Sandi Tan’s Shirkers May Be the Year’s Most Compelling Grifter Story

In 1992, a budding Singaporean filmmaker named Sandi Tan, then 18, wrote a screenplay called Shirkers and recruited two cinephile classmates—Jasmine Ng and Sophie Siddique—to help produce it. Tan played S., a teenage outlaw with a distinctly Holden Caulfieldian worldview, who roams the sylvan landscape and dusty streets of a rapidly changing Singapore. The project would go down in the island nation’s slender cinematic history as the greatest indie movie never to see the light of day. That was because of Georges Cardona, Tan’s 40-something American film teacher, who signed on to direct Shirkers, then absconded with all 70 reels of footage, vanishing into thin air.

This year has abounded with stories of audacious grifters, and Cardona—who operated, says Tan, as “a kind of serial film thief,” taking pleasure in undermining the efforts of young filmmakers on multiple continents—may be our most compelling example yet. Tan grew up to be a “terrible 22-year-old” film critic, then a novelist (she penned 2012’s The Black Isle). Now 46, she’s finally a feature filmmaker: In 2011, a few years after her teacher’s untimely death, she was able to recover the Shirkers reels—mysteriously well preserved, yet incomplete—and this month, she’s unveiling a sort of remix on Netflix. Also called Shirkers, it’s a probing, wry, playful documentary that mashes up her original footage with archival video, graphics, voice-over, and interviews to tell the story not of S., but of her grown-up creator, in a “faux gumshoe” search for her long-lost younger self, and for posthumous traces of the con man whose betrayal shaped her adult life. For better or worse: “I’m of two minds,” Tan tells me, giggling, by Skype from her home in Los Angeles. “Because in an odd way the film exists better in this form.”

In its current manifestation, Shirkers is a beguiling, stranger-than-fiction caper about youthful gumption, older-male coercion, and female friendship gone awry (Tan and Ng have never quite resolved their differences about the escapade). It’s also, for Tan, a waltz with the ghost of Cardona, whose honed eye helped her create a movie as visually stunning as anything by, say, early Wes Anderson, and whose filmic obsession—he modeled himself after favorite characters, particularly James Spader’s dissolute drifter in Sex, Lies, and Videotape—taught her to see her own life in cinematic terms. “He wanted to be made mythic, and for years we resisted that,” she says of her ambivalence about granting him movie immortality. “But to tell our stories we had to tell his story. It’s like he gave me a gift I should not refuse, because it’s a good story.”

Tan and I chatted more about reincarnating Shirkers, why she thinks Cardona did what he did, and how revisiting her early ambitions has altered the course of her life.

You overlay a number of cinematic tropes—French New Wave voiceovers, for example—onto your story. Was that a reflection of how you saw your life as you lived it in this era?

This is a strange thing. It was kind of how I bonded with Georges. The way he remembered his own life was as if it was scenes from his favorite movies. It’s the way I dealt with things at that time as well, having grown up in a very strange family, with parents who separated before I was born, raised by my grandparents. All of it seemed slightly fairy-tale-ish, slightly surreal, dramatic. My whole childhood was telling stories to myself to make it feel okay. So this was another chapter in that grand fairy tale, I guess. Some people have called the film a punk-rock fairy tale. Some people have called it a ghost story. It has aspects of those kinds of stories. But when Georges talked about his past, he always just referenced what I later realized were scenes from movies in place of real events. Whether they really happened, I’m not entirely sure.

His whole personality, the way he carried himself, was modeled after his favorite performances, dubious ones, like Jean-Claude Brialy in Claire’s Knee, this middle-aged man who spends his summer vacation toying with teenage girls’ minds. It’s about a man whose goal is to touch a teenage girl’s knee—that’s all he does—but the psychological damage he inflicts is pretty severe, and worse than any conventional conquest. Georges modeled himself after this guy. He took movie plots and made them actual things to do in real life. Another movie he told me about a lot was The Green Room, this rare Truffaut film where he plays a guy whose wife died 10 years ago. He keeps all her things. He keeps a room in the house for her. So it’s this strange ghost story based on a Henry James story. And this was how Georges actually lived his life with Shirkers. When he stole the footage, he gave it a room in his house! This is how he lived his life, and how I lived my life. When I went on a road trip with him [in college], I was thinking of Badlands. I was’t completely sure he wouldn’t kill me. I was in it to experience life, I guess. I knew I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to experience something I could write about later on. I kind of felt if I didn’t get killed this would make a good story.

In the making of this new version of Shirkers you seem to have come to understand why Georges Cardona undermined the original film. But did you understand why he also went to great lengths to preserve aspects of it?

I think he’s an incredibly great storyteller and talented person. He lived his life as if it was his own novel, but the way he created it I think was by taking things away, by creating these holes in other people’s lives. That was his creation. He left black holes in the promising futures of these young people he met along the way, to make himself remembered. I always felt like making this film was antithetical to what we all actually wanted. He wanted to be made mythic. For years we wanted to resist that. In making the film, you’re making him a character that’s going to live on.

I think he wanted to be spoken of. But at the same time he [made sure] this film could never be put together whole. So he could exist as the void, be remembered as the person who caused this wound. He's stolen film from his other acolytes before. [Cardona] is a kind of serial film thief.

