For all the surveillance in “Stranger Eyes,” it can be difficult for people to actually see one another for who they are in Yeo Hua Siew’s stirring second feature, set in Singapore where security cameras are capable of covering every inch of the city, but mystery still persists in every apartment as their residents go about their lives, oblivious to what’s going on next door. The director’s follow-up to “A Land Imagined,” in which the disappearance of a Chinese construction worker led the local police investigator on the case to begin thinking as he would to find him, requires a similar potential tragedy as (Wu Chien-Ho) and Anita Panna star as the crestfallen couple Junyang and Peiying, respectively, who have lost track of their infant daughter Bo and have different attitudes towards the subsequent investigation into her disappearance as Peiyang can be expected to sift through every bit of footage there is of their daughter’s last known appearance at the urging of Officer Zheng (Pete Teo), who is running the case, and Junyang would rather not, instead literally retracing his footsteps through a mall and market to see if he can remember anything from the day.
Bo’s whereabouts become a secondary question in the film when Junyang and Peiying begin to look unrecognizable to one another as the incident reveals a side of themselves that they’ve never seen before and it turns out they aren’t the only ones looking hard for some kind of meaning when Lao Wu (Lee Kang-sheng), an employee from the market where Bo was last seen, lives across the way and regularly peers into the couple’s apartment from several stories up, curious about the aftermath of the incident when he’s quite familiar with the details and perhaps he may even be responsible. Yeo intriguingly shifts the perspective between each of the three main characters, uncovering blind spots in each of their views and begins to expose one for an audience watching as well when the film defies expectations as the camera makes certain associations with characters that are bound to lead astray. Everyone in “Stranger Eyes” has a a richer and more dynamic life than initially meets the eye and in a world where every move can be tracked, it seems there can be less and less introspection of what makes others tick, resulting in a different way of losing sight of the bigger picture.
After premiering last year at the Venice Film Festival and making subsequent stops at the New York Film Festival, BFI London and Marrakech, among others, “Stranger Eyes” is making its way into U.S. theaters for a proper theatrical run and Yeo graciously took the time to talk about considering an entire culture through a tale of two apartments, the search required to find a pair of buildings across from one another that could accommodate such a shoot and achieving the gaze of different characters in all its complexity.
How did this all come together for you? From what I understand, it all opened up from an image of a man on a park bench.
As you’ve read, I was looking at people at the park and I really have been wanting to explore this topic of how we look at each other in our day and age. Coming from a city like Singapore, which is heavily surveillanced, I know that I’ve always been watched and even now more so than before [because of] the way we look at each other through social media so intensely. If I’m looking at my neighbors every day and knowing that someone else is watching me watching my neighbor, there’s a chain of gazes going on and I’ve been wanting to put a lot of these ideas that have been culminating in my mind into a film.
Is it true you had this idea roughly a decade ago? Had it changed much over the years?
Yes, a lot. One of the things that was very big was that there was a pandemic and a lot of the discourse around surveillance changed. Before the pandemic we were talking about, “Oh, should we allow surveillance to encroach into our personal private spaces?” Then during the pandemic, it was about “We need to surveillance for the safety of others. We need to tell people where we’ve been, who we’ve met [to avoid the spread of the virus].” But after the pandemic, we’re not going to a time before that, so this idea of how to coexist with surveillance really came to its maturity. Also in 10 years, a lot has changed — my own style, my own writing — and I also made another film in between called “A Land Imagined,” and you might see some something that I was exploring in terms of bringing two perspectives into a central perspective and interchanging them throughout the film. In a way, I was putting [that approach] through its paces to to really explore it in “Stranger Eyes,” but this time through through gazes.
With my films in general, I am someone who is very interested in in the idea of a multi-perspective reality, [where] there is never really one grand truth to it all. Our reality is made up of the sum and what better to explore this in a film where we can really bring together different perspectives and then show you how we are seeing things that might be the same thing but through very different lenses and different characters and the ways of looking at each other. I wanted to bring together this idea of perspectives and how it changes.
How did you relate to your actors with the cameras when it’s an extension of their gaze at the same time they’re being looked at?
The main discussion was always how do we capture the perspectives of the characters, and of course it was important for us to shoot the character who’s looking at something before we shoot what he’s looking at because we really wanted to capture how the character was looking at something, but then we’d mimic that through the camera instead of us trying to impose the way we are looking at the world and then shooting the characters. Sometimes that might help us economize our time better, but then it was also more truthful to us that we would shoot the characters and try to study how they are looking at things before we turn the camera back onto what they’re looking at. This way of shooting became very much our process throughout the filming.
Would you actually film the surveillance footage before going ahead with more traditional scenes to give the actors something to engage with?
