BACKGROUND / TIME AND PLACE / STORY, CHARACTERS AND HARDWARE

MAKE-UP AND LIGHTING / PRODUCTION / TRAILERS

BACKGROUND

THE END OF THE EARTH IS MY HOME is a modern fantasy inspired by several classic stories combined with the writer/director's travel experience. The story is primarily an amalgamation of elements from the traditional Asian Stories of the Monkey King and Bram Stoker's Dracula.

'Monkey' is one of the great quest stories, a 16th century Chinese epic called Xi Yu Chi ( Journey to the West ) by Wu Ch'eng En. It is probably most familiar to western audiences from a Japanese television series from the late 1970's called 'Monkey Magic'. These tales describe demons and monsters that threaten Tripitaka, a Buddhist monk, on a journey to India to find scriptures.

'Monkey Magic' drew from the later, picaresque and episodic passages of these tales and emphasized their surreal and comic aspects. This film looks towards the earlier, lesser known and darker chapters which deal with the Monkey King's birth and illumination and with the perplexity evoked by new found immortality. Arthur Whalley, in his translation from the 1940’s, calls Monkey "... unique in its combination of beauty with absurdity, of profundity with nonsense". It is this duality that informs the story of this film as it unfolds.

The world of this film is also derived from the Buddhist world of the Monkey myths, where time in Heaven is not like earthly time. When Monkey spends time in Heaven decades pass by for the mortal monkeys he has left on the earth below. Similarly, when he is banished to the underworld, he spends aeons in darkness while daily life for the monkeys above progresses as normal. This three-tiered time structure has been grafted onto the fictional world of this film, manifesting itself literally within the architecture and on the streets of a city.

Monkey was originally set in China in 630 AD, this film updates the story elements to a modern fictitious setting - an island called 'Hai-Wan', in the 'Bay of Thunder'. Most elements of the original story are replaced by contemporary equivalents. The monsters and demons of the original tales are now human. The dialogue, however, retains its mannered tone. This is intended to create the feeling of an island out of time, that is a world unto itself.

It is in the subject of immortality that these elements from Monkey overlap and combine with elements from Bram Stoker's 'Dracula'. The time structure allows characters to almost materialize and de-materialize, as elusively as vampires, and the vehicles and transport systems of the futuristic city recall the Count's unearthly driver-less carriages. The immortal characters, not specified as vampires or zombies, but rather treated simply as spirits - are represented by blue skin – a device common in Japanese cinema and stage for representing ghosts or spirits, another element which overlaps with the traditional imagery of the pale complexion of the vampire.

The city itself is a mish-mash of Asian, Middle Eastern, Russian and European communities, providing different cultural backgrounds for the different districts of the island.

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