countryprofiles
On The Job Erik Matti, filmmaker
Erik Matti, one of Asia’s best known filmmakers and winner of last year’s ContentAsia Award for Best Director, talks about his latest award-winning project, On the Job, and the win-win that maximised cinema and mainstream TV screens. Erik Matti’s high-profile Filipino crime thriller, On the Job, has a deliciously
in Cannes as part of the Directors’ Fortnight. Written by Matti and Michiko
complicated back story.
Yamamoto, the film stars Gerald Anderson and Joel Torre as two hitmen,
Eight years after two episodes debuted as a feature film in Cannes,
and Piolo Pascual and Joey Marquez as law enforcement officers.
the latest version – On the Job: The Missing 8 – premiered in September
Winner of the ContentAsia Award for Best Director in 2020, Matti takes
this year at the 78th annual Venice International Film Festival, the only
us behind the scenes of On The Job, a bold, multi-faceted production
Asian film screening in the competition. The feature won the Volpi Cup
with many incarnations and which now screens and streams in a very
Best Actor Award for John Arcilla, who plays corrupt newspaper reporter
different social, political and entertainment environment.
Sisoy Salas. Two days later, a six-episode premium series, with previously unseen
You’ve said On the Job is about more than assassins and prisoners being
and remastered footage, debuted on HBO Go across Southeast Asia,
brought out of prison to kill. How much more? “We wanted a film that
Hong Kong Kong and Taiwan.
would tackle the difficulties, the moral decisions, that people make on
Inspired by true events, the original On The Job centres around crime
the job. So, in the case of the first film, in addition to the story of the pris-
syndicates, controlled behind the scenes by sitting politicians who re-
oners, there’s also the story of the policemen and their difficulty in finding
lease prison inmates to carry out political assassinations.
the killers because they are already back in prison. There’s also the poli-
Matti is open about domestic feedback to his idea in the early days;
tics, and the moral grey areas and dilemmas, getting into the crossroads
he started pitching it around 2010 and the response was pretty much ‘no
of what is right or what is wrong... so it becomes even more interesting
way’. “It was a strange time in the Philippines,“ he says. ”We hadn’t been
and layers the whole film as opposed to just another bang-bang movie.
doing that kind of a film back then. So we never got the popularity”.
For the second version, we didn’t want to just mimic the first one and
Three years later, in 2013, the first feature was produced by Matti’s Reality
do another story that kind of looks familiar, with the same structure and
Entertainment with the Philippines’ Star Cinema, and had its world premiere
tone as the first one. So we dug deeper. When we started writing this four
12
contentasia october 2021