First and foremost, it looked like we were trying to recreate a lot of fancy camera stuff, but in reality we really used 90% of the footage we could find on with the actual cameras [that would be in places like] in the supermarket. All these places, the cameras were were already there for us and we just had to find a way to tap into them, so it wasn’t us recreating so much because the reality was sometimes as crazy as the fiction itself. But at the same time, of course, it was also about managing the actors’ schedules. Most of them could only make it [to set] for this certain amount of time, so some of it we had to shoot beforehand and then get them to watch it, but there were also moments where we couldn’t get the schedules to work, so the actors had to look at a screen that we’d later compose over [with VFX] but that was minimal.
How did you find your cast? It seems like you’re pulling from a lot of different countries.
There were some people who I really wanted to work with on this film, particularly Lee Kang-Sheng From Taiwan. He’s a regular in the films of Tsai Ming-Liang and he’s always had this very powerful gaze In his eyes, so it was a bit of a no-brainer when I thought of a very silent voyeur with a very powerful gaze. Both he and [Wu Chien-Ho] who plays the character of Junyang were top of mind. Then I had people who I really wanted to work with from Taiwan and this became a Singapore/Taiwan co-production. I like to cast the net a bit wide and for example with the the police officer, [the actor playing him] Pete Teo is from Malaysia and I am an admirer of his work and felt like he could really capture this almost strange film noir/cynical detective role, so it was a real nice mix. I also feel like it was good for the actors because they were very fresh towards each other. Instead of always acting within their own comfortable context, they were working with actors from different backgrounds, so that kept them on their toes and that was really nice.
Did anything happen once you got the actors involved that you could excited about that you might not have anticipated?
The ideas of my scripts are very conceptual, whether it is about voyeurism and surveillance, but seeing my actors manifest or personify these ideas in the flesh is never something that I can imagine while I’m writing the film. The most obvious would be Lee Kang-Sheng [where] of course I’m very familiar with his movies, but coming in to play this this role of the voyeur, I remember when I saw him in the scene of him sitting at the park on the park bench, just lazing around, he brought us this humanity to his role that for me was really moving [and I thought], “I fell in love with the creepy stalker!?!”
That empathy that’s given to all the characters is a really amazing part of this. As is you being able to shoot across the Singapore skyline from one building to another to capture the voyeurism. What was that like to figure out?
That might be the most difficult task, and it seemed like a simple film in that sense — apartment flats looking at each other — but in reality, we needed to get the perfect one. Not too high and not too low because once the the angles shifted, it blocks your viewing angle into the other apartment across [the way], so we had to find the ones of the perfect height. Then when they were not sets, but real apartments, these are apartments that were lived in and we were shooting for a long time, so we had to invite the family to allow us to use their house and to be housed in a in a hotel for two weeks while we shoot the film and it needed to be a pair, so if one [side] didn’t agree, the pair both won’t work. I’m very thankful for having an amazing team helping me get through all these logistics, but it was really difficult because a month before we started shooting, one of [the pair we initially had] dropped out, so we were scrambling because without that there was no shoot, but we managed to secure another pair, which is the final one that you see in the film.
This is a more conceptual question, but you’ve said before the mothers in the film are reflections of the families that they’re in. Were those characters a part of this from the start?
Yes, I always had constructed this film as a little bit of a mirror reflection between the two apartments, and then as the film slowly burns itself up, you see this strange, uncanny mirroring between them and the mother character [in both apartments] anchors that relationship between them. But in a lot of Asian societies, there’s this nuclear family that includes the mother and the grandparents and we’re always living together. It’s also a statement of how expensive housing is in Singapore. Young couples are not financially able to move into their own apartments and they’re always staying with their parents. Meanwhile, elderly parents are always living with their children to take care of them because elder care is too expensive. So it [reflects] how our society in Singapore is constructed and it’s an intergenerational situation within every apartment and house and it was just a very natural thing for me to include this character of the mother. It also plays an important role because one of them actually has no sight, and you can say that could be the fate of the younger mother [as she turns a blind eye to what’s happening] if you are to take the reflection of these two families on a more metaphysical level.
What’s it been like seeing the reaction to the film as you’ve taken it around the world?
It’s overwhelming and super thrilling for me. We make films so that we can show it to everybody, but what’s interesting is always that to to see how people react very differently around the world and have very different relationship with surveillance. Some cities like London are heavily surveilled and you have other countries that don’t really care as much about the the state surveillance or it doesn’t really encroach into their lives, so different audiences react very differently, even though there are themes that cuts across the board. At the same time, I think that relationship of how close you live with your neighbor would affect how you watch this film because of the density of cities. I remember in New York, people were laughing a lot in the film, and they took it as as a dark comedy, but when I was showing it in Europe, they were very serious, so it’s very fascinating to have this film be seen by audiences of different contexts.
“Stranger Eyes” opens on August 29th in New York at Film at Lincoln Center, September 5th in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Royal, September 14th at the Cleveland Cinematheque and September 19th in St. Louis at the Webster Film Series.