Ricky Lee. Photo by Grace Orbon-Emmelot.
“It’s important to be a good writer, but it’s more important to be a good person”
—Ricky Lee
There is no corner in Philippine cinema, television, and literature that remains untouched and unshaped by Ricky Lee. You may think this is an exaggeration, but it is true. With nearly five decades in the film industry, Lee has created over 180 scripts, several best-selling Filipino books, and the screenwriting manual called “Trip to Quiapo” that is used in introductory film courses all over the country. With more than 70 awards for his writing, Lee has worked with luminaries in Filipino cinema such as Lino Brocka, Ishmael Bernal, Marilou Diaz-Abaya, Gil Portes, Laurice Guillen, and Mike De Leon, among others, and their collaborations have been screened in some of the most prestigious film festivals around the world—Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Toronto, and Cairo, just to name a few.
But it wasn’t always this way. Born Ricardo Lee on March 19, 1947 at Daet, Camarines Norte, Lee had been placed in the care of his relatives following the death of his parents. In an interview with professor and television host Boy Abunda for ABS-CBN’s Inside the Cinema, Lee described himself as an extremely shy child who struggled to connect to his peers and instead submerged himself in literature and cinema. At the public library, he ripped pages from books he liked and compiled them into a superbook of his own at home and, unable to afford going to cinemas, Lee watched films from fire escapes or listened to the dialogue from outside the theater, imagining the scenarios himself. These interests enriched his imagination and eventually brought him to writing and in senior year of high school, he sold his first story, “Mayon”—which reimagined the birth of the iconic volcano as a love story—to the Philippine Free Press. Realizing he could earn from storytelling, Lee wrote as a means to escape and used the money to run away from Bicol to Manila, beginning his first trip to Quiapo.
Over the next few years, Lee took odd jobs as a waiter, an accounting clerk, a tutor for English and math to make ends meet and continued to write his short stories, eventually garnering him two consecutive Palanca Awards—one of the highest literary awards in the Philippines. Despite writing predominantly in Filipino, Lee took up AB English at the University of the Philippines Diliman while juggling jobs as a copywriter for Philippine Free Press and eventual staff member for Asia-Philippines Leader Magazine. But just before he finished his degree, he was forced to go underground when student-activists began being persecuted under the Marcos regime.
With broadcast and print media subject to immense government censorship and control, cinema and fiction became the avenue through which Lee could make money as a writer. In 1973, he co-wrote his first screenplay: Armando Garces’ Dragnet, which follows an undercover police officer (Joseph Estrada) whose attempts to convince a murder witness (Tsing Tong Tsai) to testify is complicated by the witness’ Chinese citizenship. For fear of being tracked down, Lee requested that he remain uncredited. But despite all efforts at maintaining anonymity, Lee’s apartment in Manila was eventually raided and he was imprisoned in 1974, despite the lack of charges against him. After a year of torture, illness, and even a failed suicide attempt, Lee was released onto the streets nearing Christmas.
Though Lee co-wrote Mike De Leon’s first major feature film, Itim (The Rites of May, 1976), he chose to remain uncredited because he was still unsure about pursuing screenwriting as a profession and due to the desire to have his first credited film be political. In 1979, he was finally credited for two films: the first was Gil Portes’ Pabonggahan, a rock documentary centered on the lives of performers and artists who critiqued the Marcos regime, and the second was Lino Brocka’s Jaguar, a film noir which he co-wrote with Pete Lacaba based on Nick Joaquin’s essay on the 1960 Brown Derby Shooting. Jaguar competed for the Palme d’Or at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival and became Lee’s first win at the Gawad Urian Awards in the Philippines.
Lee’s experiences of isolation early on in his life and the struggles he faced during the Martial Law era had a profound impact on his subsequent career. His screenplays put a spotlight on those in the margins and challenged dominant social hierarchies, ideologies, and power dynamics; his complex relationship with structures and authority figures sublimated into his work. In an interview with Likha Collective PH, Lee explains how cinema opens doors towards a process of reclamation of humanity: “There is a story, there is a problem, because one’s right has been violated… A person is not considered complete, until stories are written to make them whole.”
This perspective on filmmaking was crystallized in the period between 1980–1983, when Lee partnered with some of Filipino cinema’s best and wrote five films that would be included in the pantheon of what is now considered the Second Golden Age of Philippine cinema: Laurice Guillen’s Salome (1981), Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s Brutal (1980), Moral (1982), and Karnal (Of the Flesh, 1983), and Ishmael Bernal’s Himala (Miracle, 1982), the latter of which became the country’s first competitive entry at the Berlin International Film Festival and whose restoration by the ABS-CBN Film Restoration Project subsequently premiered at the 69th Venice International Film Festival.
Lee attributes his openness and adaptability to his early exposure to a variety of excellent directors whose temperaments and creative processes he had to adjust to. These early experiences freed Lee from the pitfall of confining himself to only one narrative structure and gave way to experimentation. The horrors of Brutal and Salome unfold through a series of flashbacks, unconventional at the time, while Moral followed the decade-spanning friendship of four women without a plot or an inciting incident. At the core of each of Lee’s scripts are complex women, with Lee constantly striving to humanize them and their lives especially as their struggles concerned taboo topics in Philippine society such as murder, marital rape, same-sex relationships, and participation in the political underground, just to name a few.
