Five Dollar Friday — Jeremy Lu & 'Monkey Drum'

A filmmaker and their short film deserving of your attention

Happy Five Dollar Friday!

Today I want to introduce you to Jeremy Lu, a tricultural Asian American filmmaker from the Bay Area who is currently finishing up his studies at NYU Tisch.

His latest project is a Japanese folk nightmare called Monkey Drum.

Set entirely in an isolated cabin in the rural Japanese countryside, Monkey Drum tells the story of Minato, a reclusive elderly man who begins taking care of a starving father and his son. When a fierce storm strands the three overnight, tensions rise as family secrets threaten to rot the cabin from the inside out. A cold, nightmarish, and eerily atmospheric horror film, Monkey Drum oscillates between moments of quiet reflection and visceral brutality - unflinchingly exploring themes of self-neglect, familial dysfunction, and grief.

What I love about your campaign video is that you were able to so effectively tease your vision for Monkey Drum with the resources you currently had available to you. We get to see you transform a New York apartment with just shadow, sound, and two actors. Tell me a little more about what it took to make the video.

Haha I'm glad it came across! Funnily enough, there were no plans at all to include the scene in the final campaign video! This was originally a rehearsal scene we shot as our "soft audition" for Tadashi Mitsui (Minato) and Masaya Okubo (Isseki) -- two immensely talented and experienced Japanese-speaking actors who we thought were perfect for the roles.

It was a completely stripped-down set up in the apartment when we shot the sequence - just me, Tadashi, Masaya, and Tian Pei (our director of photography) - which honestly worked perfectly for the scene we were trying to shoot. If you've read the script, you'd know how defining the scene is within the context of the larger story and it was honestly just great to play around with it in such a stripped-down environment. As a director, I love being loose and free whenever I'm rehearsing scenes!

When it came time to make the campaign video, I just thought it'd work well to film my segment in the same room we shot the rehearsal in. Even before we launched the campaign, I always just wanted potential supporters and audiences of the project to feel included. In my head, the best way to do that was to step into that space myself and introduce the film in a location we shot a rehearsal in.

Kudos, it worked with me. You mention in the video this film is born from a love of intimate stories that live and breathe Asian culture. Are there any filmmakers who have served as key inspirations in the development of this project?

I absolutely adore the work of Akira Kurosawa! I also work as a narrative cinematographer and Kurosawa's compositions are almost always some of the first points of reference I cite in tone meetings.

Because Monkey Drum is a one-location all-interior film, I've always wanted the visual language to emphasize compositions and the literal architecture of the space. Kurosawa - and honestly Japanese cinema's - ability to compose frames with such precision and intention always just felt so synonymous with the way I envisioned telling this story. From haikus to short stories, poeticism is such a synergetic component of Japanese storytelling culture and I wanted to honor that as much as possible in the development of this film.

Every frame should feel as communicative as a line of dialogue and the process of working that out with my cinematographer and production designer has been a real blast!

Your intentionality with framing does shine through in your previous film, The Chameleon. Its compositions feel meticulously crafted.

I was fortunate to work with Angela Kwak, an incredibly talented story-driven DP, to build that reserved, limited-shot feel of The Chameleon.

Tell me more about that process so far on Monkey Drum with your cinematographer and production designer.

Tian and Vivian Zhang (our production designer) are good friends of mine as well as some of my closest collaborators. Especially as a student filmmaker, it's definitely important to work with people you're able to trust - both on a personal and artistic level.

It's understated how much trust goes into collaborating on an artistic level especially when you're dealing with a piece that carries cultural significance. You're literally welcoming another artist in the sandbox of your own imagination and something I've really been able to learn over the past four years is how to develop that sense of trust. It's the trust I have for these two insanely talented artists (and friends) that makes it so consistently easy for us to bounce millions of ideas off of each other.

We're in the midst of pre-production right now so a lot of our creative work is just a big boring stack of handwritten and typed notes. I also work as a cinematographer/gaffer so being able to bring my own process and instincts as a DP to a project I'm directing has really helped me communicate my intentions a lot easier.

