Directors Emily Chang and Dan De Lorenzo go behind-the-scenes of Humberville's Poetry Slam

March 23, 12:18 AMLA Asian American Movie ExaminerEd Moy

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Emily Chang on stage as Maharaja

In co-directors, Emily Chang and Dan De Lorenzo's hilarious new short film The Humberville Poetry Slam, an Asian American poet, Liberty Fu, decides to organize a local slam contest to find four poets who can help him represent their small town and win the National Poetry Slam.

The film recently premiered at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAFF) as part of a shorts program entitled Is it worth it? Lemme work it.

Humberville stars real-life slam poet and spoken word performer Giles Li, along with a terrific ensemble cast that includes Michael Barra, Christine Witmer, Emilie McDonald, Ndidi Oriji, Ben Prayz, Melanie Ryan, Francesco Saviano, Bruce Smolanoff, Ben Stumpf,  and Chang. The film was produced by Shilpi Gupta, Chang and De Lorenzo, with cinematographer Matthew Jacobs and gaffer Ryan Minelli.

Taking a break from the film festival circuit, Chang and De Lorenzo joined in an online chat about the making of Humberville, the dubious Uncle Morty's Dub Shack, and the mystical character Maharaja Shaneeqa Savaasana LikeLike Wheatberry Lopez Chung jr.

(Note: The following Q&A was edited for brevity, readability and inappropriate content, which you can probably find on the Humberville Poetry Slam website in the near future.)

Ed: How did the idea for Humberville Poetry Slam come about?

Giles Li, Michael Barra and Christine Witmer

Emily Chang directing on the set

 

Ed:  The film takes place in Humberville. Where is that?

Dan:  It's funny -- many of our audience members were convinced that Humberville was a real place! It's an entirely made up town "somewhere in middle America," although, there is actually a Humberville, France. Our Humberville, we pictured somewhere near Indiana or something. We constructed our fictional town from the East Village in NYC and parts of New Jersey and put Emily's elementary photoshop skills to work.

Ed: Now I recall you mentioning that at one point Liberty Fu wasn't the main character, but rather the Ben Stahl character that was played by Ben Prayz.

Giles Li as Liberty Fu

Emily:  We had always wanted the non-poet to be the actual hero, but Liberty's character was just so fun to listen to and watch and as we were watching all the footage we realized it was Liberty's story. We realized that Liberty wasn't so much the "bad guy" we originally thought he was. He was the protagonist/antagonist flawed with the "hubris" of overconfidence that many poets have, but as we watched the footage we saw that he was really the heart of the movie. Giles did a great job of making him like-able even though he was such an untalented jerkface. Haha... sorry, he's kind of this untalented loser with big dreams and you really root for that. Ben was great, too. There was this whole B-story with Ben and his wife, but that also got cut out for time -- in the original cut, we follow all the characters at the end so you see what everyone ended up doing a few months later. In the final cut, we only kept Ben and Liberty's epilogues. The point was to show that everyone else in Humberville, after going to the slam, had somehow "achieved their dream" in their own eyes, except for Liberty, who was the original one who'd wanted glory in the first place.

Ed:  Do you think having Liberty/Giles in the lead helped get the short selected for SFIAAFF or would it have made been selected without Liberty being such a focal point?

Emily:  Do you mean Giles as an Asian or as a well known poet?

Ed:  Both... but also as an Asian American character.

Dan:  I think it helped that Giles was really a (very talented) poet, because it helped the whole thing ring true and I'm sure it helped to have an Asian lead in terms of getting into the festival, but beyond that, half our crew behind the camera was also Asian American.

 

Emily:  I am Chinese /Taiwanese American. Shilpi, our producer, is Indian, and Dan is Filipino -- just kidding. But "De Lorenzo" sounds like it could be though.

Humberville Slam Poet

Ed:  What is your ethnicity Dan?   Interesting, the film is very much multi-ethnic.

Emily:  He is a colonizer. Dan is Italian American. Very important for me to have a multi-ethnic cast /crew, as all my friends are.

 
Ed:  Ndidi Oriji was also excellent in an uptight character role.

 

Dan:  Yes! Ndidi's awesome. She was a friend of Emily's. She is actually a lawyer and an improv comedian by night. So it was a no-brainer.

Ed: She's really a lawyer?

Dan:  Yes! If you look at the books in the background of the set during her talking head they are actually her law books, which we forced her to lug in to the set. All 500-lbs of them, you know, trying to lend "authenticity."

Ed:  I liked the bit about her journals.

Emily:  Yea. I'm an avid journaler, so it was funny to me to make this woman so tightly wound and an overachiever that she would be competitive even with journaling.
 

Ed:  How long did it take to shoot the film? And I have to ask Dan about his IMDB credits on Uncle Morty's Dub Shack?

Dan:  We shot the film in four days for principal photography then two for B-roll and a summer to edit. Uncle Morty's Dub Shack is the show that I got hired on at Imaginasian TV. It was very fun. I worked with two really funny guys, Jimbo Matison and Trevor Moore of the sketch comedy group Whitest Kids U Know. Trevor just released a movie called Miss March. Anyway it was great fun working with those guys and we basically just re-dubbed old Asian B-movies and kung fu flicks with our own dialogue. It's very silly. Check some out on YouTube, it was compared to that old show Mystery Science Theater 3000 by SF Chronicle.

 

 

 

 

Ed: Do you two have anything else you'd like to share with readers, or maybe some inspiring words for Asian American Filmmakers dreaming up their first short film?

 

Dan:  First, I'll say that SFIAAFF was my first experience bringing a film to a fest and it was a lot of fun and I'm really happy with the way the audience reacted. I think they liked it and it made all the work worthwhile and I look forward to taking it around to as many festivals as we can.
 

Ed:  Was that the first large audience to see the film?

 
Dan:  It was! We had showed it to friends and stuff but that was the first large audience and also the first time we had seen it on the big screen. We had also screened it with a test audience of about 20 people. All film students.

Emily:  I don't feel like I'm really in a position to give advice, but if i had to, not so much for Asians, but for filmmakers in general, I'd say the lesson I learned was I had to stop just thinking about what I wanted to do and just get my [expletive deleted] together and DO it. Once I planned it out and got things going, it all came together. 

Dan:  As for the Italian readers, my advice is: cook spaghetti and meatballs as often as possible... always al dente... and meet a Chinese poet... and all your dreams will come true.

 

Humberville Slam Judges

 

Ed:  Awesome. So when can we expect to see that 90-minute or two-hour feature version online?

 

Dan:  As soon as we get back to NYC, we're on that.  Hoping we can get it up in the next couple of months or so.

Ed:  Great!  Maybe it can be a webisode series.

Dan:  That'd be fantastic. There is a particular "dirty scat" song that Mike Barra sings [that we can't print here] but  I think will be successful with online viral audiences.

For more about The Humberville Poetry Slam, you can go to:  www.humberville.com