The Making of Dark Gift

Friday, 13 January 2012 21:23

with Director Scott McQuaid

The initial idea of the ‘Dark Gift’ documentary was just to be a reference point for silek harimau practitioners within our aliran (tribe).

I just wanted to have a visual document of the pesilats (silat players) that had gone before me so I had a reference but then from a very small project it started to expand into this epic documentary that took over seven years for me to shoot and produce.

It started with me just shooting footage of seminars and collecting some archive footage of my teacher’s Grandmaster Adityo Hanafi and Maha Guru Richard Crabbe de-Bordes. Then during my merantau (right of passage) which took me across Indonesia and Asia for two years I shot as much footage as possible. From randai performances of silek and its dances, to establishing shots of the Sumatran jungle and the Minangkabau houses and its general landscape right across Indonesia into Jawa and Bali.

While I was in Yogyakarta shooting footage and researching at the temple Borobudur I remember an encounter I had with a snake. I was doing the pan-out shot of one of the buddhist figures at the temple and I saw something move in between legs and looked down to see a black as night snake. Now I learned long ago that anything bright and colourful in the wild can be dangerous but maybe not fatal, but anything that is black you should run like fuck. However this snake was right beneath my feet and I’m guessing its reflexes are quicker than mine so I just froze while it passed through my legs and slipped into a crack within the temple walls. As I watched disappear into the wall I was thinking what a great shot but dared not move. Lots of Indonesia is still very raw and wild so this is regular for the people there and since moving from Hong Kong to Malaysia, even I have become accustomed to seeing a few monitor lizards, monkeys and snakes on my way to work. So just know that when you see that zoom out shot of the Buddhist statue in the film, that’s when a naga (snake) is lurking beneath my feet.

I had spent four days on a boat traveling to Rinca island to shoot Komodo dragons in the wild and I got some great photos and video. But whilst editing the camera chewed up the tape and screwed up the footage which I was gutted about.

I wanted everything to be authentic and original footage, to show the West real images of the Minanagkbau. Apart from the archive footage of some fight demos, everything else is my own footage. I didn’t want to show a Bengal tiger. I wanted a genuine Sumatran tiger so I had to go to a Sumatran tiger reserve and film the tigers there. I actually waited three hours before I got some decent shots of the tigers moving and play fighting that features in the documentary. Every animal, landscape and still photo is authentic to Sumatra; there’s no doubles or substitutes.

The first bit of footage I ever released to the public was in 2005 on YouTube, which was the scenes of me fighting my student pesilat Ian Llewellyn in Lake Maninjau in the Minang province. We had traveled from Bukittinggi after shooting some randai silek the night before, but we made the mistake of trying some local Sumatran coffee and that gave us nasty food poisoning. Maybe it was the water but we were not in good shape when we shot that demonstration.

However the shots looked good and that footage once put on YouTube really got a lot of attention and that's when I kinda knew that this documentary needed to expand and become a documentary for the general public as opposed to something that was just personal for harimau pesilats.

I had hours of footage from Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Hong Kong and even stuff in China, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos which was never used because it didn’t really link to the subject but the footage was still shot.

I visited Ghana in 2003 to study with my teacher Maha Guru de-Bordes and we shot his interview at his house or should I say palace. I remember it was in October; one of the hottest periods to be in Ghana and we had to turn off the fans in the room because it was interfering with the sound, so Guru and I were just sweating like hell as we shot this segment. I remember Guru saying in between takes "Scotty your killing me here, man."

I went back there again in 2010 to help my teacher run a 12 day training camp. Guru de-Bordes and I spoke about shooting some golok scenes for the film and so the next day we went down to the beach with some students from the Dallas tribe lead by their teacher Guru Kelly Smith and shot three techniques each. It was very rushed and again the climate was hot, so we didn’t spend a great deal of time setting up; much like the entire documentary it was guerilla filming style. One man and his camera and if I was in the shot then Kelly filmed it. Later I uploaded the techniques as a demo on YouTube and the response was again very well received.

While I was living in Hong Kong from 2004 to 2009, I was fortunate enough to track down Bey Logan who is now a film producer for kung fu movies. Before he relocated to Hong Kong, he was the editor of the UK martial art magazine called Combat. He was the person who introduced Guru de-Bordes to the martial arts world on a global scale, I guess.

He published an article after seeing Guru de-Bordes fight Cass Magda; it was called ‘The Cutting Hand Of Harimau Silat’. This was because Guru had manage to cut Cass Magda’s head using only his bare hands.

