Day 435 March 10th
10th
Anniversary Interviews Series – Digger part 3
Was
it a hard decision to leave Art Asylum when the time came and to add to that
are you happy with Diamond Select Toys taking it over?
Digger - Although Art
Asylum was officially sold in 2006 I had already resigned in 2005. Years before
I left NYC to move to Hong Kong in 2001. I
didn't leave to pioneer our manufacturing like I generally told people at the
time. I left because I was completely burnt out and needed get the #%$K out of dodge.
Without all the personal details (more for other people's sakes than mine - I'm
open to fault) we had internal problems. We rented out the NYC Hard Rock Cafe
to celebrate our acquisition of the Star Trek license and had every fat cat
from every major studio was there from Paramount
to Marvel.
A violent altercation
kicked off at the show between me and a mess of other people. Why?
Doesn't matter anymore but we thrashed some of the upstairs, tables
crashed over, guitars knocked off the walls, I lost my cool...not a good scene.
The short story is that next morning I woke up in my car freezing to death
outside Toy Fair and I realized I was DONE. My hair was literally falling out
in clumps from stress for months after years of paying the guys with my credit
cards, getting screwed over hard by more than one friend/ partner and
ultimately trying to get us funded so we could be the Intellectual Property
company that I envisioned us to be. We had major problems internally like many
families do, I was tired, burnt out and I truly wanted to go live and work in Asia so I could find myself again.
I was working on
personal projects and film more and more over the next 4 years. In 2005 while
my dad was terminally ill and I was going through my first divorce I wanted
more freedom so I resigned and gave them my majority interest in the company to
find new investment. It was all mutual really. When it's time to move on you
should move on. Most of what we were doing, MINIMATES especially became turn
key. We weren't innovating anything anymore, we were no longer the company I
created and I wanted to direct films more than I wanted to breathe so I set out
to make it happen.
What have you been up to since departing from
the toy scene?
Digger - I was still
doing some design work and still working with AA for many of those years but I
traveled all around Asia as much as I could. Japan, Thailand,
China, Malaysia and the Philippines meeting people and
getting into trouble on a pretty regular basis. I was studying Muy Thai fighting
for a few years under Sifu Wong in Tai Kok Tsui. I had some independent and
group art shows, acted in a few films ( Ultraviolet, Largo Winch, The Vampire
Effect, The Counting House and more ), and then started directing music videos
to cut my teeth in the whole process of film making.
Largo Winch!
Ultraviolet
The Vampire Effect /
Twins Effect I got to play a vampire and be in a film with Jackie Chan at the
same time. Good times.
The Counting House
This is a really
really bad Italian horror film I did in HK. Maggie Q ( Mission Impossible
3,Naked Gun,Nikita ) was among the many known faces that were in this film. As
far as i know it was never released. I have a scene where I get ripped off the
ground by demons and dragged into the trees Predator style.
The first video I that
wrote and directed ( Dead Air Space by Dan F ) was sort of personal story that
was a toyetic nightmare. I told the story with a Chinese toy factory worker
that goes insane but make no mistake he's supposed to be ME. I went to all the
factories i knew in China
trying to secure locations for us to shoot and it was more of a bitch than you
might think. I had pumped a lot of work through some of these factories over
the years with Art Asylum. They owed me this at least but everyone that owns a
toy factory is afraid that your going to be doing a documentary on Chinese labour
issues whether it's child labour or just plain abuse and half of them turned me
down even though I told them straight up we were doing an art house music video
they were paranoid! In the end 3 of them came through. A tooling factory, a
factory that both McFarlane Toys and I used quite a bit and another one all of
them a few hours north of the China
border to Hong Kong.
I teamed up with
Victor Pena who's a master post production director among other things and Dan
F is an extremely intelligent musician from the UK who started out as a
geologist and found his way up to HK to open a very successful club that prints
money while we does all his other creative stuff. Tobias Kohl did a great job
shooting it and Darren Leung played the main character. Darren is an actor and
big time wing chun'r. The son of Duncan Leung who was the last student of
Yip Man, Bruce Lee's teacher. I really had a great group and project for my
first piece and everyone was chosen for a reason. The tone of the piece is very
low tech, Nine Inch Nails meets Tetsuo's Iron
Man. I placed Darren in a factory
worker outfit and had him act and run through the factory with the real toy
factory workers. We had 3 thousand factory workers being held at a gate that
were officially off work and wanted to leave and they let me hold them at the
gate for one shot until I yelled action for one shot.
http://vimeo.com/1342580
One of the more most
fun and challenging videos I did in HK was with Maitreya. He was coming off his
European tour to fly back to New
Zealand and he became connected through a
common friend that insisted we work together. Jamie is an amazing talent. This
was a ton of work that we all did with a very small budget and less time to do
2 videos but we pulled it off. LOTALUV and CHUR TO THE CHUR where the 2 songs
we chose because of their commercial appeal but in truth there isn't one weak
song on the album. One of the 2 major locations for LOTALUV is a place in Hong Kong called Mongkok. This is the most densely
populated spot on the face of the Earth and I couldn't have asked for a better
location. The bitch was that I didn't have a bullhorn and I needed to direct
everyone live, second by second and my voice was gone for weeks
afterwards.
LOTALUV
CHUR TO THE CHUR
( CHUR means CHEERS in New
Zealand )
Behind the scenes
BLIND GENERATION was a
song by an indie musician by the name of Gregory Moore. I met this crazy
talented kid beat boxing and playing guitar on the street in Hong
Kong and we became friends so when I took him into the studio at
World Worm Studios to cut a track that we could do a video for. The women in
the beginning of the video are both real blind beggars that I had been dying to
shoot something with for years.
I art directed,
storyboarded and did all the props for this Cinematic Orchestra video / To
Build a Home
From the very first
day I landed in Hong Kong I became close with
Howard Lee (How 2 Work Toys) and legendary HK designer Eric So who was one of
the earliest driving forces of the urban vinyl movement along with Michael Lau.
We would share stories and views on the business which they were the best in Asia at without a doubt. They found me my first big studio
in Tsim Sha Tsui which was right next to theirs. They were some of my very
first good local friends that I could count on. Eric So included me in STAND BY
ME , a life size painting exhibition he did with all of his famous friends from
around the world and I was honoured.
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