As a DP, I'm a big fan of simply writing everything the director tells me in tone meetings in a small hand-journal so a large majority of our process involves just dumping our conversations in a giant document. It's important for me to have an organized ‘library’ of the film's visual language on paper so it's always in the back of our heads when we're making some of our more detailed decisions on imagery. It's also important to steer away from rigidity and not let the specificity of the documents and prep-work paralyze you on set. Organization is nice but looseness is essential.

You’re currently in New York City and the cabin you’re filming at is in Connecticut. Have you been in the space with your DP & PD? Has it been a challenge to prep from afar?

Such a fun challenge! We don't start location scouting until early March so a lot of our prep-work has involved analyzing lots of photos (taken by our lovely producing team) and attempting to mock up rough floor plans from that.

I mentioned this earlier but so much of the film's visual language is dictated by the architecture of the space. The production design of the cabin itself is supposed to feel stagnant, rigid, and "rooted to the Earth" while the cinematography leans more fluid and dynamic. A shorter way to put that is so much of the film's vocabulary is reliant on the geometry of the set itself.

So it's definitely challenging to prep when the space is an hour and a half away from NYC. Monkey Drum is supposed to be a sensory experience so eliminating our senses from the preparation has been really interesting! I guess, in a way, our distance from the location has helped our process feel loose and open. We're able to pitch ideas and images that aren't tethered to the look and feel of a specific environment.

I really enjoyed the evocative imagery and the bits of Japanese language and culture threaded throughout your campaign page. I personally find the intricacies of language fascinating. One example in particular that stuck out to me was your explanation of the “I am disturbing” greeting that’s customary when entering someone’s home. Clearly Monkey Drum will be an incredibly rewarding experience for a viewer that’s able to recognize and unpack the cultural nuances of your film. But you also mention in the video that film isn’t exclusive to the experience of being Japanese. How are you approaching finding that balance?

I was raised through the lens of Filipino, Japanese, and Chinese cultures so this whole pressure of "picking" a culture to represent through my art has always felt very strange to me. It's obviously important to be as truthful and deliberate as possible when representing culture - as POC/minority artists are definitely aware of what happens when it's done carelessly - but for me, the balance comes in the form of letting Asian characters exist just for the sake of existing. It's taken so long for me to make a film about the Asian experience purely because I don't know if I'm currently equipped or ready to tackle that subject. I just want to make films with voices from my own culture that aren't necessarily exclusive to my own cultural experiences. Grief, self-neglect, and familial dysfunction are all themes that Monkey Drum explores through the lens of Japanese culture but it's all stuff that is universal to the human experience.

I’m excited for you to dive into this world and, hopefully, learn a little more about yourself in the process.

Thanks for letting me watch The Chameleon. It’s a beautiful character study that meditates on a complicated father/daughter dynamic. Although different in genre, I can see thematic and tonal threads that connect the two films. Tell me about the thought process of choosing the subject of your next film and how you landed on Monkey Drum.

No one I know agrees with me on this but The Chameleon was always written and directed as a horror movie. At least in my head it (still) is. While Monkey Drum is more of a horror story in the traditional sense, there are definitely many thematic threads that connect the two films. I'd even go so far to say that I'd love for people to one day watch the two back-to-back as companion pieces. In the simplest sense possible, The Chameleon and Monkey Drum are both films about family and how it's ironically the intimacy of family that can cause them to rupture.

Interesting! I, too, would not have described The Chameleon as a horror film.

I can definitely understand why. A large part of The Chameleon has always just felt inherently horrific in the sense that it depicts an otherwise healthy and warm relationship crashing down as the result of a single traumatic second. For me, there's nothing more horrifying than the idea of someone you love just inexplicably being "someone else" and it's these abstract concepts of "replacement" and "impostorizing" that drive the film for me.

