The main shooting location was the Suarez family home, with other locations around Bacolod and Silay City. The challenge was how to make the people, the environment, and the spaces express the narrative, and not turn the film into a tourism travelogue.     

Instead of the strict, corporate hierarchies of commercial film shoots, Baláy Dakû became a familial experience. My family and household staff provided the day-to-day administrative and logistical support. I trusted Bahaghari with the film’s visual interpretation while I focused on the screenplay and the actors. Some of the cast members doubled as crew members like Riega who was a production assistant and Glynn who was a make-up artist. The camaraderie among cast members was jovial and supportive. My former high school English teacher, Mrs. Rosana Gaspay, even joined the shoot as a make-up artist. My parents, relatives, and friends were cast as extras in the birthday party scene. Workers from our family and relative’s farms were cast in farm scenes. Meals were served to the cast and crew on time. An honorarium and travel allowance were paid to each actor. With some exceptions, shooting usually began at 9 AM and ended by 7 PM. 

The film was shot over eleven days in April 2002. During the film’s production, an important reference and source of inspiration for film directing was Professor Ray Carney’s biography of John Cassavetes. The book got me very interested in the most overlooked part of filmmaking: directing actors. Hollywood actor turned film director John Cassavetes is considered the patron saint of independent filmmaking. He was also a master actors’ director who came up with his own unique and inimitable methods to direct actors. The acting performances in his films are frighteningly intense, singular and unpredictable compared to majority of other films. I was inspired by him to begin exploring my own methods of working with actors and pushing the boundaries of their performances.             

To address the unfinished screenplay, risky techniques pioneered also by Cassavetes and Andrei Tarkovsky were adopted. I chose to use the unfinished screenplay as a foundation, and write the rest of it as we shot the film. I would give the scenes to the actors as we went along, and as much as possible, shoot the film in sequence. 

Shooting in sequence is generally not practiced and is quite impractical. These techniques at their worst can create a haphazard and scatterbrained film. At their best, the improvisational nature of the writing and the shooting would keep the narrative spontaneous, fresh, and alive for both the actors and the crew. Mostly shooting in sequence would allow the actors a more organic and authentic process to grow their characters. 

My father pointed out that since English was my first language, my writing in Ilonggo might be limited and awkward. So, he suggested to allow the actors the freedom not to stick to the script all the time. When the actors felt it was needed, they would say their lines based on their interpretation of their characters. Significant parts of the natural, spontaneous behavior and feelings in the film were generated through this method.       

The Cassavetes biography did not have a step-by-step guide on how to direct actors. That information was anecdotal. So, working with the Baláy Dakû cast was an on-the-job learning process for me. I first worked on gaining the actors’ trust and respect which are the most crucial elements in any working relationship. I did not let my insecurities affect my professionalism towards the actors. Another crucial factor was that the veteran actors did not take advantage of me. They treated me as an equal. We developed a relationship of mutual trust and openness. The most convincing example of this was my relationship with Mandy Alimon (Julio). Mandy was my high school algebra teacher in La Salle Bacolod. Before we started shooting, I kept calling him “Sir Mandy” because I was used to calling him that as my teacher. He told me to stop calling him “sir”, which puzzled me then. I only realized later on that as an experienced, veteran actor, Mandy knew that if I kept calling him sir, the feeling of me being his former student and subordinate, would subconsciously prevent me from directing him freely. Another example was when Mandy and Joy were uncomfortable about shooting a sex scene. Both of them were teachers so limits needed to be imposed in the scene. Bahaghari and I sought their approval for specific details in the scene. We collaborated with them to make sure they were comfortable with what they were doing. 

I adopted Cassavetes’ principle that actors, just like your crew members, are equal collaborators in realizing the film. Instead of shooting for coverage or following a storyboard, we filmed scenes mostly using long takes. This method helps actors’ emotions, responses and behavior grow organically. The common practice of breaking a scene into several shots tends to stifle the natural flow of the actors’ performances. Instead of looking for “perfect takes”, we adopted Cassavetes’ methods of using multiple takes as rehearsal time for the scenes, as well as exploring different and more complex emotional variations of performing the scenes. The long takes also made the audience experience the slower pace of life in a provincial city like Bacolod.  

