SLIFF 2015 Interview: Dax Phelan – Director of JASMINE

JASMINE screens Saturday, November 7th at 5:15 at The Tivoli Theater as part of the St. Louis International Film Festival. Director/writer Dax Phelan will be in attendance. Ticket information can be found HERE

In this gripping psychological thriller, Leonard To (Jason Tobin, BETTER LUCK TOMORROW) struggles to come to terms with the unsolved murder of Jasmine (Grace Huang, THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS), his beloved wife. Nearly a year after Jasmine’s death, Leonard finally returns home to Hong Kong. Determined to begin again, he searches for a new job, attends grief-support meetings, and reconnects with a woman from his past (Eugenia Yuan, REVENGE OF THE GREEN DRAGONS). The unsolved nature of Jasmine’s murder — and the Hong Kong police’s seeming indifference to the case — prevents Leonard from attaining true closure, but he appears to be slowly starting life anew. That progress comes to a sudden halt, however, when Leonard crosses paths with a mysterious interloper (Byron Mann, THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS) while leaving flowers at the scene of his wife’s murder on the first anniversary of her death. Suspecting that the man is his wife’s killer, Leonard investigates in the hope of linking him to the crime. But the police remain unpersuaded, and Leonard realizes that the only recourse is to take matters into his own hands.

Dax Phelan, writer and director of JASMINE, took the time to speak with We Are Movie Geeks in advance of his film’s screening at The St. Louis International Film Festival.

Interview conducted by Tom Stockman November 3rd, 2015

We Are Movie Geeks: You’ll be here this weekend for a screening of your film JASMINE.

Dax Phelan: I’m already here. I have a few days before my film screens at a film festival in Kansas, so I thought I’d come to St. Louis and scout some locations for a movie that I’m planning on shooting here next year.

WAMG: You’re from here. What’s it like coming home to St. Louis and showing your first feature film?

DP: There was a period of time where I didn’t come back to St. Louis for many years because my parents had both retired and moved to New Orleans. I came back a year ago for my high school reunion and had a fantastic time and said to myself that I really need to come back to St. Louis more often. It so happens that I have a film project that I have been developing for a while that I want to film here. When you’re shooting a low-budget film and dealing with all the logistics and problems that are inevitable, like when it’s raining when it’s not supposed to be raining, you think to yourself that it will really be a miracle if this film ever plays on a big screen anywhere. To have JASMINE play in my hometown, at a theater like The Tivoli where I saw so many films that inspired me, is like a bucket list moment for me. I couldn’t be happier.

WAMG: So it sounds like you were a big movie buff growing up in St. Louis. Who are some of your favorite filmmakers?

DP:  I was a big fan of Steven Spielberg’s work of course.  Martin Scorsese’s films had a major impact. I first saw RESERVOIR DOGS when I was living in St. Louis and that shook up everybody. I was very much into filmmakers from that era in the 70s that inspired so many. When I was in college, that was when PULP FICTION came out, I also discovered the works of Lodge Kerrigan and Spike Lee and people like that. It all just kind of coalesced then.

WAMG: Let’s talk about your film JASMINE. How did you come up with this story?

DP: I had an idea for a character in my head for a long time. Whenever I was working on assignments, making a living as a screenwriter, I always yearned to be working on something more personal. This idea kept coming back to me over and over again. I always thought that if I ever turn to directing, I would pursue this idea and flush it out. I happened to be in Hong Kong on a writing job and I met Jason Tobin. Jason had been in Justin Lin’s BETTER LUCK TOMORROW. He’s the crazy one in that film and I thought he was so excellent in it. We were having dinner and I kept looking across the table at him and I thought he had such an interesting face. He’s Eurasian – half British and half Chinese. He had an interesting face and an interesting voice and a little voice in my head said that if I ever get around to writing that idea and that character, this is the guy! A few months later, Jason happened to be in Los Angeles shooting FAST AND FURIOUS TOKYO DRIFT and I took him to lunch and told him that I thought he was a fabulous actor. I couldn’t believe he hadn’t been the lead in a feature yet and I wanted to be that guy that put him in one. I told him we could write the story together, I would write the script, and he would play the lead. He liked the idea of shooting it on the streets of Hong Kong and that’s how it all began.

WAMG: Were you thinking Hong Kong when you came up with the original idea?

DP: I was thinking first and foremost about the character.  By being true to that character, and knowing that Jason was going to play the lead, it had to be Hong Kong.

WAMG: Did you speak the language?

DP: I speak just enough Cantonese to get myself in trouble, but unfortunately not enough to get myself out of it.

WAMG: What were some of the challenges of filming in Hong Kong?

DP: The language barrier, though that’s not as bad as it sounds. Hong Kong was a British colony up until 1997, so almost everybody I meet there speaks English to some degree and many speak it fluently. Many even have British accents. Even though it’s a very exotic city, it’s also very familiar. So that was an obstacle but certainly not a daunting one.

WAMG: Would you ever want to make a movie there again?