The Chameleon and Monkey Drum share these thematic threads. Monkey Drum is about a bond between an old man and a family that quickly turns sinister but, in my head, it's simply just another extension of the "family drama" genre. I'm a sucker for dramatizing strange/non-traditional family dynamics so I feel very fortunate I'm able to further that storytelling instinct in this short!

What have you learned from making The Chameleon that you hope to apply to Monkey Drum?

I'm a student filmmaker. So many of my collaborators are working on my films for free. The math is simple. I don't know if this makes sense but it's so much better to lead as a director when you're leading from a place of gratitude rather than survival. Such a warm and welcoming environment was fostered on the set of The Chameleon (all credit to the lovely crew) but it's that warmth that gave me the freedom to direct from a place of truth.

I definitely want to foster a similar environment on Monkey Drum because at the end of the day, if you're not artistically fulfilled or even just having fun when directing, what the hell is the point? I've worked in the camera and G&E department of so many student/independent film sets and it's always obvious whenever a director leads without gratitude.

It's a privilege to make a film (let alone having a hard working and talented crew supporting your efforts) and the process should reflect that!

Amen to that.

In your campaign you write “I see this film as an open letter to my older self, not a tragedy. It’s an optimistic call towards a version of myself decades in the future who I hope can welcome me with open arms should I come knocking on his door one day.”

Considering the heaviness inherent to the story of Monkey Drum, I’d love to hear about the optimism you find in bringing this film to life.

Monkey Drum is a cruel and cynical script in so many ways but I think it's my optimism as a person that allows me to access and write about these darker themes from an objective perspective.

I don't want audiences to root for Minato and I really don't want audiences to feel like Minato's ultimate fate in the film is ‘unavoidable.’ Minato is a character that is (literally) self-destructive by nature and if anything, I want audiences to leave the film with a need to take care of themselves better. Exploring tragedy and horror is just my way of avoiding it (and hopefully helping others avoid it) in real life.

I think I'm optimistic out of necessity. Every day, the world finds a new way to make me all the more terrified about living in it. Ironically, my favorite way to cope with my crippling fear of the world is to create an entire fabricated situation about said fear and film it.

Speaking of optimism, when I think back to when I graduated from film school, I remember it being a time of optimism, wonder, and seemingly infinite possibilities in front of me. I didn't know exactly what I wanted to be doing in the film & TV industry but I knew I somehow wanted to be adjacent to storytelling on a grand scale. I didn't have any doubt I'd figure it out, somehow, someway.

There's been a lot of doom and gloom in film and especially TV these days. We're going on 5+ years of uncertainty with the Covid shutdowns, declining movie theater attendance, Wall Street re-prioritizing profit over growth, the strikes, interest rates rising, production jobs going overseas, attention going to Youtube/TikTok instead, and the fear of AI. I mean, even just writing that out is deflating.

How has all that permeated the film school environment? Or has it? And how do you think about your own future as a filmmaker?

I feel like almost anything can permeate the film school environment as it's genuinely such a microcosmic bubble at the whims of an industry that just keeps changing! We're constantly fearing and debating about AI, strike shutdowns, and declining attention spans but it's mainly the uncertainty of the industry that has permeated the film school environment.

Regarding my own future as a filmmaker, young artists represent the future of the film industry. I want to have a say in how that road is paved but, particularly at the student level, it's much easier to control a film than it is to control an uncertain industry. The act of creating art is so inherently human to the point where I can optimistically say that no amount of uncertainty will ever take away the art itself. My love for art is what first led me to filmmaking and what will continue to lead me.

That’s a wonderful sentiment to end on. Thank you for sharing your story with me, and best of luck to you and your team as you head towards production.

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You can join me in supporting Monkey Drum by contributing to their campaign here:

Thanks to new paid subscribers coming aboard, my weekly contribution has gone up from $7 last week to $13 this week.

Again, it’s better for everyone involved if you contribute directly to the filmmakers and don’t become a paid subscriber to this newsletter. But, if you ain’t got time for that every week, you can click the ‘easy’ button and I’ll contribute on your behalf.