LOCAL director Tony Pietra Arjuna is paying homage to his favourite filmmaker David Lynch in his latest film, Shadowplay, which mirrors Lynch’s popular TV series Twin Peaks.
His 90-minute film is about a private eye, Anton Shaw (played by Tony Eusoff), who is hired to find a missing woman named Lamya (Juria Hartmans). But Anton soon finds that her disappearance is linked to a traumatic event related to his own childhood years.
The film also stars Radhi Khalid, Stephen Rahman Hughes, Gavin Yap and Susan Lankester.
Tony says that – like Twin Peaks – his Shadowplay will have few supernatural elements.
“My film is a love letter to David Lynch,” says the 42-year-old director whose mother is a Malaysian and father an Indonesian.
It all started when he wrote a paper on Lynch when he was pursuing a degree in mass communication with a major in films.
“I never completed that paper,” he admits, adding that it would have taken him too long to write everything about Lynch.
Instead, he opted to write a shorter and easier piece on John Woo so that he could hand in the paper to his lecturer before the deadline.
Rather than waste what he has written on Lynch, Tony used the report and turned it into a fan flick, setting his story within the Twin Peaks universe.
He says that though his story took place in Malaysia, “if you carefully analyse Twin Peaks, you will find striking similarities between the supernatural elements in the show and with Malay mythology”.
About 10 years ago, Tony had planned to use some of the elements from his fan flick to turn Shadowplay into a film.
He had wanted to make his directorial debut with Shadowplay. But he could not find funding for the film.
“Most of them felt my story [was not suitable] for local taste,” he says. “In fact, one producer even said my film is a little too intellectual, and that Malaysian audiences do not like a thinking film.”
He decided to put Shadowplay on hold, and began co-directing other feature films such as Cuak and Train Station.
In 2017, he decided to pitch the Shadowplay story concept to Ken Petrie, an executive producer at the London-based production house, 27 Ten Productions. Petrie liked the story concept, and finally Tony got the funding to begin shooting the film last year.
Initially, he wanted to shoot the film in Bahasa Malaysia for our local audience. But Petrie had a different idea.
The producer felt the film would be better in English, and that the story catered more for English-speaking audiences.
Besides, an English-speaking film would be easier to sell to overseas market.
Co-produced by Kino-i Pictures and Radhikal Films, Shadowplay will be released in a digital format through Vimeo On Demand, instead of having a traditional cinema release.
Tony believes that with digital, the film could reach out to a bigger audience.
When asked to describe his film, Tony says: “If you expect everything to be spoon-fed to you, then you will not like the film. But if you treat the film like a puzzle that you need to deconstruct and solve, you will enjoy it better.”
Going back to his past, his first ambition was to become a comics artist. But after watching cult horror The Evil Dead 2 at the age of 10, he changed his mind and decided to be a filmmaker. He was mesmerised by what he saw and wanted to churn out similar films.
To him, both comics and filmmaking deal with “visual storytelling”.
His next film is a supernatural thriller called The Dark Eye, which he will be co-directing with Ayez Shaukat.
Tony Pietra Arjuna’s Shadowplay can be pre-ordered before its release on Aug 27 on Vimeo On Demand.
