll say is that there are things hidden in plain sight in several frames that explains the constant presence of the flies.
MovieMaker: How was your experience with NYU?
I genuinely met my film family at NYU. I think for your closest collaborators to be your closest collaborators, there’s an element of mutual trust that needs to be met. Luckily for me, most of my collaborators since graduating last year are filmmakers I met at NYU who I also consider my most trusted friends.
The next script I’ve been developing is a Filipino-American immigrant monster movie that takes place in rural Oklahoma called Sirena. I’d also love to adapt “Monkey Drum” into a feature one day if the story feels right. My main goal moving forward in my career though is to keep making horror movies that prominently feature Asian characters. It’s hard for me to write on what it even means to “be Asian” so if I’m able to continue making these stories that don’t pressure my characters to preach on the experience of being Asian, I’d consider that a big success.
You can learn more about Flickers’ Rhode Island Film Festival here and read more of our festival coverage here.
Main image: Tadashi Mitsui in “Monkey Drum.” Courtesy of the filmmaker.
