ROYSTON TAN IS understandably nervous. His first feature film, the controversial 15 won international acclaim, including the Special Jury Award of the Deauville Asian Film Festival, and expectations are high for his next effort, 4:30, which he's just finished shooting and is in post-production in Thailand.
'I never expected the success of 15,' says Tan. 'So, I can't predict how this one will be received. The biggest pressure is within me because I'm trying to outdo myself this time. Not just with the film, but my own directing approach,' Tan says. 'In the past I liked to put pretty pictures in my film. I focused a lot on cinematography and music to convey the mood. But this time I told my cinematographer, 'Let's take all that away. Let's do storytelling at its bare minimum, removing all the flowery and cosmetic stuff and see whether we can still challenge ourselves.''
The result is an emotionally charged film with minimal dialogue and long takes, the 28-year-old film director says - which will be a contrast to the fast-cut style of his 2003 debut.
4:30 revolves around a young boy (played by Xiao Li Yuan, last seen in Homerun by Jack Neo) and his relationship with a suicidal Korean man (played by TV heartthrob Kim Young-jun) who's renting a room at the boy's home. Told from the perspective of the boy, this story of two different characters is less about friendship than about a shared experience and appreciation of solitude.
'4:30 is about two lonely people - two strangers getting connected,' Tan says. 'It's about how two different people from two different paths get acquainted with one another and find comfort in each other. It's about getting to know each other, even if in the film the two characters only have one speaking sentence. There's a very strong tinge of sadness, but also some heart-warming moments. While my first film was about hope, this film is about wishes.'
Tan started working on the script of 4:30 while shooting 15, a graphic film depicting Singapore's underbelly of gang violence and drug trafficking. 'Because I was working with some young gangsters I worried they would run away during the shoot, so I had them all in the same apartment. By the time I got to sleep it was usually 4.30am. I would look out the window and see people awake and I wondered what their story was.'