Uncle Goose Waits For A Phone Call

This is a story about waiting.
Uncle Goose has lived long enough — 75 years — to understand that patience is always rewarded. And so he waits, for that telephone call that never really arrives.

First and foremost, the thing that kept me up at night, made me jump awake in the frosty London morns onto my Final Draft software, was the character of Uncle Goose — how an old man decides to do something extraordinary about something as mundane as waiting for a telephone call. Hooking a telephone set with a 50-metre cable and walking it to the shops, why not? Much like Lamorisse’s La ballon rouge, like Polish’s The Astronaut Farmer, like Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, why not indeed.
The thematic question I wanted to answer with this film is this: What else can an old man look forward to? With old age comes all kinds of familial and social worries and banality, what then makes him happy? In making the film, I have found the answer for myself and it lies with the Chinese title of the film — to declutter, or to let things go. I shall however let my audience discover their own meaning within the story.

The screenplay for the film was originally written in Chinese, before being translated for production in English. And it had to be so. Only in the Chinese language did I feel equipped to delineate the staccato and stoic nature of a Chinese old man.
The other reason for writing in Chinese is the Teochew element I wanted to instill in the film. Teochew is a dialect of the Chinese language often heard in Singapore, which would also sound familiar to people in Taiwan, Thailand, South of China and so on. All of my grandparents came from the Teochew region of China back a long time ago. And so 100% of the dialogue in this film are spoken in Teochew, a small step that I’ve taken to be closer to my grandmother’s tongue before it becomes thoroughly extinct in Singapore.

I had the fortuitous opportunity to work with Singapore’s veteran actor Chen Shucheng. How he agreed to play the part would have to be a story for another time. Chen’s age, life experience, his authentic Teochew fluency and mannerisms have truly brought to the screen an extraordinary portrayal of Uncle Goose. For that I take my hat off to him. Uncle Goose has broken the stereotype of the sluggish pensioner, detached from the times. Uncle Goose is exactly like a young man, except with age and life experience.

I hope that the audience can feel the magic from the film, as we have felt making it. I hope to make more movies that would bring even more magic to the world. And why ever not?