Yawning Bread. 28 February 2008  (Original article at www.yawningbread.com )

Slam the odds

In the press kit was this tale by Jonathan Lim of how it began:

Three years ago I was walking around the sports section in a department store in Beijing, looking to buy myself a new basketball. When I walked over to the rack of basketballs and picked up one of the latest models, this little boy came running up and excitedly pushed me aside and grabbed the very same ball I was looking at as if it was the only one left. Astonished at his brashness, I caught hold of something I’ll never forget. As he stood there holding the ball, there was a sparkle in his eyes that seemed to sum up every big dream this little guy could have at this moment in time.

I stood mesmerized looking at him daydreaming at this ball. As his father walked over, the little boy looked at his father, and without saying a word, quickly put the ball down and picked up the cheapest ball he could find, a barely useable rubber ball. The father nodded his head and the two of them walked off.

Everybody has a dream. That sparkle in the child’s eyes was what inspired me to write this scrīpt and make this film. His passion, dreams, and aspirations are the bases of the story I have to tell.

Jonathan, who is a Singapore Permanent Resident, though originally from Sibu, Malaysia, spent the next few months writing the scrīpt -- in English -- then a month more translating it into Chinese. He and Christian Lee, a Chinese-American now working in Singapore, were determined to make a film in China, despite being with no contacts, no funding and no experience in that unique market. They were dreaming as wildly as the little boy in the department store.

Although he had graduated from the New York Film Academy, Jonathan enrolled a year at the Beijing Film Academy to learn the ropes of making movies in China and hopefully to acquire a few contacts. Christian was doing something even more elementary: he was spending his time in a crash course learning Chinese!

But things looked up from the start. As Christian described it to me: "A good marker was that after the scrīpt was translated and we showed it around to some Chinese people, they said it looked promising." The two of them gained some confidence that the story would resonate with the audience. The scrīpt would later be improved through workshops, in which the dialogue was colloquialised to make it more realistic.

Basketball is a very popular sport in China. Even the American NBA (National Basketball Association) is muscling into the Chinese market and looking to develop their own basketball league there, for commercial reasons. As a movie about three teenage boys being bullied by high school basketball players, Slam should fit right in. As well, it's also a story about the main protagonist's difficult relationship with his father, something that many teenage boys around the world will fully appreciate.

But why a film in China? Clearly, the size of the Chinese market was an irresistible attraction, but the duo also saw an opportunity. Too many Chinese films were historical, or dealt with poverty and hardship, while many Hong Kong and Taiwanese films were "slap-sticky, over-the-top types", in Christian's words.

"We wanted something that would speak to a new generation of Chinese," he felt. Something that would be cool to them and relevant to their lives, and yet, "engage the audience in a search for a truth, and perhaps to question humanity."

Slam's storyline, as Christian admits, is nothing new. It's a solid, universal story of fighting the odds and living the dream. But what is new is that it's the first basketball movie that has China and Chinese society as context.

However, they had first to get financing. Christian had to write a business plan for the first time in his life and, together with a powerpoint presentation, knock on doors. Soon, they found a Sino-American joint venture company that had previously produced and marketed Chinese films. The company expressed interest in funding the making of Slam and handling the worldwide marketing.

"They seemed like straight shooters," Christian said, describing how the guys they met were forthright and to the point. Contract negotiations began.

With spirits high, the team moved into casting and pre-production. Then, as Christian was to learn, "Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong." Just a week before the final contract was to be signed, the film investment company's phones were disconnected. Jonathan and Christian soon discovered that the company had folded entirely, the Chinese partner having embezzled all its money!

They scrambled to find alternative means of support, eventually raising it privately from family and friends. The project would in the end cost nearly S$1 million.

Despite this near death experience, they pushed ahead.

Casting would be a major preoccupation. Getting known actors was out of the question. Besides the cost, in the Chinese film industry, "name" actors would not audition. They might send in a video, but otherwise expect things to be wrapped up over a chat or a meal.

So the two of them scoured over 100 schools and looked at thousands of students to find their actors. "It was difficult because we were trying to find actors who could play basketball, or basketball players who could act," Christian recalled. Eventually, they found a number of TV actors, whom they had to train every weekend for 6 months in basketball. The boys had to learn to execute over 200 basketball plays that were needed for the film.

The antagonists were played by real basketball players. These four guys knew their moves on court, but they had to be intensively coached through acting workshops and through interpreters. Jonathan and Christian didn't know how well they succeeded until the shoot.

"That's when those bullies really came alive," Christian recalled with wonderment. "Even Jonathan and I felt intimidated."

Not unusual with many film projects, some of the original casting didn't work out. Originally, one of the protagonists was supposed to be an overweight oafish guy, and Jonathan and Christian thought they had found one from the auditions. However, they later realised that this candidate didn't seem prepared to exert himself during preparation and training and so a switch had to be made.

Another change related to the role of the mother of the main character. The actress played it rather over-the-top, and in the end the entire character was cut out.

The actual filming period took 38 days in the summer with temperatures reaching 40 degrees, a decision that Christian now looks back on with some amazement. This was one of the triggers for more heart-stopping drama coming to the set.

As Christian described it in an email to me,

What happened with the gangsters (for lack of a better word) took place towards the end of our production when we shot the final basketball competition. We had rented a large warehouse, and set up the cage basketball set for that final scene. We needed a large group of extras, and most of them [turned out to be] hoodlums.

Conditions were rather poor with there being no air conditioning in this warehouse, and us shooting in August. We had plenty of water, but we didn't have air con, just big electric fans to circulate the air. At one point, these hoodlums (gangsters) rallied together all the extras, and decided to ask for more money. Instead of coming to us in a civil manner, they just started yelling at everyone to vacate the warehouse. Then they picked up sticks, and violently made everyone leave. When everyone was out, they chained up the gate to the warehouse. That's when they made their demand for more money, for all the extras. When we refused and tried to resume shooting by going to break their chain and lock, that's when the knives came out. We backed down, and started to negotiate how much more we had to pay them. We lost a full day of shooting from this episode.

And still it wasn't the last of it.

Another time where production came to a complete standstill, was once again at this bloody warehouse. All these difficulties seemed to come right at the end, just when we thought we were out of the woods. This time, it was the crew who went on strike. They refused to work without an increase in their pay. It seemed they took note of what happened with the extras, and saw weakness in their foreign bosses. At this stage, time was absolutely about money. We could not afford to lose shoot days, and we needed to get out of that warehouse, so we had to take the lesser of two evils. We settled, and got the darn film wrapped. It put a very awful taste in everyone's mouth, especially Jonathan's. Some of the people he thought he could trust sold him out completely.

The wonder is that the film was finished, and that it will open on 20 March 2008 at Golden Village cinemas in Vivocity. Jonathan and Christian were determined that the World Premiere should be in Singapore.

For more information, see, www.slamthemovie.com

I haven't seen the film yet, so it's not for me to say how good it is, but I would most certainly want to see the result, just to appreciate the audacity of the venture and the tenacity that saw it through. I think it helps to know the trials and tribulations involved in making a film like this, so that we can better appreciate these two guys' dream-come-true.

© Yawning Bread