The scenes were prepared for, but not strictly predetermined. I realized while making Baláy Dakû that witnessing talented, skillful, and brave actors bringing a film’s scenes to life gave me great pleasure. I was very fortunate to have such a talented and excellent ensemble with almost effortless chemistry. Most of the principal actors also had a talent for improvisation which was crucial in creating the characters’ emotional and behavioral variations for the different takes. These methods created genuine moments of spontaneity and surprise for myself and even the actors. As D.H. Lawrence once said, “No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” 

The shooting style was a response to the slick, formulaic cinematography of mainstream film production. Borrowing from Cassavetes’ and Dogme 95 methods, the camera and the lighting would be subordinate to the actors. The ephemerality of the actor’s art form requires periods of stimulation, activity and rest. The glacial pace of industrial cinematography methods tends to kill the actors’ performances with a lot of waiting around. Fast camera and lighting set-ups – made even more possible with the portable digital technology then – would help keep the actors’ performances fresh and alive. We shot this fiction film like we were shooting a documentary: exploratory but also deliberate, naturalistic but sometimes expressionistic. We were all responsive to what was happening in front of the camera and sometimes even behind it.  

A creative process ritual was also established during the shooting of this film that would be consistently repeated throughout my subsequent films. The first few days of shooting usually seem to be all about the cast, crew, and the film itself, feeling each other out. I scheduled physically intimate scenes between Joy and Mandy on the first day of shooting. We learned that day that the two actors would need more time to become more physically comfortable with each other. Their day one scenes were rescheduled for reshooting, and the day one footage was scrapped. 

All these shooting experiences, methods, and techniques converged during the last few days of shooting. There was a crucial reckoning scene between Isabela (Riega) and Julio (Mandy) to be shot. It was a crying scene and I had never directed a crying scene before. I did not know how to get Riega to cry. I have heard stories where directors tend to rely on trite methods where they play sad music to make the actor artificially sad or even abusive methods where they curse the actors out or even physically hurt them. Even the filmmaker I admire the most John Cassavetes was not above using abusive directing methods. I refused to be either trite or abusive, so I went into the shooting the scene with no idea what to do. 

Just before we shot the scene at the terrace of my family home, I took Riega into my bedroom. We both sat down on the floor in silence. We did not say a word to each other. I was wracking my brain how to direct her to cry in the scene. The next moment, something spontaneous happened. I just kept repeating a line over and over again. “I don’t know what to do … I don’t know what to do …” Tears started filling my eyes. I was crying. Not before long, Riega also started crying next to me. We cried together for a few minutes. Then I stood up and said, “Okay, let’s shoot the scene.” Riega’s performance in the scene was quietly painful and beautiful. I would later call this technique “empathetic direction” and use it in different variations in subsequent films.         

Since I was writing half the script as we filmed, I did not have the film’s ending. This creative problem was made more urgent by Bahaghari telling me that he needed to leave for Manila for another shoot by the middle of April. To paraphrase the lines used to describe Cassavetes’s films: I did not need the film’s ending. I needed the moment when the film stops. The solution to the problem presented itself to me on the second-to-the-last day of the shoot. Bahaghari took a group photo of cast and crew. He played a photographer’s prank on us which gave me the idea for the film’s final shot.

While filming the climactic dinner scene on the second-to-the-last-evening of the shoot, I noticed something with Joy. Her acting interpretation of Stella’s behavior was not the same as the direction I gave her. Instead of cutting the takes and correcting her, I respected her interpretation. There were two reasons why I did not say “cut”. The first reason was that while Joy’s interpretation of the character at that moment was not the same as mine, it did not feel wrong. It was just different. The second reason was a lesson learned from the Cassavetes biography where he encountered a similar situation with his wife and lead actress Gena Rowlands during the filming of a A Woman Under the Influence. If a director and an actor do not agree about the interpretation of a character, the actor might be wrong, but the director has to be open to the possibility that the actor might have a deeper interpretation of that character. This was the case with both Rowlands and Joy. I only realized later on that Joy’s performance in that intense scene was painfully drawn from her own real life, her own personal experiences. Her courage and her skill added incalculable emotional layers to the scene.