These days, it’s difficult to pin down H.P. Mendoza. One week, he might be somewhere back east or in the Midwest, preparing a new stage play. Another week, a film festival to promote his debut feature-length directorial effort, FRUIT FLY. Whatever the locale or job, the guy can never be accused of sitting still. Since returning to the San Francisco Bay Area from Philadelphia in 2005 to write the script to a previously-produced concept album entitled COLMA: THE MUSICAL for high school chum and now collaborator Richard Wong, Mendoza, a self-trained musician and lyricist, has become the toast of the Asian American and LGBT cinema scenes. The filmed version of COLMA has traveled to over 30 international film festivals and garnered a slew of critical awards and a coveted distribution deal. His next collaboration with Wong, the dark drama OPTION 3, was released in 2008; the two switched roles for FRUIT FLY, in which Wong handled cinematography duties while Mendoza not only wrote and directed, but scored, acted and edited as well. The resulting film, characterized by Mendoza himself as being analogous to Armistead Maupin's TALES OF THE CITY, reflects a love/hate relationship with the notions of friendship and romance — and, it seems, with Mendoza’s own relationship with fame and its pitfalls.

In the following conversation, Mendoza talks about the challenges of creating a first feature, the whole COLMA experience, and his hometown of San Francisco.

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Tell me a little about FRUIT FLY – where did the story come from, and how were you able to get it produced?

FRUIT FLY was an idea I had rolling around my head during the festival run of COLMA: THE MUSICAL. After going to a bunch of gay festivals and Asian-American festivals, I got pretty sick of seeing certain tropes: the gay film that disrespects Asians and the Asian film that disrespects gays. But regardless of what kind of film contains that gay character, he is most likely flanked by a straight woman who affects a persona that, working in a gay neighborhood for five years, I got to know real well: The fabulously unapologetic fag-hag.

I really wanted to work with L.A. [actress L.A. Renigen] in a more substantial way. Where COLMA was pretty much about me, FRUIT FLY is about L.A., who, like her character in the film, is a Filipina performance artist who was dealing with having two separate families on different sides of the continent and not having connection with her biological mother. As I wrote the story, I'd see countless gay men at film festivals flock to L.A. and call her their fag-hag and/or compare her to Margaret Cho, which was weird seeing as how L.A. wouldn't even have opened her mouth.

When I pitched the idea to the Center for Asian American Media, they had just finished producing THE PRINCESS OF NEBRASKA and OPTION 3, so I was scared to pitch my little gay musical to them. It was funny to hear the staff of CAAM, both male and female, forced to say certain words around the office. "Hey, did we find any candidates for WHITE FAG #1?" "No, but I just scheduled two auditions for ASIAN FAG."

CAAM was so supportive of the film. There were at least five different CAAM members on set every day of the shoot. After about 20 days of shooting, the film was done and CAAM had another film under its belt.

Were there any concerns about making a musical as your first directorial effort, given the track record with COLMA? I imagine that there must have been concerns in the back of your head about “repeating” yourself. Or was that even a concern at all?

Honestly, I have a stack of screenplays that I've written and I'm determined to direct them all. I only have two musicals in that stack (one being FRUIT FLY), and I don't intend to do a musical for a long time. I also wanted to do a musical that had music that sounded different from COLMA. I'm prouder of the music in FRUIT FLY than I am of the music in COLMA, truth be told, but a few people have told me that they just don't like the FRUIT FLY sound and wished it were more like COLMA. Fair enough. There's no accounting for taste and if you don't like the sound of the music in FRUIT FLY, nothing is going to pull you through 94 minutes of it.

I don't feel bad about "repeating" because with COLMA, I already became "musical guy." Specifically, at gay film festivals, I was "that Asian musical guy" and at the Asian film fests, I was "that gay musical guy." Doing one more musical would be fun, at least, and it doesn't pigeonhole me any more than I already have been. The real test is when I do my next film. People will walk up to me and ask me what my next project is, and I tell them it's a comedy about California proposition 8. The next question is usually, "Cool, what kind of music will this musical have?" When I tell them that it won't be a musical, they lose interest.