This is a man who never actually finished anything in his life. He’d never made a film, written a script himself. This is the closest he ever got. It freaked him out. I’m sure it really threatened him, to have Sophie and Jasmine running the show. He had no idea what to do on set, frankly. He was the DP. He’s got a great eye. He could operate a camera and shoot really nicely. But he wasn’t actually directing. He had never come to the point where he had to be judged for actually having made a film. I think on some level he was not just blocked, but terrified. And that was another reason. Besides the more sinister thing of causing hurt, he was feeling totally emasculated I’m sure. And I think he felt it was his right to run off with this film.

In a way, even if Cardona wasn’t directing the original movie, he was directing the movie that would come decades later, through his manipulation.

I don’t think he had that much imagination, but he certainly knew I would find myself editing the film in a strange conversation with him. He’s a strange foe, not a complete baddie. He did expand my world through movies. I guess he expanded all our worlds. And talking about real life as if it was a movie, it helped me make this film, trying to think about what he was thinking about.

The original Shirkers became something of an urban legend in the nascent Singaporean film community. Can you explain what it meant in context?

Nobody was making films back then. There were one or two little ones in the early nineties, like a really bad horror film about serial killers in 1991 that wanted to be a blockbuster. They cast it with American TV actors playing Singaporeans. Nobody took it seriously. Shirkers, not many people knew about, even though there were a couple newspaper articles about the making, a TV segment in some little news program. Of course those are not in circulation now. The only references to Shirkers now would be the people who knew we were making it: this film programmer Philip Cheah, a few friends of Jasmine’s. They really could not have imagined that it looked like it did, or that we had that many actors, or that it was strangely ambitious, that we shot in all these locations where no one had shot before. After Shirkers, in the late ’90s, people started making films. There was a push to start this indie film community in Singapore. Sophie, who is a film historian, thinks our film was actually the moment that the Singapore indie film scene began. In books it would begin a couple years later with this film called Mee Pok Man by Eric Khoo. Shirkers never happened and vanished when it should have been considered the first. I never say that, because I think: it never happened, therefore didn’t exist. But there are people who felt like it rightly should have been there. And the fact that it was stolen was kind of a tragic thing. I’m of two minds: I think if it had been completed, and was not conventional enough as a narrative, we would have been laughed at. We would have been discouraged from any more acts of filmmaking. So in a strange way I’m kind of ambivalent. It exists better in this form.

Cardona’s ex-wife, who spent 25 years married to him, appears in the film, though she won’t let her face be shown on camera. She’s a confusing character. It seems like you saw her as a kind of enabler. Am I clocking that correctly?

I’m very sympathetic to her. I feel like she was the one robbed the most. At the same time, I could not get a straight answer out of her. I’m sure she’s all mixed up. She was so ambivalent about this interview. At first she wanted to be interviewed on camera, then said no, then said, okay, we can shoot her and not show her face. When all was said and done she was really pleased that we had done this, because it helped her figure everything out.

There were complications in the marriage, but she kept sticking to him and taking him back and paying for his life because she loved him. It’s very touching. At the end [they were divorced but] she threw him a funeral. I think that was the last con. She paid for his funeral, gave him a really nice burial in a cemetery in Houston, the works. I said, “Why did you do that?” She said, “I’m from New Orleans. Death is important to us.”

In the film you mention later movies—Ghost World, Rushmore—that echo the style and vibe of original Shirkers. What accounts for the similarities?

It was the funniest thing. It was like the world sending signals. I was watching these things and thinking, Oh my god, that’s exactly what we were going for. I guess my point was, all of us, in the ’90s, were tapping into the same kind of aesthetic, because we watched the same films, thought the same way, had the same taste, read the same graphic novels. So we wound up shooting our little films and they wound up having strange affinities. My producer Jess Levin showed Jim Jarmusch’s editor, Jay Rabinowitz, some footage from Shirkers, and his jaw just dropped. This fit into the whole spectrum of indie films made in the ’90s. It would have just slipped right in. That made me feel more confident. It had a place in the world, had it existed.

Do you see that aesthetic as a collaboration with Georges?

Completely. Which is why we restored his credit as director. He was actually a really good DP. He framed it really nicely. But I must say that the production design was done by us kids. That was our taste. Though the primary colors were very much a Georges and me thing, color-coding the characters. It was something we got from Heathers, from Paris, Texas. Georges idolized that film.

Having made this, do you feel reacquainted with the version of yourself who had the gall to go out and realize her vision against all odds. Do you feel—

Braver?

Or like a filmmaker again?

I’ve always felt like a filmmaker. The novel was a digression. I’ve always felt like a filmmaker in my head. This was just gratifying that I could get it out of my head and into a form that people could watch. Going forward I’m pursuing things with a bit more fervor, a bit more confidence. Having other people have confidence in the fact that I can actually make a film makes a huge difference, rather than talking about it and nobody believing you. Which is what happened for years.

The two projects I’m actively pursuing are also teenage-girl movies, but with that very similar spirit of gung ho, brave, Let’s go do this! I’m very excited by that. I want to go on making films that can tap into that, because I think it’s powerful.

This interview has been condensed and edited.