The Cinequest Film Festival starts in one week, and right now there are hundreds of local writers, bartenders, theater operators, baristas, hotel clerks and wait staff (along with thousands of film lovers) who are busily preparing for this special time of year in San Jose.  But there are also quite a few local filmmakers who have been working like crazy to get their films ready for viewing.  It must be a great feeling to have your film premiering in your hometown – and also very scary.  We’ve sat down to interview a few of these filmmakers, and we’ll be posting the interviews throughout the week.

First up is Vijay Rajan, a local filmmaker who graduated from Santa Teresa High School and San Jose State University.  BASE EMOTIONS is not the first film Vijay has brought to Cinequest, and I’m sure it won’t be his last.  This is one of my favorite interviews ever, as it shows how much heart and soul is put into these films, and I think Vijay really represents what Cinequest is all about.

Vijay Rajan

1Q: Tell us a little about the origins of BASE EMOTIONS (playing at CQ with The Sentiment of the Flesh), from concept to financing.

“Base Emotions” is a film that came to me at a time when I was really struggling with the question of faith. How do we trust in people when we have been hurt by them? How do we trust in God — if we do — if we have been hurt by Him? I was considering the word “faithless” one day and was struck by the fact that it had two meanings: one of infidelity, and the other of not believing in something. I wanted to write a piece that would bring into direct conflict two characters who each were faithless in those different ways — one who was an adulterer and another who simply did not know how to believe. It just grew from there. Ultimately, it ended up being a character piece about a maddening woman named Katie, probably the first fully realized female character I’ve ever managed to successfully write; I know her incredibly well, and yet she always simultaneously surprises me. She is someone I hope the audience will desire, despise, be repulsed by, feel compassion for, and then ultimately will come to understand. This is because the film is also to an extent about judgment; we judge other people so easily, yet never seek to understand their perspectives, to realign our thinking to their priorities, their punishments, their sense of morality. In the course of one night, all of this plays out. Can the character of Justin, and through him the audience, seek to understand this woman whose behavior just seems to be so contrary to many of our own conceptions of morality?

Once I’d written it, I called up the guys who I’d worked with since film school, and in our various ways, we found our ways into the project. The entire short film, 22 minutes long, takes place in one hotel room with only two characters. In terms of financing, we found a willing partner and executive producer named Quoc Peyrot who believed in the project and basically donated all the camera equipment for the production. In terms of the actors and the set, it was all very low budget; my crew basically consisted of people who were passionate about this project and the filmmaking process. It was during this time that we basically went from being guys who worked together in film school to being a film company. Together, we bought a jib crane. Together, we paid for the location and the necessary supporting equipment. Together, we made the project work.

I have done work in the past I’ve been proud of, but “Base Emotions” is really the first project for our company — Siren Song Creations. And it’s really an honor to be able to say that now that it’s finally done, it will be having its world premiere at a film festival that is just a block down the street from where we filmed it at the Fairmont Hotel, and maybe three blocks down the street from the school where we as a group learned our craft and met each other. We are about as local as local filmmakers can get; yet we take a certain pride in the fact that our work is absolutely universal in quality. We just believe in the strength of storytelling. You can sink millions into a movie, but I hope our film — low-budget as it is — just has characters and a situation that will churn something visceral in our audiences, something uncomfortable but familiar, and something ultimately hopeful. I mean, it’s a question all of us deal with in our lives, right? How do we forgive?

2Q: You have attended Cinequest several times before as both filmmaker and film viewer. Explain your favorite parts of our film festival.

God, I love Cinequest. That’s the truth. I’ve had some bad years in my life recently, and Cinequest helps to (more…)