Ask anyone in the Bay Area film community to name the region’s most creative, influential, Renaissance-like filmmakers working today, and H.P. Mendoza’s will likely pop up.
As it should.
During much of his innovative career, the 47-year-old Filipino American director, actor, screenwriter, musical artist and multimedia sensation has stuck close to his San Francisco roots, where he’s made adventurous, unconventional films such as the delightful “Colma: The Musical” (which we wrote), “Fruit Fly,” “I Am a Ghost” and the gasp-inducing “Bitter Melon” to name a few.
His latest is a funny-sad, thoroughly human and relatable heartache of a dramedy, “The Secret Art of Human Flight,” which opens July 5 at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. It found Mendoza winging it outside of his regional comfort zone, filming in and around Pittsfield, Massachusetts, rather than in the Mission and elsewhere.
H.P. Mendoza discusses “Secret Art of Human Flight” at SAG-AFTRA Foundation June 27 event in New York. (Dia Dipas)upil/Getty Images
“Flight” poignantly centers on depressed children’s book author Ben Grady (Grant Rosenmeyer) as he attempts to deal with a crippling, impenetrable grief after his wife’s unexpected death. He hopes that’ll happen by trying to learn to fly. Ben seeks to accomplish this goal — to the dismay of many around him — by adhering to the principles set forth in a questionable manual cooked up by a kooky guru named Mealworm (Oscar nominee Paul Raci).
Besides being shot on the East Coast, “Flight” differs in another key way from Mendoza’s earlier self-described “DIY” films — namely that it’s his biggest theatrical release yet.
“This is the most exposure I’ve ever had,” Mendoza said via Zoom from Colorado where his innovative “visual album” piece “Attack, Decay, Release,” a trippy collaboration he made with husband Mark Del Lima, was being screened as part of the Ouray International Film Festival.
“We have 16 cities (where it’s screening) to begin with. That’s more than any of my films put together,” he added.
All of this is welcome news to Mendoza, who was introduced to Jesse Orenshein’s wise, wistful screenplay while dealing with a heavy grief himself, having lost two special friends in his life, one due to breast cancer and the other from COVID-19.
“That was what the time was like,” he said, referring to the brutal early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. He realizes others were going through as much or more.
“I’m not going to claim to be the guy that went through the worst because we were all experiencing loss,” he said.
It was during this time that Mendoza received the script from Rosenmeyer — who also served as “Flight’s” lead producer — but pointed out that he was experiencing his own loss and that if the film was seeking to take “a quirky ironic” route that “wouldn’t get too heavy,” Mendoza might not be the right one to direct it.
“I said that almost as an out, which is like ‘hey, look: you either kind of accept me for this state that I’m in or you probably will find someone funny enough to do the job.”
Nonetheless, he got the job, and traveled to the shoot for some pre-production work, where he met many in the cast and crew who shared their stories of grief and fear and how they were coping during that tenacious time.
“The day before Paul Raci showed up, I talked with the whole cast and crew and worked a lot of things out and said, “OK, well, the good thing is let’s work through this grief together. We’ll work through it in the most optimistic way possible.”
Then the other shoe dropped.
He got a call from his mom. His father had died of COVID.
“My mind was going a million miles a minute and I’m in this cabin with my cinematographer,” he recalls. “And I just kind of blurted it out (there was no tactful way to say it) ‘hey my father died.’”
Mendoza knew he needed to make a decision since the film was about to roll.
“I was like this is the time when I’m supposed to say, you know, I had to go,” he recalls. “But my father lives in the Philippines. So even if I weren’t shooting ‘The Secret Art of Human Flight,’ it would have been tough for me to get there anyway. So I stayed on set. Paul showed up. He gave me a big hug. He said: ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’ And I was like, ‘Thank you so much for saying that. Let’s get to work.’”
Mendoza is no stranger to working through some hard personal stuff while on set. Just look at his 2018 hard-hitting dysfunctional family black comedy “Bitter Melon” set around a Christmas holiday no one will forget. It’s got a tiger bite to it as it addresses toxic masculinity, sexuality and familial pressure.
“That felt really about me working a lot of my inner demons out and just sort of I had a whole cast held captive,” he said. “And the beauty about working on that film was I was working with a largely Filipino American cast who — that even though this is a specific story about me — was like ‘No, we’ve all been through this. So I was no stranger to sort of turning a set into group therapy.”
That approach also lends itself to actors tapping him for more insight into their characters and the tidal-changing shifts of emotions they’re experiencing. Rosenmeyer, who plays the grief-stricken lead character in “The Secret Art of Human Flight,” asked Mendoza — just as his character Ben does of others he meets — about the process of grief.
“Meanwhile other people who had just gone through loss onset were talking with me about it. I think the best thing about that was we would always convene as a group and just sort of talk,” he said. “I think we spent three nights around a bonfire — kind of drunkenly — as we were just talking and then ended up singing and dancing every night.”
The mood, the sharing and the bonding was different than on other films, he said.
“I’d never been on a set like this,” he said. “Nobody wanted to be away from each other and people were constantly processing.”
And from working through a cast and crew’s collective grief, a movie took shape and then flew on its own.
Contact Randy Myers at soitsrandy@gmail.com.