In some ways, I look at FRUIT FLY as “Maribel’s story” [Maribel is the name of the character portrayed in COLMA by L.A. Renigen, who takes the lead role in FRUIT FLY – ed.]. Here you have a woman, Bethesda, who’s arrived in The City in search of…a birth mother? A measure of success? That theme of “searching” pops up as well in COLMA between the characters of Billy and Rodel, and I wonder if FRUIT FLY was your determined effort to approach those themes from a different perspective, as it were...

I love talking about musicals as I watch them, usually with people who have already seen it. I sit there and say "Here's the big opening number that establishes who everyone is" and "Here's the reprise which is a slower melancholy version of a happier song previously performed with gusto." The most fun I have is pointing out the "I wish" song. 99% of musicals have them. "Somewhere That's Green" from LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, "Part of Your World" from THE LITTLE MERMAID, "Who Knows" from WEST SIDE STORY...name the musical, I'll tell you the "I wish" song.

I wanted to make a musical that was all about the "I wish." I liked the idea of having a small artist's commune in San Francisco in which you don't know much about how good the art is that comes out of this commune. I've visited many and lived in two and I'll tell you, the truly great artists are rare. When I see films about artists struggling to get their brilliant works of art to the public, I blanche a little. I cringe just as much when I see the story about the really BAD artist because it seems like a deliberate and knee-jerk response to the "brilliant artist" story.

I wanted to make a movie about regular artists who are all constantly just searching. You want to find your birth mother? Okay. But now, you're making it the point of your one-woman show? Fine. Kinda dramatic. Nobody likes your show? Well, did you find your birth mother? Not yet? Well, what do you really want?

Were there any particular challenges this time out in composing the music for this film? Or did things come about easier this time out, seeing as how you weren’t writing from an apparently autobiographical viewpoint?

COLMA was a concept album before it was a screenplay, so the difficulty in making that was re-composing it to be a film. It was easier for me to write the music for FRUIT FLY because I wrote the music and screenplay simultaneously. It was also a little more fun for me to write the music because I decided to use the music to tell the story even more than I did with COLMA. I feel like if you remove the music from COLMA, you'd still pretty much understand the story. But I wanted FRUIT FLY to be a fun challenge for me to write. If I get to "that scene" that I had to write, I would actually tell myself, "OK, now do it without writing a single line of dialogue. Just do it through lyrics."

I also wanted the soundtrack to sound more like two of my biggest influences: synth-pop and musical theatre. So, a lot of the songs sound more synthesized than synth-pop. So synthesized that it sounds like it's pumping out of a Sega Master System. And some of the songs are so musical that the most expected response would be, "Dude, that sounds so gay."

Talk a bit about the ensemble of actors in FRUITFLY. Anyone familiar with COLMA will know L.A. Renigen, and those who saw Richard Wong’s follow-up OPTION 3 became acquainted with Theresa Navarro. Yet for the most part, the actors were either local talents, or non-actors. What challenges were there for you as a director in getting such a diverse group of talents to gel?

Getting people to gel wasn't hard. I think we had a lot of good will going into the project. Everybody was excited and nervous and just as neurotic as each other. A lot of the people in the cast I knew from Bay Area theatre productions. I wanted to pluck people from the San Francisco performing arts scene and a lot of the people who were cast were performance artists who had done their own one-woman shows. Christian Cagigal, who played Gaz Howard, actually is a magician whose shows garner rave reviews, so it was delicious for him to play a smug, self-centered illusionist. Christina Augello, who plays Dirty Judy, is a performance artist who has been doing one woman shows for years.

Aaron Zaragoza, who plays Jacob, is a non-actor through and through. He had, and still has, no dreams of becoming an actor. But I auditioned him anyway so I could hear his singing voice, which sold me. The result is pretty funny, and I think he captured the essence of the young wannabe artist.

You take a supporting role in FRUIT FLY, though I must confess I didn’t know what to make of your character. Would you see your character here as just another distraction to Bethesda’s ultimate goal, or does he serve another purpose? Or would he be, uhh, an extension of your own personality?

Mark is definitely not an extension of my own personality. Without spoiling too much and spelling anything out, I wanted Mark to be the counterpoint to Windham's gay white male. I like Bethesda contesting the idea that she might be a fag-hag, yet the two closes connections she makes during the film are to gay men.