DP: Absolutely. I have a company called New Silk Road Entertainment that is working on future projects that, like JASMINE, are crossover films. East meets West films that are designed to appeal to audiences from both continents and around the world. Other issues you run into are things like weather. Even though we didn’t shoot during the rainy season, I think every day on the call sheet it said there would be a 90% chance of rain. We lost a day and a half of shooting because it would rain constantly and none of the shots matched. In general though, Hong Kong is a wonderful place to shoot a movie. The filmmaking community there is very supportive and there are a lot of talented filmmakers. They all do not just one job, but multiple jobs. There’s a real can-do attitude there. I think in the U.S., and in Hollywood, people are trying to come up with reasons not to make films.  They only make films if their forced into it or they’re afraid someone else is going to make it. In Hong Kong, by contrast – good script, bad script, no script, they’re going to make the movie. I find that energy really refreshing.

WAMG: You’ve worked as a writer and co-producer on a number of films. This is your first film as a director. Have you spent much time on the set of these films that you have worked on?

DP: It depends. On some of them I have. For many years I worked as a script doctor on projects. I made a lot of money but I received no credit. Sometimes I would be hired to just do a quick two-week dialogue polish for somebody, so not a lot of time on set. I was a development executive for Mace Neufeld for several years before I turned to screenwriting full-time. I was on the set of THE GENERAL’S DAUGHTER and THE SUM OF ALL FEARS, which he produced. A few others.

WAMG: Were you involved in filmmaking when you were young and living in St. Louis?

DP: I used to make films with my friend Bill McMahon, who still lives in St. Louis and went to  MICDS with me. He’s an associate producer on JASMINE. We used to make films on Bill’s camcorder in place of writing assignments at school. Instead of writing a paper, we would make a movie about the subject, which was a great excuse for us all to go to Bill’s house and turn it completely upside down trying to execute these very pretentious films ripping off every other movie we’d ever seen. I was hoping there’d be a VHS tape of these left, but we haven’t been able to track anything down.

WAMG: How did you get involved in the industry?

DP:  I left St. Louis to go to college at Southern Methodist in Dallas. I was studying pre-med and after about one semester, my grades were poor and I realized that I just wasn’t interested in the courses that one had to be interested in or to do well in that program. My freshman adviser asked if I had ever thought about taking film classes. I love watching movies, but the idea of making them was so foreign to me that I had no idea how to go about it. She encouraged me to take film courses and for the first time in my life, school didn’t feel like school anymore. I loved it so much I work through my summers because I couldn’t get enough. After I graduated, I knew I had a lot to learn so I moved to Los Angeles and enrolled in graduate school at the American Film Institute. I was there for two years. The summer after my first year, I started interning at the Paramount lot for Mace Neufeld, this veteran producer who had made the original THE OMEN as well as HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER and NO WAY OUT and so many other films that I loved growing up. I worked for him as a development intern for a year and when I graduated from AFI, he promoted me to story editor under his new deal with Sony Pictures. About a year later, they bumped me up to Creative Executive. Mace was a wonderful first boss to have. I was very fortunate in that regard. I made a lot of connections through that job, but at the same time, at night and on weekends, I was writing my own material.  My degree from AFI was in screenwriting so I was hoping to become a full-time screenwriter and eventually I sold one of the scripts that I had written and that enabled me to write full-time. I’m still doing it.

WAMG: How has JASMINE been received so far?

DP: Fantastic. We are very fortunate to have had our world premiere at the Hong Kong International film Festival then we had our U.S. premiere at the Dallas International Film Festival where we got some extraordinary reviews which I couldn’t be happier about. We had our Los Angeles premiere at the Asian-Pacific Film Festival which is a film festival that has long been close to my heart. We won five awards that night including Best Narrative Feature. It had been such a long road up to that point, so to be acknowledged like that by your peers was very heartwarming and meaningful. Since then we’ve toured round the world. We played in New York. We played it in Savannah last week and are playing it in Kansas on Friday. We’re scheduled to play at in Philadelphia and Anchorage Alaska and the Bahamas so it’s just been exploding.

WAMG: What can you tell me about this project that you may be filming in St. Louis? Will you be directing this one?

DP: Yes, the working title is Kirkwood. It’s based on a dream that I had in 2010. Like a lot of writers, I have ideas come to me in my sleep and I keep a notepad next to my bed. I wake up in the middle of the night sometimes and write down any ideas that might come to me, but most of the time when I wake up the next morning and read what I wrote, it’s usually a lot of garbage that doesn’t make any sense. But on this occasion, I basically wrote a story that I thought was very intriguing. It was autobiographical in some ways, but it wasn’t based on my life as much as it felt like sort of a parallel version of my life. It’s an idea that I haven’t been able to shake. I figure if it won’t leave me alone, I might as well make it. It’s a thriller, like JASMINE in the Polanski or Hitchcock tradition. It’s wonderful to be back in St. Louis and great to know that I’m going to be able to make this film here. To come home and make a film in your old backyard, I can’t imagine anything better than that.

WAMG: I’ve lived in Kirkwood all my life so I’m very excited about the project. Good luck with all your films and I’m sure your film JASMINE will do well at the St. Louis international film Festival this weekend.

DP: Thanks so much.