Bey is a nice guy; he invited me over to his place for dinner and at that time he had a rough cut of the film Ip Man before its release as he was part of the production team. He asked if I wanted to see it and so we watched the film and talked about the martial arts film industry in Hong Kong. He told me stories about being on set with Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung and Jet Li. And then we discussed his part in the documentary.

It was a very easy shoot; Bey knew what he wanted to say and I think we only did two takes. We remain good friends and keep in touch. He says he’d like to produce a silat based movie with me in it, who knows. While I was living in Hong Kong, I opened my first official harimau silat school which has become the Black Triangle Silat tribe. The space I originally used was a Wing Chun studio and it had a hostel next door so I met various travelers that were martial artists. This is also were I met some of my students. So the stories from my students that feature in the documentary came about during chance meetings at that studio in Kowloon.

The most fun parts to shoot was obviously when I was traveling across south east asia but aside from that I did enjoy the scenes with Grandmaster Hanafi in Jakarta at the 31 Mentang Museum. I learnt so much that day which was then later scripted and integrated into the documentary. He was recently over here in Malaysia and he continues to educate me mentally and physically in my silat through the mindset.

We have become very close since that documentary shoot. The first time I met Guru Hanafi was in 1999 when he visited our class in London. He recently told me over dinner “I remember seeing you in London, long time now. I see you take on two students at once, it was very good”. This jogged my memory to a class I had long forgotten about; however the memory instantly brought pain to my joints as I recalled that tough session, although no class was ever easy.

I’m not entirely sure of the first interview I shot for the documentary. It might have been Dr. Lee Wilson in his house in Cambridge. I don't know, but the last segment I shot was here in Malaysia with Maha Guru Jak Othman.

Despite training with Guru Jak twice a week, he’s a nightmare to schedule a shoot with; the guy is always busy. If he’s not teaching silat or muay boren he’s editing, because he’s a film-maker as well. I shot his part in his gym at about eleven o’clock at night and with Guru Jak he doesn’t just answer your questions; he ends up giving a lesson. So I had a lot of footage left on the cutting room floor as it were of Guru Jak talking about blade fighting that then branches into another area of combat or history which again was really interesting but it didn’t always associate directly with the topic at hand.

Collecting interviews with respected Guru’s was perhaps the hardest part because this silat style is so rare there are only a handful of instructors that teach this art and they're all situated over the globe. From Indonesia, to Malaysia, to England, to Africa, to the Sates.

With every interview I learned something new about the art which would then make a new scene in the film that I would then have to rescript and shoot; it seemed never ending.

Because the subject matter has limited information, I wanted to include as much as I could to let people know. The art of silek harimau is a journey that never really ends as I’m always discovering new material and learning new elements to my physical combat. But in the end you have to have a cut off point otherwise it never gets finished. Maybe ten years from now I may have accumulated more information and will release a redux version of the Dark Gift, we'll see.

As for the graphics and artwork I am very particular and wanted something timeless, so I got my good friend Arthur Bird-Davis who is a part-time comic book illustrator to come up with a few designs for the DVD cover. That's how the cover came about; I tweaked the image here and there but for the most part its his design. He also was the narrator for the documentary as he has a good BBC voice.

As soon as I had a final cut, a new trailer advertising the release of the documentary went live on the site and on YouTube and orders came flooding in. The response has been overwhelming and it has humbled me to see how much interest there is in this beautiful martial system.

We have sold the documentary to all corners of the Earth--England, America, Ireland, Africa, Malaysia, Norway, Germany, Italy, France, Sweden and Australia. Half of the proceeds for this DVD goes towards helping the endangered Sumatran tiger which is a subject matter that is very important to me and close to my heart, so I am happy to announce we have raised over a thousand pounds already.

Once again I would like to thank everybody who has purchased this DVD and those who have also sent donations helping support the Tiger Trust fund.

This year I plan to release a demonstration DVD titled Silek Harimau: The Minangkabau Art Of War which I am currently shooting. This will be the last DVD I will release for sale as my goal is only to spread the message and secure our lineage. The documentation of our lineage and history has been secured and noted in the Dark Gift. This follow up DVD focuses on the physical and mental mechanics of the art demonstrating applications used by Minangkabau pesilats. My intention is not to release an endless library of DVD's for financial gain but simply to cement Minangkabau Silek Harimau amongst the world's elite fighting styles and make sure this art never dies or becomes lost in history.