Chasing after a feeling: Petersen Vargas on making ‘Un/Happy for You,’ that JoshLia magic

“It feels unreal,” Petersen Vargas says of his latest blockbuster film, Un/Happy for You, which has raked in P320 million after three weeks in theaters and now approaches its fourth week.

“I think no one expected it to be this big of a hit, not even my producers over at Star Cinema. All we had was this dedicated faith to all this timing and potential, especially for the return of JoshLia on the big screen.

Something felt right. Whenever I was at the mall, the first order of business was to go over the cinema queues and each time I saw people buying tickets for our film, it felt like a win. It’s been an emotional three weeks for all of us,” Vargas continues.

The film, which tracks the story of a New York-based writer and an emerging Bicolano chef encountering each other again two years after their breakup, a story riddled with sheer pain and unresolved feelings, marks the onscreen reunion of Julia Barretto and Joshua Garcia, who last appeared in a music video of Moira dela Torre’s Paubaya three years ago, and it was actually that project that served as springboard for a possible comeback for the love team.

“They were thinking something along the lines of a Moira visual mixtape starring JoshLia, and in hindsight, that sounded like a perfect prompt and strong jump-off point,” Vargas tells me.

The Star Cinema project, shares Vargas, was already pitched to him with a ready storyline by the studio’s in-house writers Kookai Labayen (also serving as creative producer) and Crystal San Miguel, who were later joined by Jen Chuaunsu as suggested by Vargas himself.

“What I do remember about the earliest version of the story they first sent me was that it was this raunchy and spicy reckoning of two exes all under the heat of the Bicol sun. One of the first questions that I had was, ‘Joshua and Julia are up for all of this?!’ It felt like a level-up to their body of work in terms of maturity and emotional requirement, and considering the real-life resonances, which I didn’t want to be like an elephant in the room in the whole process,” says Vargas.

Adds the director, “I remember I instantly liked the idea that I was going to discover Bicol through its food, as it was the given that I was most unfamiliar with. It was also particularly interesting to me that it’s essentially a break-up film, but the actual break-up has already happened even before the film starts.”

Considering how the film essentially contends with the anatomy of a breakup, it feels only appropriate for Vargas to revisit Star Cinema classics like Cathy Garcia Sampana’s One More Chance and Olivia Lamasan’s Starting Over Again, while also reviewing Barretto and Garcia’s body of work.

“I feel like it’s important to know what’s already been done, and also, it’s my own way of honoring the ongoing conversation that these works have already begun when they were made and released during their own time,” notes the director.

Vargas says further that he “wanted to approach Un/Happy for You differently from the ones that preceded it.” 

“With An Inconvenient Love, it was clear from the get-go that I was aspiring for this mix of Wong Kar-wai (visual style and color), Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit (modern DIY spirit), and Jade Castro (socially aware love stories), three of my favorite romance directors. With A Very Good Girl, it was me opening myself to the wide range of contemporary women-led revenge films.”

“But with Un/Happy for You,” he continues, “I felt like I had to approach it not primarily concerned with its cinematic language, but with feeling. It was a process where I was constantly chasing after a feeling, and I wanted to look for things that could bring me to that emotional space.”

“It was also personal archives of my own memories, which brought me to the decision to depict Juancho and Zy’s happy memories as mundane digicam home video clips, because that’s how mine look like in my head when I try to remember them,” he adds.

Here, Vargas discusses the making of the film, the JoshLia magic, and what it means to put faith in the material. The conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

This film is Julia Barretto and Joshua Garcia’s reunion since their appearance in the music video of Moira dela Torre’s Paubaya in 2021. What was it like having them in this project, and how integral do you think is their onscreen pairing for this kind of story?

Joshua and Julia are the pair of wings that our material needed so it could fly. I can’t hide the fact that I’ve been a fan of the love team since Vince and Kath and James (I saw that film three times during its run, and immediately once it was available to stream), and so there was this curiosity for just how they do their thing.

The first time I officially met them together was during our look test. Because of our tough schedules, I usually find a way to maximize the look test day and squeeze in a more exhaustive camera and lens test, additional costume fitting, initial actors’ workshop via scene work, which will then entail a few editing tests to experiment on visual devices and treatment. So it usually becomes a heavy duty jam-packed day for the main staff and our leads. 

And the surprise of meeting them that day made all of my initial anxieties and worries vanish. They were just professional and warm and fun, both of them ready with a shooting day’s worth of energy and commitment. There was no evidence of friction or tension, just pure natural chemistry and talent.

You know, I really feel like they found the most perfect partnership in each other as co-actors, the kind that’s once in a lifetime. Because you put them together in any space, and in any scene, and it instantly becomes electric like magic. They do not simply complement each other, but they find ways to fill in the gaps so that things feel special and complete.

In our project together, I really felt that they laid their souls bare, and it’s evident in what you see and feel when you do end up watching the film.

I know working with a script that’s not your own is not unfamiliar territory to you, but how challenging can it be to put faith in the material but at the same time assert your artistic vision as a director?

At this point, you’re right, I’m much more used to working on a script not written by me. I like how you put it, “to put faith in the material,” because the requirement before moving on to the next step was always to have some sense of faith with what’s in my hands.

The studio system can be tough, sure, but I also put faith on my Leo sun and Virgo moon placements. Kidding aside, I think the key to making it work is that you have to like it, to like what you’re doing so you can enjoy the process. 