Ricky Lee (left) and Ishmael Bernal
Lee’s most famous work is arguably his 1982 collaboration with Ishmael Bernal: Himala, an iconic film inspired by the stories of the alleged apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary on Cabra Island, Occidental Mindoro during the 1966–72. The film had initially been rejected several times by different local producers and had only been produced after it won a script contest under the Experimental Cinema of the Philippines, a government-owned production company established by the late dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos, enabling Lee to choose Bernal as the director and Nora Aunor as the protagonist, Elsa. Centered on the lives of the villagers transformed by Elsa’s visions, Himala can be seen as a coming-of-age for an entire community and examines the corruptible power of structures such as religion, the stretches of martyrdom and fanaticism, and the limits of the humanity and faith, especially in the presence of conflicting desires and oppressive material conditions.
Whereas Lee’s writing was used as a means of escape in his early childhood, his experiences during Martial Law transformed it into a tool for confrontation with the harsh realities of life. Though Lee is aware that cinema can enable audiences to exercise a form of empathy, the clarity in the politics of Lee’s writing never does a disservice to the narrative. He received the Gawad Plaridel Award in 2015—an award given by the College of Mass Communication at the University of the Philippines Diliman to prime movers in mass media and arts. In the citation, Lee was honored “for bravely depicting in his films themes considered taboo or radical in Philippine cinema—such as the oppression of women in Brutal, Moral, and Karnal, the abuses of authoritarian leaders in Gumapang Ka sa Lusak, the exploitation of sex workers in Private Show, the evils of religious superstition in Himala, the plight of HIV victims in Dahil Mahal Kita (The Dolzura Cortez Story)—all of which he wrote from the point of view of the victims themselves.”
Lee places immense value on education and community and this prompted him to start his own free screenwriting workshops in 1982, with the first session held in his former apartment in Chico, Langka, beforehe wrote Himala and established himself as a cinematic voice. Lee began the workshop not as a means of asserting his own power or imposing his own excellence but as a way for people interested in cinema and writing to share knowledge and learn from one another; a space that served as a learning environment for everyone including himself.
Those trained by Western academic institutions will find Ricky Lee’s workshops unusual. There are no minimum years of writing experience needed to enter the workshop and Lee accepted Filipino applicants from a variety of backgrounds, even outside of the film industry. There were no strict outputs throughout the process nor a requirement to become a screenwriter after the workshop’s conclusion. Held across a minimum of eight Sundays, Lee held film viewings and introduced workshop participants to a variety of stories and storytelling methods, afterwards moderating discussions about the material. Though he gave people resources to learn about the technical aspects of screenwriting, Lee does not focus on formats nor does he impose a singular narrative structure. Instead, he focuses on helping individuals identify stories they gravitate towards and suggests paths they can tread in the process.
Prior to the pandemic, Lee accompanied his workshoppers to different parts of Metro Manila on “immersions” where they inhabit the lives of characters from a place that they’ve selected. With precautions in place, workshoppers live for half a day as anything they choose: from flower vendors and go-go dancers to weeping brides and homeless men. The following day, they are tasked to write monologues based on their specific experiences. In an interview, Lee expressed why the experiential process was necessary: “You have to get to a point where you don’t know what’s behind the door when you open it and when you inhabit these characters, that edge where there is a sense of danger, a sense of the unknown, does so much for you as a writer.”
While this practice is no longer at play due to social distancing, the workshop itself has only expanded since the pandemic. Prior batches were limited by the logistics of Lee’s home, but the online space has allowed a wider reach: with hundreds of Filipinos participating from all around the world. Despite the scale, there is still a sense of intimacy reminiscent of in-person meetups. In her essay “Undoing the Workshop,” author and critic-at-large Katrina Stuart Santiago writes about what separates Ricky Lee’s writing workshops from other literary and artistic spaces founded on Western pedagogy. Santiago continues that Lee deliberately decentralizes the discussion from himself for the sake of inclusivity, erases his own privilege to allow other voices to be developed and heard, and refuses to romanticize writing so that it can be taken seriously as cultural work, as a learnable skill, as a lived practice. Lee’s workshops instilled that art and storytelling was in service of something greater than artistic excellence and despite the looseness of the structure, it has worked: birthing many important voices in contemporary Filipino culture such as Lav Diaz, Jeffrey Jeturian, Bing Lao, Leo Abaya, Cathy Garcia-Molina, John Torres, and Ely Buendia..
Unconcerned with homogenizing the industry, Lee and his workshoppers continue to develop films, share resources and techniques, and create initiatives to introduce newer voices into a more supportive environment. The culmination of Ricky Lee’s 40-year endeavor is a community of storytellers like the ones who helped him in his early stages: all individually exploring what is most personal and challenging to them; inadvertently mapping out the landscape of cinema in the Philippines, keeping it alive for the world and future generations to see.