It was also important to me that there be a gay Asian presence in the film because I felt, and still do feel, that in the gay community, the Asian woman is worshipped and the Asian man is emasculated. These are concepts that are not new to any society, by any means, but I do feel like it's a LOT more blatant in the gay community than it is anywhere else. Only in the gay community would you find groups of people who have no qualms making grossly stereotypical Asian jokes or even boldly saying, "Ugh, let's not go there. That's an Asian hangout."

Instead of whining about it in song (an idea I toyed with, but quickly dismissed), I decided to just have a gay Asian male character in the film that co-exists with the other characters. I didn't want to have some obvious reactionary caricature of the overly masculine Asian American male. I wanted a gay Windham.

Now, by the end of the film, I would like people to think about what the possible futures are of these characters. After a hot night between Windham and Mark, Bethesda ends up being friends with them both. These things happen in real life, sure, but what does that mean for the movie? It's one of the smaller questions I wanted to raise, and I actually do have a more explicit scene that used to exist right before the last musical number in which Windham is trying to show off pictures he took with his phone when suddenly, he receives a text message from Mark, making Bethesda raise a brow. I cut it out.

Your portrayal of San Francisco in FRUIT FLY was lauded by film critic Jason Sanders as “…an indie-Asian/gay highjacking of THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURGH.” Actually, I looked at it more like a re-imagining of the astounding mis-en-scene of Julien Temple’s ‘80s classic ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS in its depiction of 1950s pre-radicalized London beat society. How do YOU view your take on your home town?

Ha! I love THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURGH, but I don't think FRUIT FLY is much like that film. I have much more dialogue than UMBRELLAS and I think UMBRELLAS is a LOT ballsier than FRUIT FLY in that Jacque Demy REALLY flips the musical convention on its ear.

I'm so flattered that you would compare FRUIT FLY to ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS. I was actually more inspired by Armistead Maupin's TALES OF THE CITY and all of the people I've met over the years who have moved to San Francisco because of that book. It was weird being a San Francisco native and realizing, at one point, that all of my friends are transplants.

I see San Francisco as a tiny sleepy artists town that's being gentrified so much by the very artists who decry it's gentrification. I feel like you can't take two steps in the Mission without bumping into some member of the digerati who survived the dot-com crash and is now playing the role of "starving artist" in San Francisco. I also really believe that the theatre scene is worthwhile, but overlooked. You want to see real starving artists? Meet the technical directors of various productions in San Francisco who live in residential hotels and often live on set. Meet the sound engineers who live in a revolving door commune working out of an overstuffed backpack.

COLMA and OPTION 3, for which you wrote both screenplays, have traveled far and wide to vastly different film festivals and screening opportunities. What hopes do you have for FRUIT FLY, which in some respects is more overtly queer than the earlier works, yet retains many of the same dichotomous qualities of COLMA (witty yet smarmy dialog, a wistful yet poisonous attitude to the possibilities and pitfalls of the outside world, charmingly endearing yet repulsive characters – in only a couple of cases)? And how do you hope audiences will receive it?

FRUIT FLY is somewhat of a middle finger to the people that told me that I really needed to do a non-Asian, non-gay film for my first feature because gay and Asian are not marketable. That's basically saying that I am not marketable. I still don't really know how well COLMA did, but I'm aware that a lot of COLMA fans will not like FRUIT FLY and a lot of them will love it but I'm hoping FRUIT FLY does, at least, as well as COLMA did because that will prove to me that people still like my music and writing regardless of how gay or Asian it is.

And finally: I’m assuming that the musical career is continuing apace, judging by the growing catalog on your website. Any chance that H.P. Mendoza will just put down the pen and movie camera for a bit and just go out on a concert tour anytime soon?

After my first two albums are re-released (or remastered, I should say), I'll be releasing two more albums, back to back, that might...MIGHT...spark a tour. We'll see, though. That might cut into my film time, and I definitely want to get my proposition 8 film done by 2010.

Check out the FRUIT FLY trailer and site

Here’s the film’s Facebook page

Join us for the Los Angeles premiere of FRUIT FLY on July 11