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Food-for-the-Gods.com Sits Down with
Director H. Scott Hughes
BURNABY, BRITISH COLUMBIA--"The film's music was of particular importance to me. I was a musician long before I was a filmmaker," says Food for the Gods writer/director H. Scott Hughes, a professional vocalist and former music educator in the Texas public school system. Classically trained, he earned a degree in music from Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi, where he studied composition and orchestration under multi-ASCAP Award winning composer Lawrence Weiner. Hughes scored and performed the soundtrack from the Canadian Mountie-themed documentary Duty, which he also co-wrote and produced. Prior to that, he composed for a number of musical stage productions, including The Big Break at West Texas A&M University, Canyon, and Shakespeare's Metamorphosis at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.
"Music is such a part of my writing," he says. "Every time I write a new story, invariably I write a new song or theme to go with it. Well, along comes this incredible opportunity to make Food for the Gods--a film I had wanted to do for years. Just the fact that my project was chosen for production, and I was even allowed to direct it, that alone was humbling enough. And yet, I knew that if this film was going to happen, I was determined to press my luck even further: I had to score it. I knew what I wanted and what I wanted to bring to it, but I also knew I wanted a partner to help bring it to fruition--to help bring a certain authenticity to an Asian-themed film that I wasn't sure I could deliver alone. As such, Yvette Lu was a godsend."
Dr. Yvette Lu was only one of dozens of actresses auditioning for the role of Sheenyana, the lead character of Food for the Gods. "Yvette came in very late in the process," says Hughes, "I think it was the last day. I had never met her before then. We had already seen some great performances--including Beverly [Wu] who absolutely blew us away. But when Yvette came in, we all knew immediately that there was something particularly special about her. Even to my mother, who created the character in the original short story, Yvette Lu was Sheenyana. Likewise, no one else but Beverly Wu could have played her manipulative cousin, Xionko." Lu and Wu had the perfect chemistry as sibling rivals on-screen, and off-screen the two women quickly became friends--both sharing a love for music and singing. It was fitting that they would both soon lend their talents to the film's musical soundtrack.
Like Hughes, Lu was classically trained in music beginning with Canada's Royal Conservatory of Music. An accomplished pianist and mezzo-soprano, Lu was inspired by the film's compelling storyline to write a series of vocal themes and approached H. Scott Hughes. Hughes loved them and knew that he had found his co-composer without ever leaving the set. Nor did he have to leave the set to find his female vocalists. Yvette Lu and Beverly Wu are both practiced mezzo-sopranos. "Their harmony was gorgeous--and they sang in the Japanese-like Kyontawa language, which we created for the film. Yvette and I wrote the lyrics in English, and Phillip Matte, my co-writer on the screenplay, added some phrases as well. Then we translated it into Kyontawa. Just like in the film, it's not gibberish. They're singing with very specific words, with a very specific grammar, for a very specific meaning."
During postproduction, Lu and Hughes spent many days at a piano and in front of a TV monitor, reviewing dailies and timing motifs to editorial cuts. "It's a challenging process," says Hughes, "especially when you know that the edit is constantly changing, and you have to anticipate those cuts and design the music to be flexible, while still having specific poignancy to a particular scene. Every note has to be custom made, every one highlighting a specific emotion, even if it's so subtle in the background, you hardly know it's there. So, Yvette and I also spent a lot of time in the edit lab with Cory [Johnson]--the three of us working together. It was a wonderfully unique situation: the director, the editor, and the star, sitting together in a room planning the scenes note by note. I don't think that happens very often."
Lu and Hughes knew that in order to capture the authenticity needed, they needed authentic instrumentation. Enter Professor of Music Xu Qian of the University of British Columbia, who only recently arrived in Canada from Beijing, China. "The erhu is a beautiful and fascinating instrument," explains Hughes, "and predates the European violin by centuries. We are talking ancient. And talk about true authenticity, because Professor Xu speaks little English, communication was challenging at times. To say that someone speaks "Chinese" is a bit of a misnomer--there's really no such thing. There are multiple Chinese languages or dialects. Yvette's family is from Hong Kong, so she speaks Cantonese. Professor Xu speaks Mandarin. Fortunately, Nihkol Xu, our makeup artist who is also from Beijing, was such a trooper to come into the recording studio, above and beyond the call of duty, and act as a translator between two Chinese-speaking musicians (Qian and Yvette), who otherwise wouldn't be able to understand each other. However, at the end of the day, we all shared a universal language--and that was the music. I still get chills remembering how incredible he was. It was such a wonderful educational experience. I've worked on numerous musical endeavors, and I don't think I've ever been so proud and so humbled to work with such dedicated and talented people--and that goes for the entire film, everyone who worked on it. They did it."
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