I grew up watching Star Cinema films, so there’s some visual repository of what a Star Cinema film looks like and feels like all in my head. But there’s also so much more in there, and what I usually apply at the beginning of every project is something my mentor Jade Castro passed on to me: don’t be too obvious with your pegs.

Meaning, seek out the most outlandish and unexpected pairing of references so that you could look at the project a different way, but also so that it feels much closer to your own taste. Seeking out the obvious might do otherwise, and lead you to the predictable and expected.

And in order to do that, you’d have to be a consumer of a wide array of things: art, life experiences, music and playlists, books of poetry and stories, films and film reviews, anime and web comics and graphic novels — just about everything you could lay your eyes and hands on. 

I really believe every film is in conversation of film and art of the past and present, of the young and old, of the cliché and the unfamiliar. The more you know, the more you know what you want and don’t want, and the less it becomes difficult to assert your own taste and vision to a project.

I also like the fact that I started working with Star Cinema at the exact beginning of a new decade back in 2020, so it feels like I’m riding on this new wave of the studio’s storytellers. So there has always been this idea, since Hello Stranger and An Inconvenient Love and eventually A Very Good Girl and Un/Happy for You, that I could pull up my own tricks because I’ve always had belief in what Star Cinema represents and I always felt like they had belief in who I am as a director.

Let’s talk about the filming process. I’d like to know when the production itself began. And what was the shoot like? What were the challenges you encountered?

I think this was the first time where the playdate was already officially announced even prior to filming. We started filming [at the] end of May, and ended a month and a half after, around mid-July. This meant that we had exactly one month [until] our playdate to do post-production and finish the film. Putting it like that in writing feels crazy, and I couldn’t imagine now how we managed to pull it off! 

We spent most of our production in Naga City, where the film is set, and a few days in Manila, mostly to shoot the scenes set in the past, when Joshua’s Juancho and Julia’s Zy were a live-in couple in the city.

I think the biggest challenge that presented itself during our first rounds of ocular and location checks simultaneous with the creative team’s further research, was to decide on how to visually represent Naga and allow its essence as a city and food capital to be felt all throughout. 

Even though it was a city, I felt like life there was slow, precise and careful, much like the insistence on the ways they cook their food, earning their distinct flavors by really taking their time.

It was apparent for their kinalas that it takes an entire morning to get the components of the dish ready. For their gata-based dishes like Bicol express, laing, pinangat and kinunot. But getting to those flavors, there was a noticeable striking intensity that I felt was an emotion and experience that became the driving force for our lead character Juancho.

There were also extensive conversations with my constant collaborator, director of photography Noel Teehankee, on how to depict the past and present visually. Especially for how the past, or specifically how each of the leads remember their own version of the past, is what drives the present-day conflicts of the story.

I remember even during the shoot, we kept looking for ways to make the past feel imperfect and a little bit off, to create light and color sources that shouldn’t be there in the first place, much like how we could shroud our own recollections with excess and artifice to service our own hubris and to hide our flaws and weaknesses.

We were also lucky to have met three chefs based in Naga (Chef Doy of Chef Doy’s, Chef Makoi of Chef’s Kitchen Retro, and Chef Roy of Café Rosa) who approached Bicolano food very differently from one another.

We also got to go around local eateries serving traditional Bicolano dishes so that eventually we treated food in the film with the respect it deserves. We even built a menu from scratch, in consultation with Chef Roy for the Bicolano touch, and with my dear friend Jayson Maulit, who owns and heads Marikina restaurant Trining’s, a playful ode to his grandmother’s cooking.

About the film’s visual lexicon, do you have any work that you’ve considered as an influence for it?

Because this film feels almost like a two-hander, I’ve always leaned on the spirit of 2000s American indies (Andrew Bujalski, Aaron Katz, Joe Swanberg, early Noah Baumbach) when it came to the visual strategy of depicting this kind of brazen, wayward, but ultimately genuine romance.

I wanted it to feel like it was at its core about the inside of these two characters, and how simply bringing them and keeping them together onscreen is what mattered the most. 

And as I’ve said, this was a film where I relied on a lot of my own impulses and instincts, instead of building some kind of moodboard to keep going back to. Just like how I kept yapping about Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers with my DP (director of photography) Noel [Teehankee], for how it created a look for an in-between of real and unreal, and for how that seemed to me what subjective memory could feel and look like.

And so we also got to pick up on its creative use of cross dissolves, which we peppered the film with — sometimes a bit too indulgently. 

Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers came out as we were in the middle of pre-production for the film, so that kind of guided me with how Luca, in I think all of his films, depicts the chaos of playing with the fires of unrequited attractions by making everything feel sensual.

And so, for example: cooking for someone became like foreplay. At the beginning of production, I got to see Pablo Berger’s Robot Dreams and I think I would never have pursued and committed to Un/Happy for You’s intercut ending idea if not for the way Robot Dreams’ own ending sequence made me understand that it could work. 

Lastly, one major work that kept coming back to me all throughout the making of this film was Bang Woo-ri’s 20th Century Girl, especially for how bold its overall look and color choices are, and that’s always stuck with me.

Any moment you consider as a highlight in the film?

I’ll always be proud of that ending. It’s like my ode to JoshLia in one single scene. – Rappler.com